Category: Blog

Garden Update: November 2024

Posted on by craig

While stuff has stopped growing in the garden for weeks now, we’re still busy wrapping up the tail end of the garden, harvest, and preserving season.

Everything has been pulled from the ground, but as of writing this, I’m drying rose hips for tea, figuring out what to do with the massive horseradish haul, and still have to finish off the popcorn.

There were several points in the last couple months where we were overwhelmed, especially when the harvest overlapped with Thanksgiving, five birthdays, and a handful of other social engagements, but we kept telling ourselves that come November it’s pretty much all over and we’ll be glad we did it.

And you know what? Even back on November 1st I was feeling that relief. I have a solid seven months ahead of me of just enjoying this food and not having to do any garden or preserving work.

End of season reflections

I’ve yet to do my annual tally of total weight harvested and the equivalent grocery value, but it’ll be interesting once I get to it. 2024 was a record year for things like carrots, beets, garlic, and rhubarb, but lower than average for corn, potatoes, and tomatoes. I’m not sure how the whole harvest balances out.

Some successes and new discoveries included:

  • Chamomile. I’d been wanting to grow this for years but finally found seedlings. The tea is fantastic so we will be upping our chamomile next year.
  • Rose hips. They’re currently in the dehydrator but I can’t wait to try them in tea. The Sleepytime Tea I buy is a mix of six or seven ingredients, but the first three are chamomile, mint, and rose (they use rosebuds, I’d use rose hips), so I’m hoping we come up with a blend pretty similar.
  • I love my steam juicer. Like, a lot. I use it frequently.

Some “better luck next time” experiences this year included:

  • Growing mushrooms were a flop. We did get some super tiny mushrooms but certainly not enough to make the effort worth it. However, we will try again next year. It often takes us a couple years to figure out how to make something really work, so maybe the same is true here.
  • The rainy and cold start to the season created all sorts of problems. Our chickpeas didn’t grow and we got next to no kidney beans. We did manage a record haul of black beans though!

Planning for next year

Even though we’re just winding down this year’s garden, we can’t help but think ahead to next year already.

In addition to expanding the chamomile mentioned above, we’ve got a few other changes in mind:

  • We really want mushrooms to work. Over the winter, I’ll reach out to my “mushroom guy” and run our experience past him and see if we can figure out what might’ve gone wrong this year and figure out a better strategy for 2025.
  • We like to rotate crops a bit. It’s good for the soil, but we also learn that certain produce grows better in different parts of our garden. It might be due to differences in sun, water retention in soil, soil quality, microorganisms, or a million other things. The big change is moving the corn. We usually plant it in this long stretch between our sidewalk and fence. Between the corn and the fence we usually have sunflowers. It seems sometimes the sunflowers grow fast and shade the corn, stunting their growth—and other times it seems the opposite with the corn stunting the sunflowers. Also, while the squirrel raids our whole garden, it lives in the tree right next to the corn, so maybe moving it away will reduce the damage it does.
  • Popcorn is also a problem that requires changing next year. The issue is that popcorn needs to completely dry on the stalk before it’s picked, which means it’s in the garden extra long and the squirrel will eventually raid it. In 2023, it devastated our entire popcorn patch in half a day. This year, we noticed it raiding the popcorn fairly early in, so my husband chopped all the popcorn down and hung the stalks upside down in the garage to let them dry. We thought we’d defeated the squirrel… only to later discover other rodents in the garage had eaten a good portion of our popcorn. We did get a harvest this year, but not as nice as back in 2022 before the local rodents discovered how tasty popcorn is. For 2025, the plan is to cut them down when we see the squirrel starting to pay attention, and then hang them upside down indoors where it’s rodent free.

Enjoying the fruits of our labour

All work aside, we now enter into my favourite time of year—enjoying our abundance.

We share our harvest with a handful of people—family, friends, and neighbours. With the overwhelming hauls of food we bring in, even giving out a considerable amount of food leaves more than enough for our family of two for a full year.

Ahead of us we have a year of tasty dinners—pasta with home canned pasta sauce, pesto dinners with frozen pesto sauce, curries with home canned butter chicken sauce, soups for lunches, vegetables to accompany every meal, fruit to throw in overnight oats, juices to keep us going, and country wines for sharing with guests.

Garden Update: October 2024

Posted on by craig

Things have been a bit quiet around the blog lately. That’s partly due to some employment changes (I took on a new job and am adjusting to new hours and roles, etc.), but it’s largely due to everything needing to be harvested all at once.

The last two weeks have been a canning bonanza.

First there was SO MANY TOMATOES. At this point we have a year’s worth of salsa, pasta sauce, butter chicken sauce, and crushed tomatoes, so we’re juicing the rest of it. And that takes quite a bit of work.

Looking ahead, I knew I’d need more freezer space, so I went about juicing a bunch of rhubarb and canning the juice.

I use a steam juicer for easy juicing of rhubarb, then can the juice.

And then there were the beets. Eighty-eight pounds of beets. I pickled most of them and pressure canned some in water.

While all this was going on I also set up a batch of jalapeño wine, juiced all our grapes for grape wine, set up rhubarb wine, and set up beet wine.

And while I was working away in the kitchen, John was outside harvesting well over a hundred pounds of squash, a couple hundred pounds of potatoes, and enough carrots and parsnips to feed an army.

And there is still more to go.

Preparing for winter

As we harvest our produce, we’re leaving the property as bare earth again. But there’s still a lot of work to do before things are finally down for the winter.

The most important is planting the garlic, which John will do toward the end of this month. He’ll insulate it with squash leaves and other garden greenery. The garlic will hibernate over winter and then be one of the first things to break through the soil in the spring.

While we didn’t get much of anything from our mushroom beds, we might try overwintering them with squash leaves too. If we can successfully do that, it’s possible the mushrooms will spring to life when the weather warms again next year. If we don’t see action, we’ll try again with new mushroom kits.

And once the urgent canning is done, likely in early November, we’ll turn to canning the less urgent things. We have a ton of dried beans to can in water so they’re ready for cooking. I might also make some pumpkin purée and stick it in the freezer. And as we near January, we’ll figure out strategies for using or preserving the squash and potatoes before they go bad (which usually happens around February).

The first step is to let the beans fully dry before storing them, so I’m leaving them in cookie sheets to dry without going mouldy.

Enjoying the fruits of labour

I have cursed out loud several times these past couple weeks at the record harvests we’ve brought in. (Squash was about the same and potatoes were a little less, but most other things far out-produced last year.)

But I know come December when it’s all truly and finally done that I will be glad we did it. We’ll have veggies for a full year, fruit for several months, juice for maybe eight or nine months, and proteins (beans) to supplement dinners for a full year.

We are overrun with jars filled with produce, but it’s a good thing. Once things calm down, we’ll work at moving everything to our storage room and organizing it all. For now, it’s sitting in crates in the kitchen.

Not only does this mean convenience—I have everything on hand and in the case of things like veggies in the freezer, they’re already peeled and chopped—but it saves a TON of money over the year through grocery savings. People keep telling me about the rising cost of produce at the store and that hasn’t hit me because we buy next to no produce.

And as the spring rolls around, I’ll be ready to do it all over again.

Photo dump

Here are some snaps I’ve taken of the wind-down of the garden.

We got a record haul of 88 pounds of beets. Our previous record was 55 pounds.
And some of those beets were massive.
It hasn’t been the greatest year for peppers, but the habaneros are starting to come in.
We harvested all of our tomatoes and put the plants in our compost. We’ve got four crates of green tomatoes that we’re leaving out to allow them to ripen. I also have some green tomato recipes that I’ll likely pull out once the rush of preserving is done and I can circle back to these.
I had a week off between jobs and literally canned about 150 jars. Most were pickled beets, some were pressure canned beets, and the rest was tomato juice and rhubarb juice.
Our potato harvest wasn’t so great this year. We got four half-filled Ikea bags, whereas we normally have four or five filled-to-the-brim Ikea bags. However, we always have way too many potatoes, so we’ll see if this ends up being a reasonable amount.
We had a nice haul of squash, ending up with about as much as we normally have. Most of it was butternut squash, a few pumpkins, and a handful of pumpkin squash (a green squash shaped like a pumpkin).
We like to let our pumpkins stay out until right before a frost—this lets them get nice and orange, but also doubles as Halloween and autumn decorations since we grow our pumpkins in the front yard.
On the left is grape wine and on the right is jalapeño wine. The grape vine in our yard had a label that said “red wine grapes”, so I’m quite excited to taste this. I made grape wine last year with a friend’s concord grapes and it tasted like spiked grape juice; I’m hoping this is more wine-like. For the jalapeño wine, this is completely new to me, but it’s supposed to be good!

Garden Update: September 2024

Posted on by craig

While it seems this slow start to garden season this year delayed everything, it’s yet to be seen if it has an actual impact on harvest quantities. Things are coming in fast and heavy right now, but with the weather starting to cool and as we inch toward fall, the ripening might slow down and we might not see much more coming. The next few weeks will be crucial for stocking up this year’s haul—which provides next year’s food.

August harvests

While we’ve had a few things here and there that were ready early, like a few potatoes that needed to be harvested extra early and a couple bell peppers, here are the significant harvests this past month:

  • Corn, 28 cobs. This is down considerably from the 130 we had last year. However, we planted a significantly fewer corn than last year, and of what we planted, some stalks developed a fungal growth and several healthy cobs were stolen by the squirrel.
  • Cabbage, 2 heads. This is a new-to-us crop. I’m fermenting one right now to make sauerkraut and I gave the other one to my mom.
  • Garlic, 188 bulbs. This is a record haul for us. I’ve already dehydrated some to make garlic powder and with the rest I’m letting them cure so they store nicely in the pantry. I’ll likely pickle some.
  • Tomatoes, currently around 100 pounds, with lots more to go. I’m not sure if we’ll reach last year’s haul of 206 pounds. There are a lot of green tomatoes so we’ll still get a lot more, just not sure if it will be as much as last year.
  • Cucumber, currently around 60 pounds. There’s more coming, but I’m not sure how much. It’s not looking too promising for reaching last year’s haul of 173 pounds.

Likely coming this month are the massive hauls of our:

  • Black beans
  • Peppers (bell peppers and hot peppers)
  • Grapes
  • Onions
  • Beets
  • Carrots
  • Parsnips

And in early October before it gets too cold and wet we’ll harvest our squash, potatoes, and popcorn.

The salsa experiment

For the last several years I’ve been canning a very tasty salsa using a premade salsa mix intended for canning. You chop the tomatoes and throw them in a pot with the salsa mix and vinegar, cook it a bit, and then can it. It was super easy and delicious. But that salsa mix has been discontinued!

This year I need to find a new salsa recipe, but I’ve always found salsa recipes intimidating. The ones I’ve seen seem to require several different types of hot peppers and a whole list of spices. But I don’t want to go shopping for ingredients; I just want to pull them from my garden. I did some digging and found three easy recipes to try. I’ve canned them all up and will soon have a taste test with some family or friends to determine which is my new salsa recipe going forward.

Here’s what I’ve put together this year (so far):

  • Tomato and corn salsa. I made this with cherry tomatoes, so it’ll hopefully be a bit sweet, and it has homegrown corn and a couple homegrown jalapeño peppers. I’m hoping it has a nice flavour to it and it isn’t too spicy.
  • Tomato and jalapeño salsa. This is similar to the above recipe except it has no corn and about ten times the number of jalapeño peppers! This will likely be very spicy.
  • My Bernardin Complete Book of Home Preserving (which, for US folks, I believe is the exact same as the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving) has a roasted tomato salsa ranchera recipe and in the notes it mentions a Sicilian alternative where instead of using jalapeños you mix in chopped pickled banana peppers. I went with the Sicilian alternative and am really looking forward to trying this one! While the Sicilian variation is technically a relish (relishes and salsas are pretty much the same, but relishes are more acidic), I would use it as a salsa.

Lots of tea…

Our chamomile plants have stopped flowering for the year and we ended up with about one litre / one quart of flowers. These make excellent chamomile tea! Next year we will plant a lot more of these flowers so we get a year’s supply, since we expect this litre of dried flowers to last only for two or three months.

We’re also working on dehydrating our mint and saving that for tea. We’re currently at 3.5 litres with a LOT more to go!

Building up the pantry

Earlier this year I posted a photo of my food storage room and its bare shelves. These are starting to fill up again. Around that time, our freezers were mostly empty too, and now everything is packed to the brim.

I’m really looking forward to when the end of October rolls around and all of the processing is done, and we’ve got packed shelves and stuffed freezers and we get to just spend eight months enjoying the fruits of our labour.

We want to be more strategic with our meal planning this year. Usually, the squash and potatoes start going bad around February or March and we rush to use as many as we can as soon as possible. This fall, we’re going to do meals like shepherd’s pie and dinners with roasted root vegetables, so we use much more of these up before we get to that new year rush to use them before they go bad.

August photo dump

The sunflowers along the side of our property have grown quite tall, with several of them higher than the eavestroughs on the house. We think this might be a record height, but we’ll know at the end of the season when my husband measures them.
These are two squash plants that have grown out of the compost bins after a couple seeds survived the process. Not only have they completely overtaken the work area just to the right of this pic, but they’ve climbed this twenty-foot tree (you can see squash leaves right at the top on all sides of the trees), but it’s also gone along the top of the fence to the left, going at least 1/3 of the way down our property.
We’ve had a grape vine for several years but never managed to harvest more than a handful of grapes. Last summer, my husband built a pergola for the grapes to climb on, which has resulted in the plant spreading out and making it easier for me to harvest grapes. This is maybe 1/4 or 1/3 of what’s on the plant. These are red wine grapes, so I’m looking forward to seeing how they taste as a wine. Harvesting these grapes is a little intimidating, though, because the wasps have discovered they love grapes and once they break into a few grapes, they all come swarming.
Another harvest pic. These tomatoes and jalapenos went into making salsa. The red bell peppers will likely be chopped and frozen, but if I get enough red bell peppers I’d like to try canning roasted red peppers.

Garden Update: August 2024

Posted on by craig

What a difference one month makes!

In the last monthly update, I wrote about how this year is not a good year for the garden. May and June were very cool and rainy and by the time I was writing up my July update, things looked like they do in early June.

Pretty much right after that post, the weather turned and became much more like a normal summer. We get occasional rain—more than we get some summers—but the days are now hot and sunny, which the garden loves.

Everything looks so lush. This is one of my favourite times of year for looking at our house. We’re not the only ones on the block that garden, and we’re not the only ones with front yard gardens, but when it comes to the scale of what we do, we stand out.

When someone comes to our house in the summer for the first time, I tell them the house number but then say “look for the garden, you’ll understand when you see it.”

Growth progress

A lot of things have come up quite rapidly. Tomatoes and peppers are still quite small and struggling, though the tide is slowly turning and things are looking vibrant, but the rest of the garden…

Potatoes and garlic are the tallest we’ve ever seen them. Strawberries are more prolific than we’ve ever had. Carrots and beets are looking lush too.

One of the surprises this year has been chamomile. We’ve tried growing it from seed a couple times and gotten nowhere, but this year I found a few seedlings at the greenhouse and scooped them up.

We only have three plants but they are heavy with flowers, and it’s the flowers that are harvested for chamomile tea.

To harvest chamomile, you pluck off the flowers, with as little stem as possible, and you set it to air dry for 10-14 days. I’ve got a good system going where I harvest every weekend and I have two baking dishes filled with flowers to help keep straight which flowers were picked when.

To make tea from dried flowers, it’s about 1 teaspoon of flowers per cup of tea.

Homegrown chamomile tea is much stronger than the store-bought stuff in tea bags. It’s likely because it’s so fresh and hasn’t been on a shelf for weeks or months.

The first time I had a mug of home-grown chamomile tea, I was soon stumbling around like I was drunk because the sedative effect was so strong. I’ve had a couple cups since then, and while I haven’t had as strong a reaction, I can definitely feel it trying to conk me out.

The mushroom beds

We planted mushroom beds under our cedar trees a little while back. Mushrooms need cooler temps, in the 15-20 degrees Celsius range, to fruit (to grow mushrooms), so it’s been too hot for that. I suspect right now it’s doing a lot of the underground work and growth.

However, despite the slightly-too-warm weather, it looks like the white oysters have attempted fruiting.

Unfortunately, the day after I took this pic, the temperature jumped to over 30 degrees Celsius and stayed there for a few days. These mushrooms stopped growing and dried out. However, once the cooler temperatures come in the fall, we should start seeing action here again.

In the meantime, I need to start looking at how to preserve mushrooms; in the fall we should be harvesting mushrooms faster than we can eat them.

A lot of mushrooms can be dried, such as the king oysters we have growing in the back patch, and that’ll likely be what I do for the others we’re growing. However, from what I’ve read, regular oyster mushrooms like these generally don’t do well with drying. The dehydrate just fine, but when you try to rehydrate them, they either don’t rehydrate well and remain tough or they take in too much water and then they become mushy. (A friend gave us a bag of dehydrated oyster mushrooms last night, so I’ll be able to test how well they do or don’t rehydrate!)

Oyster mushrooms can be frozen, though, but they have to be blanched first. (According to one site I’m reading, if you don’t blanch them first, frozen oyster mushrooms that are then thawed become a mushy mess.)

The fruit tree harvest

We don’t have fruit trees on our property, but we know some folks that do, so every year we head over there a few times throughout the summer to raid their cherry tree and their apple trees.

From one cherry tree, we managed a harvest of over 40 pounds of cherries, which is about double what we harvested last year. It’s not necessarily that there were more cherries this year, but rather we were more thorough in taking as much as we could, stripping the tree of everything except the impossible-to-reach cherries.

These cherries will be juiced and turned into wine, though I did try canning some cherries so we have them for eating later or to use as garnish in mixed drinks.

We went back a few weeks later to do the first of what will likely be two apple picking visits. From one tree, we managed to get 142 pounds of apples. They have a second tree that might need another month or so before the apples are ready, so we will be heading back to get more. However, I’ve been told the second tree (it’s in the back and I didn’t see it) did not produce as many apples as in the past. So, we may not quite reach last year’s haul of 285 pounds of apples, but we’re going to try!

Looking ahead, we need to figure out what to do about fruit trees.

Their cherry tree is slowly dying. They keep telling us each year that the next year might be the last year, yet the tree keeps going, but one day it will actually be that final year.

There’s a similar fear with the apple trees, that one of them might die. And, oddly, this year one of their three apple trees didn’t produce a single apple.

While we will continue to harvest cherries and apples as long as their trees bear fruit, we are starting to explore options for expanding our harvest. We’ll start inquiring if friends or friends-of-friends have fruit trees in their yards. There’s a neighbour across the street that has a cherry tree and an apple tree, so we’re looking for the right opportunity to strike up that conversation with them. And we’re also exploring the idea of planting trees in our neighbour’s yard; they’ve asked us to do more garden stuff in their back yard, and some fruit trees would be an easy way to do things without adding a ton of garden maintenance time to our routines.

The annual rhubarb harvest

We don’t have rhubarb, but both our neighbours do, and neither wants any of it, so we take it all for ourselves. This year we harvested 115 pounds / 52 kilos of rhubarb, which is our largest harvest ever!

We’ve chopped, washed, bagged, and frozen the entire harvest. My mom’s basement freezer is stuffed to the brim with rhubarb.

We usually don’t do a whole lot with rhubarb. I make a big batch of rhubarb wine and maybe a batch or two or rhubarb ginger gin, but that really only uses a fraction of our harvest. My step-dad will often make rhubarb crumble and rhubarb pie, but even he has his limits to how much he can use.

This year, since we likely won’t get as many apples as we normally do—which means we won’t get as much apple juice as we normally do—we’re thinking of juicing some of this rhubarb and working that into our weekly rotation of juices. This would use up some of the rhubarb and would help make the apple juice last all year since we’re drinking less of it.

Foraging ahead

I happened to find a mention somewhere that wild hazelnut trees grow in Manitoba, and this piqued my curiosity. Around the same time I learned that wild cranberry bushes also grow in Manitoba. After doing some research and asking around, I may have found a couple spots where these plants exist, so in August (for hazelnuts) and September (for cranberries), I’ll be heading out to see if I can find them and forage them. (In Manitoba, it is legal to forage nuts and berries from provincially-owned land.)

I’m really hoping the foraging adventure is successful because I’m already researching how to preserve these things and what to make with them. I’m mostly eyeing hazelnut butter and cranberry juice.

I’d like to learn more about foraging and how to do it in or surrounding the city. I remember from visiting the family cottage when I was younger that there were wild blueberry and strawberry plants to pick food from, but that was out in the woods immediately surrounding the cottage. Doing something like that here in the city or in a place I have to drive to feels monumentally impossible—the first task is finding these things when they’re not part of my immediate vicinity. It sort of feels like looking for a needle in a haystack. I could pick some random place to forage stuff, but it’s a total shot in the dark if anything is there.

But, like with anything else I do food related, I’ll do some research, I’ll ask around, and I’ll figure out how to get it done.

Making Use of Scraps

Posted on by craig

Gardening, especially on a large scale, means creating a lot of organic waste.

While there are some plants where the whole thing is edible, such as chives and leeks, most plants result in edible products but the rest of the plant dies at the end of the season. Or in the case of perennial bushes and trees, the leaves fall off as the plant goes into hibernation.

Nothing truly goes to waste, though. We compost religiously. We have four bins in our backyard and collect compostable goods from our house, my mom’s house, a coworker, and occasionally the discarded coffee grounds from the office.

But beyond that, I’ve always enjoyed looking for new and creative ways to use the scraps or parts of plants we’d normally throw out.

Garlic scapes

We’ve already talked about garlic scapes a few times here on Urban Homesteading, and I’m sure I’ll be posting more about them as time goes on.

Scapes are the flower stem of the garlic plant. They’re long, thick, and have a delicious bite of garlic. They can be pickled, grilled on the BBQ, turned into hot sauce, or thrown in dinner where you’d otherwise use garlic. The possibilities are almost too much to list here.

Pea pods

This is one I haven’t tried yet but I am so curious to do so: pea pod wine.

We grow a ton of peas. Along our front and side fence we grow sugar snap peas, which are meant to be eaten whole. When the harvest gets too large, I usually shell them and freeze the peas, discarding the pods.

In our neighbour’s yard, we have a long trellis set up where we grow Alaskan peas. These ones are a bit hardier and can be pressure canned and sit on a shelf until ready to eat. This similarly involves shelling all the peas.

With either harvest, I’m left with quite the pile of empty pods.

I happened to notice a recipe for pea pod wine and my curiosity has gotten the better of me and I will be trying it this year. I’ve found that vegetable based wines rarely taste like the vegetable they’re made from, while fruit wines tend to preserve that flavour. I’ve made beet wine and parsnip wine, and the beet wine ended up fruity and the parsnip wine tasted like a regular white wine.

Vegetable juice

This past weekend, my husband thinned out the carrots and beets. When planting these, the usual practice is to over-plant and then when they start coming up, yank some out so the remaining plants have enough room to keep growing.

After he did this thinning, he gave me a crate full of baby carrots and baby beets. And when I say “baby”, I don’t mean the size of baby vegetables you get at the store, I mean micro-baby, too small to really do anything with.

We decided to juice these. I pulled out my steam juicer, which is incredibly convenient, mess free, and easy to use. It took three batches, but I juiced all the carrots and beets—including the greens—as well as an old bag of frozen celery from last year that we never ended up using.

I got 20 cups / 5 litres of juice. I put them all in individual one-cup jars, leaving headspace in case of expansion, and put them all in the freezer. My husband will be drinking them once a day as part of his lunch.

Onion and garlic seasoning

While there isn’t much waste when cutting onions and garlic—it’s mostly the papery skins and perhaps the tops or bottoms—this is still flavourful waste. One way to use this up is to create onion and garlic seasoning.

When chopping onions and garlic, separate the papery skins from the waste. (If there are any bits that have actual onion or garlic attached to them, like if you slice off the top of the onion to help you peel it, hold onto that for the next idea down in this post.) Discard anything that doesn’t look great.

After giving these skins a quick wash, you can put them in the oven to dry them, then grind them in a food processor or blender. While it’s not quite the same as onion powder or garlic powder, it can be used similarly. However, I tend to sprinkle it over my fries for an extra tasty kick.

You can also save the skins in a bag in your freezer until you’ve got a big enough batch to make this project worth the effort.

Vegetable broth

Save any usable vegetable scraps! Anything that looks in good condition (blemish and rot free) and is safe to eat (remember, tomato leaves and potato eyes are unsafe to eat), throw into a Ziploc bag or container in the freezer. When you’ve got a big batch, you can make vegetable broth.

To do this, simply dump all the frozen scraps into a big pot, fill with water, and let it simmer for an hour or so until all the deliciousness of the scraps has leeched into the water. Strain out the solids and you’re left with a rich broth. If you have a pressure canner, you can use that to can the broth, and if you don’t you can freeze it in jars, ensuring you leave headspace in case it expands in the freezer.

You’ll want to avoid anything that has an off taste or would overtake things—broccoli can be bitter when preserved and beets can make everything beet red. But the options are almost endless and allow for creating unique broth—I often throw in onions, garlic, herb scraps, mushroom stems, squash peels, carrot peels, celery leaves, tomato skins, and more.

Garden Update: July 2024

Posted on by craig

Every year, my husband says something like “this is not a good year for the garden”. It’s either too hot or too dry or too cold or too wet, but usually it’s all fine in the end.

This year… is not a good year for the garden. We’ve had a combination of too cold and too wet. It’s already the first week of July and our garden is weeks behind compared to last year.

For the most part, this will likely be okay. Things might take a little longer and be harvested a little later in the season, but they’ll be fine. Other things that are harvested late in the season — like popcorn, for example — may not do that well. As always, we will see what happens.

One casualty already has been the black beans and kidney beans. Almost none of them have come up. We’re wondering if it was too wet and the beans ended up rotting. John has replanted a ton this past weekend. They might end up being harvested a little before they’re fully dried but in the past I’ve found I can just run them through a dehydrator and they’re fine.

The plants really enjoying this weather seem to be the underground vegetable crops, particularly the garlic and potatoes.

Potatoes and garlic growing in the back yard.

The garlic is about waist high, which I think is the tallest I’ve ever seen it. In this photo you can also see all the curly scapes growing out of the garlic in the front half of the photo. Scapes are the flower stem of the garlic plant. You want to cut or pull these off before the flower opens, otherwise the garlic will stop growing. I’m planning to harvest all the scapes tomorrow—I’ll pickle a bunch of them and the rest I’ll turn into some fermented garlic scape hot sauce.

Not loving the weather this year is the tomatoes, peppers, and corn. Normally this view would be lush and full, but this year it’s kind of depressing.

Small plants in the neighbour's yard.

The weather seems to be taking a turn for the better, though. Today is supposed to be hot and sunny, as is much of next week, so hopefully we’ll see a growth spurt in these plants.

Small tomato plants.

Food for a year

Really, a few plants not growing isn’t that big of a deal — I go grocery shopping every week, so I can always pick up a can of beans if the crop at home isn’t successful. But we like the challenge of eating only what we grow.

We haven’t had broccoli since, I think, January, when our frozen harvest ran out. We just harvested a little bit this weekend and I’m so excited to have broccoli again.

We’re at the low point in our food cycle. This is the food storage room in my mom’s basement. (We use her place since we don’t have a basement, and in return she has free access to whatever she wants.)

While we’ve got a few things left, it’s quite empty. The freezers are mostly empty too.

In a few months this will be FULL of jars and boxes and the freezers will be stuffed to the brim as well…provided the garden picks up some speed with all the growing. Then we’ll eat well until the spring when our choices narrow as things run out and we’ll start dreaming of the upcoming harvest and new round of amazing food.

Mushroom beds

The BIG new project this year are our new mushroom beds!

We’ve been wanting to grow more plant-based protein, which is partly why we’re upping our beans this year, and mushrooms were part of our plan. We weren’t sure if we were going to get it off the ground this year or not.

I received a great mushroom book for my birthday back in March—Organic Mushroom Farming and Mycoremediation by Tradd Cotter—which gives great instructions for how to set up mushroom beds on your property. (Despite the complexity of the title, it’s a remarkably novice-friendly book.) But… I was overwhelmed and decided to make this year the research year so that next spring I’d be ready to go.

In the meantime, I follow a local mushroom spawn producer on Instagram and saw a post about mushroom spawn kits that would be great for a garden. After a few DMs to get my nervous questions out of the way, I picked up the kits and we created our first mushroom bed for black pearl king oyster mushrooms.

Bags of mushroom spawn and sawdust pellets.
Mushroom spawn and sawdust pellets.

With how easy it was to set up—and it’s still to early to see how productive it is—we hit up the mushroom guy for some more, and we’ve set up a second bed for white oyster mushrooms.

I’ll do a full post on at-home mushroom production later this summer. A friend of ours has done an in-the-house mushroom set-up that’s quite impressive, so I’ll take some pics and grab some details from him to share in my eventual mushroom post.

Pride season

For many parts of the world, including Winnipeg, Pride happens in June.

As a fairly-masculine cisgender white gay man, I realize that I have a lot of privilege in society. Folks who have different gender and attraction identities or different gender expressions, or have different intersections with skin colour, socioeconomic status, and disability do not have as easy an experience as I do just existing. I don’t experience much homophobia and discrimination, though it does occasionally come up.

When I started this blog, I made a conscious decision to be openly queer here. I want this website to be a place where absolutely everyone is welcome.

Most homesteading sites would make the same claim, but then they also post Bible verses, make explicit statements about the importance of family and children, and often express a distrust of society. While all of these are perfectly fine to find important and have on one’s site, it does not create a welcoming space for 2SLGBTQ+ people who are interested in homesteading. And when I’ve gone onto some of these homesteaders’ social media accounts, I’ve been further alarmed by the content I’ve seen. Unfortunately, most homesteading sites and folks are not welcoming to queer people—they might in theory be, but not in practice.

I imagine some future people reading this section of this post and demanding what someone’s bedroom activities has to do with growing tomatoes. And, really, if that’s your question then that highlights the problem. If a straight person can post about their spouse and kids and importance of family in their post, then why can’t I post about my husband and the importance of Pride in my post? It’s that old double-standard that continually oppresses queer people and their identities.

If you’ve read some of my posts, you’ve likely seen references to my husband. I don’t hide it.

I’ve decided to take a tiny step forward—I’ve updated the banner graphic at the top of this site to include a progress pride flag.

There may be future inclusive changes and posts, once I figure them out. I know one thing I’d like to do is compile a great list of queer homesteaders and farmers. I follow a great account on TikTok, but a list need to be more than one item long. 🙂

Garden and project photo dump

Here are random photos of the things I’ve been up to the past few weeks!

We’ve added chamomile to the garden this year, so I’m working on plucking these flowers and drying them for tea.

Chamomile flowers.

The saskatoons are ripening; when they’re a dark purple, they’re ready. The challenge is to get them before the birds do. Last year on a Saturday evening I looked at the saskatoon bush and thought These look ripe, I’ll harvest them tomorrow morning. Twelve hours later, Sunday morning, the birds had completely decimated the bush, eating every single saskatoon. As I walked up to the bush to take this photo, a robin gulped down a berry and flew away.

Unripe saskatoon berries.

In the realm of preserving projects, I finally tackled the chicken broth. I’ve had a few chicken carcasses sitting in the freezer for months and they needed to get used up before this year’s harvest started filling the freezers again.

I took the carcasses, covered them with water, and added dried herbs and seasonings from last year’s garden. Piled on top here, you’ll see parsley, thyme, and a powered seasoning made from dried onion and garlic peels.

A pot of chicken broth with seasonings on top.

Once it’s boiled and then simmers for an hour or two, everything gets strained and the broth is then canned using a pressure canner. I ended up with just over eight litres of broth.

A jar of chicken stock.

I also made a batch of chive blossom vinegar for a friend. It’s normally made with white wine vinegar, but this batch is made with unseasoned rice vinegar. It has a lovely chive flavour and smell, and a gorgeous pink colour. Over the next few months the colour will fade and turn brown, but the taste and smell will stay the same. I’m hoping to get the recipe up on this site soon.

A bright pink bottle of chive blossom vinegar.

A new-to-me recipe this year is fermented chives. Chives are ridiculously difficult to preserve. Drying or freezing them diminishes their flavour pretty quickly, so it’s very much a use-it-fresh type of plant…which is disappointing because they produce so much chives and you can only eat so much in a meal. These fermented chives turned out pretty nice. If anything, it intensified the chive flavour and smell, and the fermenting has added a bit of a sauerkraut flavour to it. Fermented foods usually last at least a few months in the fridge.

A small jar of fermented chives with a spoon sitting in it.

I’ve also got my annual batch of dandelion wine underway. It’s really cloudy right now, so it’ll take at least a few months to settle and clarify. Normally dandelion wine is made with orange and lemon juice, but I stumbled across a recipe that used lemon juice and ginger and couldn’t resist. So this will be my first batch of dandelion ginger wine. Fingers crossed it tastes good!

A big carboy of golden-coloured dandelion wine

And, lastly, we almost have a gazebo on our deck!

We host a lot of barbecues in the summer but the mosquitoes and wasps make it incredibly unpleasant. We usually have a big mosquito net that drapes over the patio umbrella, but it tears so easily that it barely lasts a summer before we need a new one.

We’ve been talking about getting a gazebo, but we were always put off by the cost…until my mom and step-dad found this abandoned gazebo frame sitting in the middle of a field on public property outside the city. John and my step-dad went back to take it apart and bring it home and they put it together on the deck.

We’ve ordered mosquito screen siding. We couldn’t find the right gazebo canopy since each make and model is different and we have no idea which one this is, so we ordered extra mosquito netting so we can at least wrap the top of this with netting and prevent the bugs from coming in. In a future year we can look at a more formal canopy. All the netting arrived yesterday, so we’ll have it put together this weekend.

A gazebo frame on our deck

And that’s about it for this month’s round-up!

Garden Update: June 2024

Posted on by craig

After getting through the garden hibernation period—AKA winter—life is starting to appear in our yard again.

Many, many years ago, I knew a newcomer family that came from a very hot part of the world. Their first winter here was their first experience with below-zero temperatures. When the plants died off and the trees shed their leaves, they thought that everything was dead. By mid-winter, one of them asked a mutual acquaintance why no one was cutting down all the dead trees. It amazed and delighted them when spring rolled around and all of those supposedly-dead trees came back to life.

The garden is much the same.

When the snow first melts, all we’re left with is dead plant matter and barren soil. But when the spring sun finally starts to warm things up, then life comes rushing back.

While garden season in Winnipeg usually starts in late May, we’ve had a rainy late spring / early summer, pushing us into June. We’ve almost got everything in the ground now.

The Early Risers

There are a few very early signs of spring in our yard that mean the season is finally starting:

  • The double-flowering plum tree blossoms
  • The garlic we planted in the fall springs up
  • The rhubarb comes rushing back
  • The chives sprout straight up

The double-flowering plum trees covers itself in bright pink blossoms for about a week, then they all fall off and suddenly this seemingly-barren bush is covered in lush green leaves.

The plum tree, at least in this climate, doesn’t produce any fruit. It’s purely an ornamental tree. When I was researching that a couple years ago, amateur gardeners said it’s likely because the blossoms come and go before pollinators arrive, so it misses out on its chance to produce fruit.

I happened to catch a bumble bee happily working away on the blossoms while they were still in bloom. If that amateur gardener theory is correct, well, this early bee might mean we get a plum or two. If anything happens, I will report back on that progress here.

The garlic is always one of my favourite crops. I think it’s because we get two harvests out of them. There is, of course, the harvest of bulbs in mid to late summer—most of which I pickle—but in early summer come the garlic scapes.

Scapes are basically the flower stem of the garlic plant. They shoot up nice and high and then do several twists and turns. You let them get nice and big, but just before they start flowering, you yank them off the garlic plant. These scapes taste fantastic roasted on the barbecue or are a nice little treat if they’re pickled. There’s a vendor at the local farmers market who makes a mind-blowing hot sauce from garlic scapes, an idea I might explore this summer.

The dwindling pantry

This time of year is also where the shelves start to look a little bare.

We still have a lot left from last year, especially frozen chopped bell peppers and frozen chopped squash, but we’re down to our last few jars of apple juice and tomato juice, and we’ve long run out of things like frozen broccoli and salsa.

We really don’t like to buy what we don’t have to, so we haven’t had broccoli in months now and we’re eating a lot more bell peppers than we normally do. Our goal is to see if we can go a whole year without buying vegetables—and except for a few exceptions (like mushrooms and the occasional potato), we’ve managed to do that.

Although it’s a massive amount of work, I can’t wait for the preserving season to hit full-swing and I get to stock all of these shelves again. I always look forward to a year of great food.

Planning for a new year

As successful as the challenge has been, we’re always looking at what changes we need to make to do better next year. For us, this means increasing broccoli, paying attention to what tomato products lasted and what we ran out of, and figuring out how to massively increase our fruit production (because we don’t preserve or utilize much fruit, mostly because we haven’t grown much). A new challenge for us is to also expand our protein production with beans and the eventual crop of mushrooms, though the mushrooms might not happen till next year.

Oh, and we might be expanding our garden space yet again.

We do our whole property, the backyard of our west neighbour, and a strip along the fence of our east neighbour, but this year we might add some garden space at a retreat centre just outside of town. We’ve been offered some space there and John, my husband, AKA the gardener, has been out there to turn some soil over. It’s a great plot of land, but it’s a bit of a drive to get there, and on his first trip out there he came home with 19 ticks crawling all over him. So, we’ll see.

John determines which crops go where and there is a draw to the out-of-town garden. One possibility is moving our popcorn crop out to the retreat centre—they apparently do not have a squirrel problem. Last summer when we had popcorn in our neighbour’s yard, a solitary squirrel decimated our entire popcorn crop in less than half a day.

This Year’s Crop

If I’m remembering everything correctly, here’s what we’ve got ahead of us this year…

Perennials that come up every year:

  • Saskatoons (AKA service berries, June berries)
  • Raspberries
  • Strawberries
  • Blueberries
  • Horseradish
  • Mint
  • Oregano
  • Parsley
  • Thyme
  • Chives
  • Rhubarb
  • Flowers — I’m not sure if I’ll do anything with flowers this year, but in the past I’ve done lilac jelly and lilac wine, as well as peony jelly
  • Dandelions

Perennials from other people’s properties (not our neighbours) that we harvest:

  • Apples
  • Tart cherries

Things we’re planting, either as seedlings or as seeds:

  • Sweet peas
  • Peas for canning
  • Sunflowers
  • Corn
  • Popcorn
  • Leeks
  • Onions
  • Potatoes
  • Garlic
  • Chamomile
  • Basil
  • Catnip
  • Black Beans
  • Kidney Beans
  • Pinto Beans
  • Scarlet Runner Beans
  • Chickpeas
  • Tomatoes
  • Bell Peppers
  • Jalapeno Peppers
  • Hungarian Wax Peppers
  • Habanero Peppers
  • Kohlrabi (for our neighbour)
  • Cabbage (for our neighbour)
  • Broccoli
  • Brussels Sprouts
  • Kale
  • Spinach
  • Mustard
  • Ginger
  • Cucumber
  • Sweet Potato

Whenever I do a list like this, I always forget something, so there’s likely more than what’s listed here.

As well, tomorrow is our tenth wedding anniversary, and a tradition we fell into a few years ago is to go to a greenhouse on our anniversary and buy something new for the garden. We’re going to head out and look for a new fruit for the front yard. I’d love to get a cranberry bush, but they didn’t have it last year, so perhaps a haskap berry bush (which look like oblong blueberries).

I look forward to the summer and fall ahead as I start really filling this blog with recipes, updates, photos, and more. Thank you for tagging along on this journey.

Garden Update: December 2023

Posted on by craig

It’s been an unusual winter so far for Winnipeg. We’ve had very little snow.

For quite a while, it was looking like we’d have a brown Christmas, something we haven’t had since the mid-90s. But the days leading up to Christmas saw some snowfall. It wasn’t a lot, but it was some. Normally at this time of year we’ve got maybe a foot or two of snow, but so far this year we’ve got about an inch.

While it has been nice not having to do any shovelling, it has left us a little concerned about the garden.

We plant our garlic at the end of the summer and rely on a cold winter to keep the cloves in stasis until the spring warmth brings it to life and growth begins. Our winter so far as been hovering around 0 Celsius / 32 Fahrenheit—some days it’s just below freezing and some days it’s just above freezing. While I haven’t uncovered the garlic to check on it, my fear was that the warm days might’ve encouraged the garlic to grow. However, we’re fully past freezing now, so what’s done is done and we’ll see what happens in the spring.

The garlic patch is covered by garden debris to help insulate it over the winter.

The other risk we run with very little snow is water supply. While we prefer to water the garden with rain water, when we go through dry spells we rely on the city supply of water. This past summer was quite dry, which required a lot of city water. A handful of years ago, lakes in various parts of the province were low and water rationing was put in place. A dry summer followed by a low-snow winter might find us in that situation again. Here’s hoping we get several feet of snow in January through March.

But that’s enough worrying about things I can’t control.

Alcohol Projects

The honeydew melon wine finished a couple weeks ago and I bottled it up. I haven’t tried it yet…but I’m a little hesitant.

For background for folks new to the blog, I really dislike honeydew melon and John, my husband, is not really a fan of it. We grew it because our neighbour gave us some seedlings, and when we realized that neither of us want to eat it, I happened upon a recipe for honeydew melon wine.

Sometimes wine tastes like what it’s made from, like grape wine, dandelion wine, and cherry wine. But sometimes it doesn’t taste at all like what it’s made from and instead just tastes like a nice wine, like beet wine, parsnip wine, and corn cob wine. I didn’t know which type of wine honeydew melon would produce, but I certainly hoped for the kind that tastes nothing like what it’s made from.

Unfortunately, with the tiny spoonful taste I had, it was very melon-y. And it has an extremely intense melon-y aroma. Blech.

John thinks it’s all right.

We’ll leave it for a month or two before we crack open a bottle and see if ageing it changes the flavour and aroma. I found apple wine changed drastically over time, so here’s hoping the same is true of honeydew melon wine.

I’ve taken on a few other alcohol projects in the last couple months:

  • I did up a batch of rhubarb ginger gin. Normally this takes on a nice golden hue, but this time around it turned a bright, gorgeous pink.
  • As a bit of an experiment, I tried a lemon-lime soju, based on my recipes for grapefruit soju and orange soju. It has a lovely citrus taste and could easily be drunk as-is, but would likely taste wonderful mixed with a splash of sparkling water for a sort-of alcoholic Sprite.
  • Back in the summer when I was utterly exhausted from juicing apples and canning the juice, I’d sliced up a bunch and bagged them for alcohol projects. The first I’ve taken on is an apple whisky with a hint of cinnamon.
  • In addition, I’ve started a batch of apple liqueur. This one takes a couple months to make, so I’ll be sipping these summer flavours in the deepest depths of winter.
  • My mom had some leftover cranberries and rosemary at Christmas, so I threw those in a jar and topped it off with gin. I’ll let it infuse for a couple weeks, strain out the cranberries and rosemary, and see what flavour adventure I’ve created. At present, the gin has turned a brilliant red.

The sugar shortage continues

As I mentioned in passing in my recent pumpkin butter post, there’s a sugar shortage going on in Western Canada. Apparently all, or nearly all, of the sugar in Western Canada is supplied by one company that’s been on strike since September, which resulted in the shelves going bare in the grocery store as we were leading up to Christmas baking season.

That also meant I needed to ration my sugar supply. By making kombucha, I require a cup of sugar every eight to ten days to start a new batch—and with no end to the strike in sight, I can’t risk running out…which means not taking on extra projects.

However, a friend visited from Ontario, a part of Canada not experiencing a sugar shortage, and she brought us a 10 kilogram bag of sugar as a Christmas present!

This means I finally get to try out the new steam juicer I bought (CA Amazon, US Amazon). I’ve got three large ziplock bags of tart cherries in my freezer just begging to be turned into wine or liqueur. I normally find it a bit of a laborious process because of the juicing step, so I’m looking forward to using the juicer to easily create sediment-free juice—and then add a TON of sugar to turn it into wine.

When I try the juicer, I’ll post a review here on the site.

Planning for 2024

It seems the garden truly is a year-round project, even in a climate where half the year sees the garden frozen solid and buried in snow.

John and I are already having conversations about what we want more of, what we want less of, and how we might rotate the crops to get a better yield. Some areas of the garden are sunnier than others, the local ecosystem of certain patches can lead to higher yields, and some plants produce more when planted next to each other—all factors we consider when we plan for the summer.

But until then…

While we’re certainly thinking about the 2024 garden, it’s still months before we actually have to do anything. We unfortunately don’t have the space to set up seed starters indoors, so we rely on planting seeds directly in the ground and buying seedlings from the garden centre.

Our neighbour, whose garden we use, also provides seedlings that he starts at his house. Normally this is in the form of tomato plants—he provides us with several dozen seedlings of a whole variety of tomatoes—as well as a few other veggies. This year, after seeing how much we love bell peppers, he’ll also start a bunch of pepper seedlings for us.

But until that time of year rolls around…we just have to enjoy eating all our preserved produce and toasting with our garden wines.

Garden Update: October 2023

Posted on by craig

With an unusually warm October for Winnipeg, our gardening projects have continued a week or two longer than they normally do.

All of our vegetables and fruit are harvested and preserved (canned, fermented, frozen, and/or put in storage) and as I write the draft of this post, I’m currently drying the last of our herbs. Parsley is in the dehydrator right now and thyme will go in tomorrow. After that, I have to finish up the mustard seed—I have a few plants drying in large paper bags and I need to break out the seeds and filter out the detritus—and with that, make a batch of mustard. The ginger still needs to be dug up, though we’re undecided if we’re going to put it in a pot and turn it into an indoor plant or if I’m going to make candied ginger with it. In my September update, I’d mentioned the plan to dig up and remove the horseradish from the front yard—at this point I think we’re keeping it where it is for one more year.

As I’m typing the draft of this post, my husband is building a pergola in our front yard—a large wooden structure for the grape vine to wrap itself around. Previously he’s used a structure made of dried out sunflower stalks (which are surprisingly durable) held together by rope, but it really wasn’t a long-term solution. This September, a windy storm knocked the whole thing over.

This pergola has become a community endeavour. John (my husband) is one of those people that knows everyone in the neighbourhood. He got initial advice from our neighbour, who directed him to another neighbour across the street—and that fellow has become John’s co-worker on this project. John has little to no experience building wooden structures or woodwork in general, so this across-the-street neighbour’s help is greatly appreciated. In order to put the posts securely into the ground, John borrowed a post-hole-digger from another neighbour down the street, who similarly offered advice on the project.

If it were me doing this, I would have just hired a company, LOL. But, John being John, this has turned into a more-affordable project that is almost community-driven. (On the plus side, when John sent me to the hardware store for the washers he forgot to buy, I noticed another neighbour down the back lane had put their old barbecue out with the trash—so I got a new-to-me barbecue that’s a definite improvement over our old one, which I would have missed out on if John hadn’t taken on this project.)

The pergola is done now!

Our grape vine is certainly going to love this! These are red wine grapes. In the spring, we might buy a white wine grape vine to plant on the other side of the pergola. Hopefully in a few years we’ll have enough grapes in a summer to make small batches of wine.

Speaking of wine…

The garden wines, also from the September update, continue to ferment. (If you’re looking at making garden wines at home, check out my Rough Guide to Making Country Wines post.)

To sum up, the following are still fermenting:

  • Chokecherry wine (this might be almost finished)
  • Beet wine (does not taste like beets)
  • Honeydew melon wine
  • Corn cob wine (does not taste like corn)
  • Grape wine (this might be almost finished)
  • Rosemary wine

Since the last post, the sour cherry wine completed its thing and I bottled it up. It is amazingly delicious! I got seven half bottles (375 ml)—we drank two of them pretty quick, we shared two with the person whose cherry tree we raided, I put two in storage for next summer (my step-dad lives out-of-country and will be back in the summer, so I’m saving a handful of different wines to share with him), and I have one bottle left that John and I will likely pull out soon. We like to share some wine when we’re watching a season premiere or season finale of a show, so we’ll likely share it this week when we start season three of What We Do In The Shadows.

The sour cherry wine retained much of its cherry taste, which was a nice surprise. (Some wines like beet, parsnip, and corn cob lose their original taste—thank god.) And now I’m in a bit of a conundrum. I have a big bag of cherries sitting in my freezer, waiting to be used for something…and I don’t know if I should make more cherry wine, more cherry gin (which tastes phenomenal with simple syrup and lemon juice), or more cherry liqueur (which is also phenomenal). I’ll have to do a survey with friends and family to see which they liked best.

Levelling up

Because of the magic of the Instagram algorithm, the app shows me content from food preservers and homesteaders. Around this time of year, they’re all showing off their pantries filled to the brim with canned and preserved goods.

I think I’m almost at that level. At least for us, a family of two, I’m at that level. (Quite often these social media posts come from content creators who come from families of four or more—they would need to produce and preserve a lot more food than we would.)

Because our house is tiny and doesn’t have a basement, we’ve been using my mom’s place for food storage. Unfortunately, it’s always been a bit of a mess that my mom has thankfully put up with. This year, John got in his organizing mode and decided we needed to treat my mom better. We got a bunch of metal shelving units from the hardware store and lined them along the walls in an unused bedroom in my mom’s basement. It’s now our food storage room. We keep all of our jars of preserved food in there, our wine-making equipment, and the squash.

We keep the potatoes in a separate room in my mom’s basement, one that does not have a window and where the door is rarely opened. The total darkness keeps them fresher for longer.

As usual, we filled up my mom’s chest freezer, mostly with rhubarb. This year we bought a small chest freezer for our house…and quickly filled it up. So we bought another small chest freezer for my mom’s basement…and it’s half full. (And in case you’re wondering, the freezer attached to our fridge was filled to the brim with veggies back in June.)

We clearly have a year’s supply of vegetables.

As a thank-you to my mom for letting us take up so much space at her house, she has free access to any and all food stored at her place. She’s been enjoying the pasta sauce, salsa, and beets that I canned this year.

Celebrating the harvest

Every year as the garden wraps up, I host a Garden Harvest BBQ, where most of the dinner ingredients come from the garden.

This year the dinner included:

Appetizer:

  • Pumpkin sourdough bread
  • Grilled baguette slices
  • Basil pesto
  • Pickled banana peppers
  • Cowboy candy (candied jalapeño peppers)
  • Pickled beets
  • Toum (a fluffy garlic spread)
  • The pumpkin, basil, peppers, beets, and garlic all came from our garden.

Main Course:

  • Garlic and rosemary grilled pork chops
  • Roasted Brussels sprouts, butternut squash, and potatoes
  • The garlic, rosemary, Brussels sprouts, squash, and potatoes all came from our garden.

Dessert:

  • Black bean brownies
  • The black beans came from our garden.

Drinks:

  • Mint tea
  • Rhubarb wine
  • The mint and rhubarb came from our garden.

Unfortunately, I forgot to take any pictures to share with you… but it was delicious!

Looking ahead to November

Gardening is really a year-round activity, especially when you go all-in on food preserving and homesteading (even just urban homesteading like we’re doing). While things certainly slow down in November, they don’t cease.

In early November I’m going to treat myself to a steam juicer—this one, I think—as it will make juicing apples, rhubarb, cherries, and tomatoes so much easier. I’ll have to test it next year to see if it works well with cucumbers; my concern is the heat of the juicing process might dampen the freshness that’s associated with cucumber juice.

When it arrives, my first project will be juicing that bag of sour cherries, provided I figure out if I’m making liqueur, gin, or wine.

Buried in the back of my freezer, I also have pincherries. This is something my stepdad harvested when he was here this summer. I’ve never worked with them before, so I’m not sure what to do. Since I don’t have a ton of them, maybe I’ll soak them in some gin and make pincherry gin. (If I do that, then I think that reduces my options with the sour cherries to liqueur or wine.)

Sometime in the next month or so, our popcorn—what little of it we were able to save from the squirrel—might be dry enough to pull from the cob and start using on movie nights.

The squirrel story: We had somewhere around 60 cobs of popcorn, which would have easily been enough for a year’s supply. In half a day—half a day—the squirrel either ate, partially ate, or absconded with 54 cobs. Yes. Out of 60, we’re down to 6. We harvested them right away, but they’re supposed to fully dry on the stalks before harvesting and then dry further in the house, so I’m not sure if the early harvest will affect the poppability of the popcorn.

Looking ahead to next year

We’re always thinking of what to do next year. What do we want more of, what do we want less of, and what do we want to introduce?

There was some concern that the neighbour whose yard we use would move, but he’s committed to staying at least another year. To sweeten the deal, my husband offered to help him tend to his flowers all of next summer.

We definitely want our lengthy list of usuals: Brussels sprouts, broccoli, beets, onions, cucumber, peas (for canning), sugar snap peas (for snacking), potatoes, squash (pumpkin, spaghetti, butternut, acorn), bell peppers, hot peppers, popcorn, sweet corn, tomatoes, kidney beans, black beans, garlic, celery, mustard, green onions (I think they’re also known as spring onions), sunflowers, Saskatoons (AKA June berries or service berries), blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, grapes, rhubarb, horseradish, basil, rosemary, parsley, mint, dill, and thyme. I’m sure I’ve forgotten one or two things.

I know we want to increase our mint (John has a renewed love for mint tea) and our fruit. Part of increasing fruit means buying more blueberry plants and possibly getting another grape vine. But it also means figuring out what other fruits we want and figuring out if we can grow them in our climate—I definitely want to try watermelon again (we’d tried it this year, but the squirrel…), and if this honeydew melon wine is tasty we’ll want more of that.

Another thinking project for next year is figuring out where we want to plant things.

Part of this means where in the yard. Mustard is better in the back yard because it gets covered with insect eggs in the front yard. This year we moved the celery from the front to the back and nearly the whole crop was destroyed by slugs.

Very little celery was salvageable.

Part of this also means which property. We been invited to use up some of the garden space at a meditation retreat centre just outside of Winnipeg where—(wait for it…)—they do not have a squirrel problem. Our popcorn is definitely going out there.

John may move both our sweet corn and popcorn out to this rural garden, which frees up a ton of space at home. Ideally, corn is alternated with beans year after year—corn uses nitrogen and beans replenish nitrogen—so we will likely be growing beans in our corn patch next year. We can only eat so many beans, so we also need to figure out which beans to grow and at what quantities and what to do with them. We definitely want more black beans as we’ve almost used up this year’s supply already (I made a batch of black bean brownies and today I made a batch of black bean tofu).

As well, it’s gotten me thinking…if we’re looking at alternative protein sources like beans, should we be expanding our meatless meal options? Both John and I don’t eat a lot of meat and we like the idea of being friendlier to the environment, so this is leading me to wondering if chickpeas and possibly lentils could be grown in our climate. As well, we don’t consume a lot of dairy, so can we look at homemade non-dairy milks and cheeses made from legumes? Those are questions to explore over the winter.

The big unknown for next year is the sour cherries. The couple that owns the property where we pick cherries has pointed out that the tree is dying and might not last much longer. If it does die, we’ll have to find a new source of cherries. (I think a house across the street from us has a cherry tree—the strategy might be to send John over there to make friends with yet another neighbour.)

Enjoying the harvest

The big task over the next eight months or so is to simply enjoy the harvest and the months of effort put into food preserving.

We have a full year’s supply of vegetables—we’ll run out of broccoli pretty quickly, since we didn’t get a big harvest, but that’s easily made up for by our over-abundance of bell peppers—and we easily have a year’s supply of lots of canned goods. As the wine fully ferments and gets bottled, we’ll likely have a year’s supply of it. Grocery bills dip in the winter due to all this, but more importantly, quality of life skyrockets with all this gourmet homegrown produce.

I mentioned in an earlier post about how we expanded into our other neighbour’s yard this year with just a strip of their property along our shared fence. We may or may not expand beyond that strip in their yard next year. I think they want us to expand so they don’t have to mow the lawn, but it’s also a lot more garden work for us, and we’re realizing we do have limits. This neighbour is a group home with a couple residents and a few regular staff. One of the absolute joys this year was to show up at their doorstep and give them bags and boxes of vegetables, most of which were grown on their property. We’ve learned that one of the residents there absolutely loves fresh corn on the cob, carrots, and potatoes. Whether or not we expand further in their yard next year, I think we’ll be sharing more of our over-abundance with them. It helps build neighbourly relations, but more importantly, my husband loves knowing that someone is truly enjoying the work he puts into gardening, and he definitely has a very appreciative fan next door.

The only appreciative fan my husband dislikes is the squirrel.

Garden Update: September 2023

Posted on by craig

As the height of summer passes and we inch our way slowly toward fall, we find ourselves entering the busiest part of the year for me. While my husband is the primary gardener, I’m the primary food preserver—and everything needs to be preserved in the next few weeks.

Harvesting and Preserving

We learned our lesson last year. We used to like keeping things in the ground as long as possible, meaning that when we get the notification that frost is coming (usually in mid- to late-October), we then hurry to harvest everything all at once. And that means having to preserve non-stop for days or weeks to make sure nothing goes rotten.

I think I really burned myself out last year.

This year, we’re harvesting things when we think they’re ready rather than leaving them as long as possible. Really, an extra couple weeks won’t make much difference.

This means that this past weekend we harvested all the beets—53 pounds—and I pickled 26 pints / half-litres. We also gave some away to both our neighbours, my mom, and some friends of ours. We still have a small pile left. If I can find the motivation, I might try turning them into beet chips.

This past weekend also saw our potato harvest—234 pounds of Yukon gold and red-skinned potatoes. Thankfully, these don’t need anything done with them, at least not right away. In the past, a restaurant has taken some of our Yukon gold potatoes off of us, so I’m hoping they’ll be interested again this year. The red-skinned potatoes are good for canning, so once things settle down in November/December, I might look at canning some potatoes. These make great last-minute additions to dinner (fry them up like gnocchi) or breakfasts (fry them up like hash browns)—and since canning fully cooks them in the process, adding them to dinner or breakfast just takes as long as heating them up and maybe getting a little crispy on the outside. I’m hoping to convince a coworker to teach me how to make gnocchi, as I’d love to have bags of homemade gnocchi in the freezer, ready to be pulled out for dinners.

The tomatoes are ripening at a nice pace. They keep me busy but don’t overwhelm me. I just finished canning a batch of salsa and I’m stewing up a batch of butter chicken sauce that’ll be canned later today.

Looking ahead, I think this next week or two is going to be the herb-harvest period. We’ve got lots of basil that I’ll turn into pesto, lots of oregano that I’ll dry for kitchen use, some mint I’ll dry for a friend for tea, and rosemary that I’ll likely turn into a batch of rosemary wine. We also have some thyme, but I don’t know if I have a use for it—I could dry it, but it’s not really something I cook with—so I might just leave that one in the garden.

A lot of the other remaining things can wait till I have time. The peppers are slowly ripening but they’re fine sitting on the plant until I’m ready; the carrots and parsnips can wait till we have time; and the black beans and kidney beans are slowly drying and I’m in no rush to harvest them.

Legal Mustard

A few years ago, a wild mustard plant took root in our garden and we decided to let it grow. Though mustard leaves are edible, we never really came to like them. The seeds, though…I taught myself how to collect mustard seeds and make homemade mustard.

The first batch was terrible. Absolutely terrible. I threw it in the back of the fridge and forgot about it. And when the following spring rolled around and we were doing our first barbecue, I pulled out that mustard with a wary look. We gave it a try and ohmygod it was delicious. The flavour clearly matures over time.

Mustard plants grow millions of seeds and no matter how hard you try to collect them all, some always scatter. Year after year our mustard harvest grew as the plants spread. We never had to plant them ourselves—nature took care of it all.

Then, last year, we got a letter from the city about property maintenance bylaws. The letter was very unclear but mentioned tall grass (we have about two square feet of grass that got a little long) and noxious weeds. After researching it, wild mustard is a noxious weed. We had to tear it all out.

Turns out, after we tore it all out and contacted the inspector to verify we’d done everything right, he told us he hadn’t even noticed the wild mustard. The letter was just about the tall grass and the generic language included noxious weeds even though that wasn’t what he flagged for our property.

(Wild mustard is a noxious weed because it resembles canola and can infiltrate canola fields. If a canola harvest has too much mustard in it, the whole lot has to be dumped.)

We’ve still got half a jar of now-illegal mustard in the back of the fridge that I pull out when friends are over.

This year, we discovered the seed catalogue we order from has mustard—a legal kind!

The mustard plants are slowly dying off now—the seeds are harvested when the plant is brown and brittle—and I’m throwing the plants in one of those large paper lawn bags. In a few weeks I’ll work on harvesting the seeds and then set out to return to the world of mustard-making.

Since this is a new variety, the heat level of the seeds might be different. Wild mustard was black and dark brown seeds, which are the hottest. I’m not sure what colour these seeds are yet. But I’m looking forward to the adventure.

Looking Ahead to 2024

We’ve been gardening at this scale for a few years now, but we always learn new things and make new plans.

Next year our front yard will fully be fruit-only. My husband is planning to take out the horseradish plant before the summer is over, which is the only non-fruit/non-flower plant on that part of the property.

In the past, our neighbour who lets us use his yard has talked about moving to somewhere that requires less work and upkeep, and he’s talking about it again. This means we have to start coming up with contingency plans in case he does follow through on the idea of moving. (Given what’s been going on in this part of the city, if our neighbour moves, his house will be torn down, his property divided, and two or three new houses will go up in their place. The garden will be gone.)

This year we started gardening a little strip in our other neighbour’s yard. I think they don’t like mowing the lawn, so they’re eager for us to convert their whole property to garden space. If we lose our big space, this could be the route we go.

We’ve also talked about how we could downsize things and do it all on our property. (Do we really need 234 pounds of potatoes, 130 ears of corn, and 53 pounds of beets?)

Lately, my husband has been connecting with a meditation retreat place just outside the city and has volunteered some of his time to help out in their garden. They’ve offered to let us take some of the space for our own use. It’s a bit of a drive, but it’s a big space and it could be ideal for things that don’t need lots of attention (since we can’t get out there everyday), like onions, carrots, parsnips, and potatoes.

Of course, for all the talk of moving, our neighbour with the giant garden might end up staying there for several more years. But it’s always good to talk about these things so that if and when it happens, it’s not a disaster and we already have a plan in place. It also gets us thinking of what we’re growing and why. Like, this year we grew honeydew melon and realized that neither of us really like honeydew melon. If we’re crunched for space, that’ll be the first to go.

Update since I wrote the draft of this post: I decided to give honeydew melon wine a try—and I had just enough melon!

Honeydew melon wine (green) and corn cob wine (yellow).

Wine Failures

In my recent post about winemaking, I listed the country wines / garden wines I’ve made and the ones that are currently in process.

Well, I’ve had two disasters—one is salvageable and the other, well, we’ll see.

I noticed the airlock on the chokecherry wine wasn’t bubbling. This is concerning as it means that the yeast might not have taken hold and might’ve died off. If that’s the case, then I don’t have a bucket of wine, but rather a bucket of sugary juice that runs the risk of going mouldy.

I do these big batches of wine over at my mom’s place where there’s more room, so I’ll head over there this weekend and see if it’s salvageable. It’s certainly possible that the lid isn’t airtight and the excess gas is escaping elsewhere (and it is indeed fermenting), which is why the airlock isn’t bubbling. We’ll see.

Edit since I wrote up the first draft of this post: The chokecherry wine is indeed fermenting. It smells alcoholic and there have been some positive changes (like there’s no longer a layer of sugar on the bottom). I’m not sure what’s going on with the airlock not bubbling, but wine is certainly being made.

That seems to be the exact problem I had with the Saskatoon wine, though that one is salvageable.

The Saskatoon wine did actively ferment during primary (the first stage of fermentation where the yeast is most active), but after moving it to a new jar (called a secondary), the bubbling seemed to have died off quickly. I left it like that for a few weeks to see what would happen…but no bubbles ever came.

Well, it had certainly fermented earlier, so I knew the yeast had taken hold and survived, so maybe this was a wine that just finished early for some reason? It could have a low sugar content and the yeast ate up all their food quickly.

Anyway, I bottled it and let it sit around for a few weeks. I started to worry, though, that I might’ve bottled it too early. Maybe the lid wasn’t tight enough and gas escaped that way rather than through the airlock?

It didn’t take much convincing my husband when I said we should try a bottle of Saskatoon wine to see if it turned out.

I opened the first bottle…and it shot out like a geyser. There was wine everywhere.

Clearly, I had my answer. The wine had not finished fermenting before I bottled it and it continued to ferment in the wine bottle. This creates a safety hazard because if the pressure builds up too much, it could shatter the bottles. Not only would that be messy, but it’s potentially dangerous.

We opened two more bottles to see if they were the same. They did not shoot out geyser-like.

Anyway, now we had three open bottles of wine, though one was half-empty after the geyser. These are 375 ml bottles (half the standard wine bottle), so collectively it was just shy of a litre of wine.

We got some snacks, poured out the wine, and settled in for the first couple episodes of The Enfield Haunting.

The wine was great! I definitely want to try it again next year and see how it tastes when it’s fully and properly fermented and aged.

There were still three more bottles of Saskatoon wine, but we didn’t want to drink that all in one night. We have a friend that was really interested in trying this wine, so we wanted to save it for our next hangout.

To be safe, I put the three bottles in extra-large Ziplock bags, hoping that this would prevent glass shards and massive spills if they shatter, and then put them in the bottom of the fridge, as the cold air will slow the fermenting if it’s still occurring. When we bring it to our friend’s place, we’ll tell him to put on rubber gloves (in case the bottle shatters in his hand…which has happened to my husband once and required a hospital visit) and do it outside (in case it’s another geyser).

Preparing for Winter

Though Winter is still a few months away, we’ll soon be in fall and then very quickly the snow will fly.

The next month or so will see me harvesting the last of what we’ve got (which is still a lot) and finding ways to preserve it. Last year, we managed to grow enough veggies to last us the year, except for mushrooms, which we don’t grow. I’m hoping this year is the same. Although I’m soon going to an indoor mushroom growing workshop, so mushrooms might soon be off our grocery list.

The only thing we buy in the produce section at the grocery store are mushrooms, apples, oranges, bananas, and ginger (which we’ve got in our garden this year!). That’s it. The rapidly rising cost of fruits and veggies hasn’t really hit us.

As the food preserving winds down in October, I hope to get back into baking bread and bagels. I’ve been maintaining my sourdough starter but haven’t had time to use it to make anything.

I’ve also got other projects I’ve been long neglecting because of the garden. Outside of this, I’m an author and a publisher and while I’ve managed to keep the publishing going, I really need to get back into writing. My favourite part of winter is the slower pace and just enjoying all of the food and drink that we’ve grown and preserved. It tastes so much better when we know we did it all ourselves.

For my husband, preparing for winter means slowly clearing out the gardens and planting the garlic so they come up right as the spring rolls around. As the snow falls, he wedges tree branches in our chain link fence and strings Christmas lights through them, giving it all a sort of enchanted forest look.

And as we get into the real depths of winter, well, that’s when the seed catalogue arrives in our mailbox and we start preparing for the upcoming spring.