As I write the first draft of this post, the temperature outside is somewhere around -32 degrees Celsius (-26 F) and there’s a strong wind that makes the “feels like” temperature a whopping -42 C (-44 F). We usually have a week or two like this in mid January, so it’s entirely expected, though not entirely welcome.
Despite the brutal cold, there are still a handful of garden things going on—a bit of final preservation of our 2024 haul and some early prep for the 2025 season.
The last of the preservation
The veggies that do well in cold storage in my mom’s basement closet are at the point where they will start to go bad soon if we don’t do things with them. These include squash, which will rot, and potatoes, onions, and garlic, which will all start sprouting. It seems these things tend to happen all at once, right when things start to get a little bit warm outside, usually in early February. My guess is there’s a subtle change in ambient temperature and humidity, even though these things are inside the house, and the veggies (and mould) pick up on it and start to work.
With the onions, I’d had hopes of making jars of French onion soup, balsamic onion jam, and pickled onions, but I’m not sure if I have the time and energy for all of that, so for the time being, I’m just working on chopping and freezing them so we can throw them in dinners and things. I do, however, have a LOT of onions to go through, so I might still get to these things.
For the garlic, I’d like to do up several jars of pickled garlic, as that’s often a crowd-pleaser at summer barbecues. Pickled garlic is delicious and for those who aren’t super fans of garlic, it might help to know that the potent bite of garlic greatly recedes, leaving just the flavour of garlic behind.
For the potatoes, we tend to boil and mash them (with just a little bit of butter), and then freeze the mashed potatoes. They aren’t the greatest when reconstituted for dinner, but they’re not terrible. They just need a LOT of butter and milk, and all that dairy and fat makes them appetizing again.
And for the squash, the only thing we can really do is peel, chop, and freeze them. It is possible to can winter squash, but with our ample freezer space and given the fact that canned squash has to be peeled and chopped first, I prefer to just freeze it. Frozen squash works well for soups and making pumpkin pie (which can be made with squash other than pumpkin). Frozen chopped squash is also great for throwing into a roast or onto a sheet pan with other veggies.
However, we also realize we still have way too much food for us, so we have been giving some of it away. That not only helps reduce our over-supply, but it helps strengthen the connections with the people around us, and allow us to share the delicious bounty of our summer labours.
Preparing for 2025’s garden
While I’m not quite ready to open up the seed catalogue we received a few weeks back, we are starting to talk about what we want to plant.
Our neighbour whose yard we use usually starts all of our tomatoes, some peppers, and a few other things indoors. We don’t have the space or skill to do so, but he’s a natural at it. He’s not sure if he’s going to be up for doing it this year, so in a few weeks my husband is going to go over there and visit and find out what the neighbour’s plans are, so we can assess what we need to do (or not do).
One of our ongoing struggles is growing fruit. We seem to have strawberries and saskatoons down, and we get a good harvest of apples and cherries from a friend’s trees, but we’d like more beyond these. We’ve got some blueberry, raspberry, and haskap berry plants, but they haven’t been productive, though this might be the year they turn around. But one thing we’ve been trying a few years and failing miserably at is watermelon and other melons.
Last year I had made plans to go and visit a homesteading fair. I ended up not going, but I checked out their website for their vendors, and found one of them was a seed company in Saskatchewan (the next province west) that has, among other things, seeds for watermelon (and another type of melon) that grow well in our climate. We will order these seeds shortly so that we don’t miss out on them.
Until next month…
This blog does get slow in the winter, mostly because the garden projects really slow down. However, with the above projects that need to get done, hopefully I’ll get a few posts out of them. There’s also the dried beans that I want to pressure can so they’re dinner-ready, and I’ve got a number of wines that are just about to get bottled.
But, if all of that fails and no posts come out of it, I’ll be back with a February update which will hopefully have more firm plans on what we’re planting—and I may have even ordered some seeds by then!
