Blog Archives - Urban Homesteading

Category: Blog

5 Easy Crops for the Beginner Gardener

Posted on July 8, 2025July 8, 2025 by craig

We recently had some people over and they saw our garden for the first time. Their question — and everyone asks this question when they first see what we do — was “How did you get started on this?” Our garden takes up two and a half properties (ours, a neighbour’s, and a piece of another neighbour’s) with somewhere north of 50 different fruit, vegetables, and herbs, bringing in well over 1,000 pounds of food on an annual basis.

For us, it started as a row of squash and a row of potatoes, and once we had that mastered, it expanded rapidly from there. If you’re new to gardening and urban homesteading and not sure where to start, here are 5 easy crops for beginners, including some that work for extra small spaces like apartment balconies.

While these can all be grown from seed, some of these work better as seedlings bought from a greenhouse or garden store, especially if, like us, you don’t have room or experience in seed starting indoors.

1. Potatoes

Four large bags and two large bins full of potatoes

This is what started us on this homesteading journey. What I enjoy about potatoes is that when properly taken care of, and that process isn’t too difficult, potatoes are a pretty consistent crop.

We use starter potatoes with eyes — either store-bought or the neglected potatoes in the back of our pantry. If your seed potatoes have a lot of eyes on them, you can cut them into smaller pieces where each piece has 2-3 eyes, and allow the pieces to callous for a few days. If you plant them directly after cutting they may rot in the ground.

To plant, be sure your potato bed has a lot of bulky soil around it. Make a dish in the soil about 4 inches deep. In the middle, dig a hole 8 inches deep, and place the potato or potato piece in the hole so that the eyes are up and the cut side is down. This is called the mother potato, because as it grows, it will rot and the new potatoes will form around it. Cover the hole with dirt, but keep the 4-inch dish in tact, and water daily so this dish is full.

You really have to soak potatoes in the beginning. For the first week, fill the bowl a few times until the water does not sink into the soil in under 1 minute. Once you see green leaves coming up, you can reduce watering to once every 2 days. This allows the potato plant to grow better roots, as the roots will reach out further in search of water, delivering more water to the plant and letting it grow more leaves and flowers. Potatoes plants put their energy into the potato to survive the winter and regrow in spring, so the more leaves and flowers, the bigger and more numerous will be your potato harvest!

We like to put a stake with the potatoes right away, because when the plant grows, we loosely tie the plant to the stake. We’ve found over the years that if we don’t tie them, a windy storm could blow the plant over and then it stops growing and slowly dies — though, that said, the potato is fine and can be harvested. However, if the plant is tied and doesn’t blow over, the plant will keep growing and potatoes will grow larger and more plentiful.

When you see about 2 feet worth of foliage coming up, heap the extra soil over into the 4 inch dish. You can pull other adjacent soil up to form a hill. The hill will ensure maturing potatoes are covered. If they get exposed to the sun, they will turn green, which is toxic for consumption.

One other reason we like to stake our potatoes is, when you pull the potato plants into hills, the stake reminds you where the centre of the plants—and most of the roots—are. This makes it easier for watering.

When you see flowers forming, this means the potatoes are growing underground. When potatoes are done flowering, usually they will fall over and die. One year, however, due to staking the potatoes, we ended up having them flower twice, and the potatoes were huge—a few were nearly 24 ounces!

To harvest, wait until the plant starts to die and turn yellow. Then carefully dig up the potatoes and break off the plant if they’re still joined. Loosely brush off dirt. Let the potatoes sit in a cool, dark, humid place for a few weeks for the skin to harden. Then potatoes can be stored in a cool, dark, dry place for upwards of six months before they start to go soften and sprout. If you’d like to explore other options, you can pressure can potatoes.

If you’re wanting to replant potatoes the following year, collect egg-sized potatoes in a paper bag and keep them in the fridge over winter. In late April, take them out on a tray and keep them moist with a mist spray bottle. The eyes will develop just in time for planting.

2. Squash

Along with potatoes, squash was a key crop in the beginning of our homesteading journey and it’s been a constant in the garden ever since. We now grow acorn, butternut, pumpkin, and spaghetti squash, but in the past we’ve done zucchini and kobocha.

Squash can be very showy in the garden because it can very large and feature large, brightly coloured flowers. We typically plant our squash in the front yard and weave through the spaces around the fruit bushes, or at the edge of our back garden where there’s a bit of dead space for it to expand into.

We plant squash seeds directly into the ground, but we’ve seen squash seedlings at the garden store, which can be great if you’re starting a little late or if you don’t have the greatest luck with planting seeds. Squash requires a lot of water. Despite what you might think, you only have to water at the base. I used to at least sprinkle the leaves a bit, thinking they needed moisture, but they don’t.

You can save yourself a lot of hassle if you make a sizeable mound of soil, about 1-2 feet across, and then flatten the top into a bowl about 8-12 inches deep. Plant the squash along the outside of this bowl, about 1-2 inches from the top. When watering squash through the year, you just fill this bowl to the top. This way, as the squash sprawls — and it may spread out 20-40 feet, or more, in several directions — you’ll always know where the roots of each squash are.

When it gets toward the end of the season and it’s damper and cooler at night, you might encounter a fungus that looks like white dusty splotches on the leaves. You can try and trim off the infected parts, but it unfortunately spreads rapidly. Sometimes we’ve had healthy squash come off of these vines and sometimes not. Putting some epsom salt in a spray bottle with water and spraying infected leaves may help prevent the fungus from spreading — however, this may be a folk remedy and have no basis in science, so feel free to take or leave that advice.

However, if you use the circular bowl setup, you’ll minimize how much of the plant is wet. The white fungus is a mold and thrives on moisture and cooler temperatures. You can’t avoid the morning dews, or overnight rains, that will give the mold its ideal growing conditions, but at least you can minimize the chances that it will spread.

Squash can be harvested at any time, by cutting them from the vine, leaving a few inches of stem attached to the squash. If you’re starting to get that fungus, it might be good to harvest all the squash on the affected vine and quickly dispose of the vine. We tend to leave our squash on as long as we can so they become bigger, however, this can lead to a less concentrated flavour. Squash stores well in a cool, dark, dry place for several months. We harvest in September and October and usually find they start going mouldy in February. To counter this, we peel, chop, and freeze the squash in January to minimize loss.

Here on the site I have recipes for pumpkin puree and pumpkin butter, if you’re looking for ideas.

3. Garlic

Washed heads of garlic that have streaks of purple in them

Garlic is one of my favourite crops to grow, mostly because it’s so darn easy.

Garlic can be planted in the fall or the spring. If you’re buying starter garlic from a garden store, look for hardneck garlic for fall planting, but either hardneck or softneck can be used for spring planting. You can also plant garlic from the grocery store—you’re better off planting in the spring in case it’s a variety that can’t withstand the winter, but we’ve always planted in the fall and they’ve always overwintered successfully.

Though you can plant garlic in the spring, it’s best planted in fall, provided the ground is dry and the weather is cool. If planting in the fall, cover the bed with about 1-2 feet of old plant foliage from harvest. We find squash vine and potato plants perfect for this. This covering acts as insulation in the spring. Garlic requires a good soaking to get started, so the winter snow piling up on the foliage will melt, soaking the garlic, while the insulation will protect the budding garlic from weather variations in pre-spring. When the weather has become more consistently warm overnight — usually about mid-May or so — you can pull back the foliage and free the new garlic shoots.

If you have a wet fall, or warm weather that carries on too close to the first snow, then planting in spring is fine. You don’t want to risk that the fall rains and above zero temperatures will sprout the garlic — then have it die over the winter. Just note that you really have to soak the garlic if planted in spring, or it may rot. Spring garlic will mature a few weeks later than fall garlic.

To plant garlic, break a bulb into individual cloves and leave the skins on. Plant vertically with the pointy end up, a couple inches into the ground, with each clove spaced about six inches apart. Water well. Garlic also works well in a pot if you’re in a small place or an apartment with a balcony or even just a sunny window.

When garlic comes up, if it’s hardneck garlic you should get a flower stem. This is known as a scape. Harvest the scape before the flower opens or else the garlic will stop growing. They can easily be cut or snapped off—and then grilled on the BBQ or chopped and added to roasted veggies. To preserve these you can pickle them, make jam, or even a hot sauce.

When the garlic plant is about 2/3 yellowed, usually in the last few weeks of July, and clearly in the stages of dying, it’s time to harvest. With a shovel or pitchfork, gently loosen the soil. Grasp the garlic plant stem near the base and pull up, loosening the soil more if it doesn’t come out easily.

Chop the plant off the garlic bulb and then let the garlic sit in a cool, dry place with plenty of ventilation to cure for long term storage, then store in a cool, dry, dark place. We’ve had garlic last upwards of a year before it starts to go bad, meaning you can keep enjoying your harvest until the next year’s harvest.

4. Peas

There are two types of peas to consider — peas where you eat the whole pod (like sugar snap peas or snow peas) and peas where you shell the peas and don’t eat the pod. We grow both here in our garden. We enjoy snap peas, so we grow them along our fence and harvest them throughout the summer for snacks. But we also grow shelling peas — while snap peas can be shelled and the peas frozen, the variety we have isn’t good for canning, so we grow Alaskan peas for shelling and canning as they hold up better to the canning process.

Peas work well both in a garden and on an apartment balcony or even in a sunny window. If you’re going with container gardening, ensure your flower pot has some depth to it as the peas will have considerable roots. Peas love to climb, so putting them along a fence or a balcony railing, or even over a bookshelf if growing indoors, will help immensely.

Water regularly and make sure it gets lots of sun. Be sure to pick the peas as they grow, because if the plant produces a lot of fully-mature peas, it may feel like it’s done its work for the season and call it quits and die. But if you pick the peas as they mature, then the plant feels like it has to keep working to put out more peas.

Peas do not like heat in their early stages, so plant them as early as you can so they can get established in the cooler spring weeks. Usually, peas and potatoes are the two crops we have in the ground right away.

Peas are best preserved by either freezing or canning. For both methods, edible pods don’t survive well, so you’re best to shell the peas (technically optional for freezing, but required for canning). For canning peas, this can only be done in a pressure canner and is relatively easy. If you’re looking for something a little different, you can ferment peas in edible pods for a unique and tasty snack.

5. Chives

Chives are a tasty garnish on dishes, and pastel purple blossoms can be used to create unique foods, like a vibrantly pink vinegar or a savoury jelly.

While you can grow chives from seed, we know someone who has attempted this and found it difficult. However, chives are easy to find at your local garden store, so it’s likely best to start with one already growing.

If you plant them outside, chives are a perennial and will return every spring. And once fully established, it requires very little care. For the first year, be sure to water it plenty to help it establish itself in your garden, but after that you can water as needed. When I’m watering the garden, I sometimes don’t bother with the chives because they seem to do very well on their own.

Harvest them as needed, with either scissors or simply breaking chives off. If using the flowers for a project, be sure to wait until they’ve fully opened. Once opened, I find there’s about a one to two week window until the flowers start to fade and fall off.

Chives don’t preserve all that well. Freezing reduces their flavour and dehydrating reduces the flavour even more. Fermentation is possible and it creates something like a chive-flavoured sauerkraut, which can be an interesting garnish on dishes and sandwiches.

The chive blossoms present more options. I make chive blossom vinegar and chive blossom jelly. This year I’ve also thrown some chive blossoms in the freezer to attempt these chive blossom biscuits (though I may rework the recipe to make it a sourdough biscuit).

The best advice? Explore and have fun.

Whatever plants you choose to start with — whether it’s one of these or something different — choose a plant you’ll enjoy eating because then you’ll enjoy the work that goes into helping it grow.

Looking for preserving ideas?

I recently released Preserving Your Urban Harvest, a guide to canning, fermenting, and freezing, including 73 recipes for 21 favourite garden crops. Click here to find out more.

The cover of Preserving Your Urban Harvest by Craig Jamison

Summer is Finally Here: A Garden Update for June 2025

Posted on June 19, 2025June 19, 2025 by craig

It’s almost hard to believe that less than a month ago, the ground was all black earth and we were just starting to get things going for the year. Now, in the middle of June, the garden is fully planted and we’ve already begun harvesting a few things. Summer has come on very fast.

Most dramatic is our front yard. These are mostly perennial bushes and flowers, so they’re among the first things to come up. When the rest of our property is mostly newly-sprouted plants, the front yard is fully grown and thriving. The front yard also keeps the bees busy—between flowers on the mustard, strawberries, raspberries, and decorative flowers, there is lots of food and opportunity for pollinating insects.

The front garden with its many flowers and bushes.

Early harvests

The front yard is also where I’ve done some harvesting already.

First were the chives and chive blossoms. I’ve focussed mostly on the pastel purple blossoms and have made some chive blossom jelly and chive blossom vinegar. I’ve also frozen some blossoms with plans to try making some biscuits with them in the next few weeks.
Strawberries have started ripening too. It’s just a few here and there right now, but there are several dozen green ones that are only a week or two from being ready. I’m cleaning, chopping, and freezing these so they can be enjoyed later, either on ice cream or in oatmeal.
Chamomile, while not a perennial plant in this climate, has come back and fully established itself in our garden. Similar to mustard and borage, chamomile self-seeds, so wherever you first plant chamomile, that’ll likely be your chamomile patch going forward. It’s only been a few weeks and I think I’ve already harvest as much chamomile as I harvested last year. We definitely didn’t have enough last year, so we’re looking forward to the larger harvest this time around.

Everything is planted

While we tend to receive gifted plants throughout the summer that we replant in our garden, so planting is never truly over, we’ve finished the bulk of it.

Our front garden is largely perennials or self-seeding plants that regrow every year (like mustard and chamomile). Our patch along the side of the house will be beans and peas this year (versus corn and peas last year). The corn has moved to a far distant patch in our neighbour’s yard in an attempt to prevent the squirrel from raiding our crop and destroying everything.

The squirrel is resourceful, though, and has already found the corn. And rather than wait for the corn to fully grow and develop, it’s started attacking the small sprouts that are coming up. With the help of a friend, we collected some pop bottles to create little safety domes over the corn to protect them for the first few weeks. (Since it looks like we’re growing pop bottles, I call it our “soda patch”.)

Our back garden this year consists mainly of garlic, a few squash, broccoli, peppers, and Brussels sprouts, with a collection of a few other random things.

The neighbour’s garden is where we’ve got the corn, popcorn, tomatoes, potatoes, beets, onions, cucumbers, and canning peas, as well as a random assortment of a few other things.

Our neighbour's garden with an assortment of plants, including a large potato patch.

And our other neighbour’s yard, where we do a strip along the shared fence, we’ve got peas and squash.

In the meantime, while we wait for things to grow and flower and produce food, we are keeping the bees happy with our mustard. It grows plenty of vibrant yellow flowers and the bees and other pollinators love it. On particularly busy days, you can hear the buzzing from several feet away because our mustard patch is the social hub for these insects.

Books to add to your library

I’m a writer at heart, so while I love writing this blog and will continue to do so (and it’ll continue to be 100% free), I can’t help but also put things into book format.

I recently released Preserving Your Urban Harvest, which collects 73 of my favourite recipes for 21 favourite garden crops. Some of the recipes are already here on this blog and some are not. Whether you’re new to food preserving or experienced, you’ll likely find some tasty recipes to enjoy.

If you’re feeling a bit more adventurous, I’m currently working on a book of wine recipes so you can “drink your garden”, which I hope to publish this summer. After that is a sourdough cookbook with a whole wide range of recipes. And then I may have a few other ideas after that. So stay tuned!

Out Now: My First Cookbook!

Posted on June 13, 2025June 13, 2025 by craig

I’m excited to announce that my first cookbook is out now!

I’m a book lover by nature and while this site will continue to grow and will continue to be 100% free, I can’t help but write it all down in book format, accompanied with full page photos. Preserving Your Urban Harvest contains 73 recipes for 21 common home garden favourites, with some recipes found here on this site, but with so many more not found here.

I’m releasing in paperback first and will follow up with an ebook in the near future for those who prefer a digital cookbook.

Here’s the cover:

Cover of Preserving Your Urban Harvest cookbook, which features four jars of preserved foods

And here’s the blurb:

Preserve your harvest. Enjoy it all year.

Whether you’re growing tomatoes on a balcony, or tending a backyard garden, Preserving Your Urban Harvest shows you how to make the most of your crops with 73 simple, delicious and time-tested recipes.

From apples to tomatoes, this book covers 21 common garden favorites with easy methods like water bath canning, pressure canning, fermenting, pickling, and more. Create pantry staples and creative treats—without needing a farmhouse or a root cellar.

Inside, you’ll find step-by-step instructions for:

Butter Chicken Curry Sauce

Fermented Garlic Scape Hot Sauce

Bread and Butter Pickles

Pressure Canned French Fries

Saskatoon and Grand Marnier Jam

Written by self-taught food preserver Craig Jamison, who shares years of hands-on experience preserving garden produce with his husband, this book is for anyone who wants to turn homegrown food into year-round abundance.

Ready to fill your pantry with flavor, not just food? Let’s get preserving!

Paperbacks are available right now on Amazon! Click here to get yours now!

I’m already hard at work on my next book about making wine from your garden crops, and then I’ve got a few other ideas after that—so if cookbooks are your thing, there are plenty coming from me in the future!

Spring is here! A garden update for May 2025

Posted on May 12, 2025May 12, 2025 by craig

I think we can finally say it—spring is here and garden season has begun! Normally we wait till the May long weekend to make that declaration because weather can still be rocky in early May and there’s still a chance of frost, but this year has been warmer than usual so far and the garden is already in the swing of things, even though we haven’t done much yet. The trees and bushes are starting to bud, the chives have come up, flowers are starting to grow, and all the birds are back.

Garlic

We finally planted our garlic. We typically do a fall planting, let it overwinter, and then it’s the first thing to grow in the spring. Last fall was warm and wet and we ran the risk of the garlic simply rotting and opted for a spring planting. Ideally, we would have done it a little earlier since garlic can handle a little cold, but nevertheless, it’s in the ground.

This year’s garlic is in a new spot. We like to rotate our crops to test out different areas of the garden for the different foods. Rotating crops is also good for soil health since different plants both take and deposit different minerals into the ground. I’ve noticed that last year’s garlic patch has garlic currently growing in it. I must have missed a half dozen heads of garlic during last year’s harvest. We will likely dig them up and move them to the garlic patch, because where they are now would be in the way of this summer’s crops.

Mushrooms

We’ve also set up our mushroom beds! Last year, we tried growing mushrooms at the bases of a few of our trees. We laid out lots of sawdust, spread out the grain spawn, and gave it a good water. We got one small clutch of oyster mushrooms and that was it.

This year, we’re trying three different types of mushrooms—wine cap, shiitake, and pioppino—to see if any do better than others. And this year we’re also upping our mushroom setup. Mushrooms really need better conditions than what we’d set up last year, so we’ve changed our tactic this year. We laid out a layer of dead and decaying squash vines and leaves from last year, a layer of wood chips we bought at the hardware store, the grain spawn, more wood chips, and more leaves and vines. We gave it a good water. The directions say it’s best to cover with a clear tarp for the first while, so I’ll get one and set it up soon. Hopefully we get some mushrooms or even a bountiful harvest—this is one of the crops we really want to succeed but have difficulty with every year.

Making a plan

I ordered seeds a few months ago and they’ve been patiently sitting our kitchen, waiting to be put in the ground. Next is to purchase seedlings and live plants. We tend to go on or around the May long weekend to pick up what we need, and we focus on things that we have trouble growing from seed, or take too long to grow from seed, such as chamomile, hot peppers, herbs, leeks, broccoli, and Brussels sprouts. It sounds like a small list, but we inevitably come home with two to three times the amount of things we set out to buy.

My husband will start tilling the ground and planting seeds and plants in the next few weeks. In early June, my step-dad will come to the city and immediately be put to work in our garden—the two of them quickly power through the whole project and get this massive garden installed in a matter of two to three days.

Barren garden, waiting to be tilled and planted

Assessing our stock

The preservation recipes I undertake every year will vary based on what’s coming up in the garden, but also on what we still have on the shelves in our food storage room. While canned foods are theoretically good indefinitely as long as the seal on the jar hasn’t been broken, I find for many things the quality degrades after a year and a half to two years. (As well, some canning companies recommend using food up within 18 months, as the seal may degrade past that date.) So, for example, I still have a lot of hot sauce in storage from last year that will be fine for the coming year, so I will likely skip hot sauce this year. On the other hand, we’re almost out of green tomato chutney, so I’ll make a big batch of that to last the next couple years.

This is also the opportunity to assess if there’s anything we thought we would use up but just ended up not. This happened a few years ago with peony jelly—it’s a nice recipe and I’ve found a few folks who love it and happily took it off my hands, but if I hadn’t, I would have ended up throwing out the jelly because we simply don’t use it up ourselves.

Assessing the inventory of food we still have has also been interesting in the sense that there is still a LOT left and it feels like we have too much…but then I realize that harvest is still a few months away and for some things they’re not really harvested until October, which is a full four months away. We will very likely have an overlap of old thing still around while we’re preserving new things, so we’ll have to make sure we’re clearly marking the dates on things so we use the older ones first.

Preserving food is an odd cycle, but a predictable one. In October, I’m exhausted and never want to do it again. In February I’m relaxed and enjoying the bounty of our harvest and could see myself doing more canning when the time comes. And now in May I’m eager for things to just grow already so I can harvest and make all of these wonderful things.

Here’s hoping 2025 is a bountiful year for all of us!

Preparing for the upcoming garden season (A garden update for April 2025)

Posted on April 10, 2025April 10, 2025 by craig

Another month and another inch closer to spring. During much of March, the snow had melted and it looked like we were headed to a very early spring—though it would have still been unwise to plant anything until the May long weekend because a good frost could kill anything.

The garden in March with most of the snow melted

But then right around the shift from March to April, the city was hit with a big dump of snow. While a lot of it has since melted, there’s still a considerable amount of snow and ice around. While we can’t plant yet, we’re still busy preparing for the upcoming garden season!

The garden in April, buried in a fresh layer of snow

Early plantings

Despite the risk of frost between now and the May long weekend, there are two things we want to get in the ground nice and early, and which can withstand some frost.

The first is garlic. We normally plant this in the fall, let it overwinter under the snow, and then it’s the first thing to come up in the spring. But last fall was unseasonably warm and very rainy and there was a very real risk that the garlic we plant would either sprout in the fall or simply rot, so we’re going to do a spring planting instead. If we get it in while the ground is still very cold, there’s a chance the garlic will still grow at the usual time.

We really wanted to replant the garlic from last year. It’s the second generation of seed garlic we had purchased from a local farmers market vendor—these ones have nice giant cloves, with only about four cloves per head. Sometimes our garlic doesn’t last till spring so we were worried it might sprout or go bad before we had a chance to plant them, but they’re still doing good, chilling out in a bag and ready to go. (We had considered freezing them to mimic the conditions of being frozen outside over winter and to make sure they don’t sprout or go bad, but just never got around to putting the garlic in the freezer.)

The second is mushrooms. We settled on wine cap mushrooms. They’re supposed to be beginner friendly, work well in outdoor beds, and dehydrate/rehydrate well. They can also withstand a little bit of frost, so getting them in around late April or early May is ideal as they fruit in the spring and fall when it’s a bit cooler.

Unfortunately, my local mushroom supplier seems to be out of wine cap spawn, so I’m looking elsewhere. I’ve found a handful of places that sell spawn online within Canada, but the shipping is very expensive (so it’s worth it to find a local supplier to save the shipping cost!). I’m continuing to explore options because we’re determined to have mushrooms this year.

Update since the first draft of this post: I’ve found an online mushroom vendor from Quebec and I’ve ordered wine cap, shiitake, and pioppino mushroom spawn. We’ll try all three and see what comes up!

New kitchen gadgets

My birthday was last month and my mom had originally planned to register me for a cheesemaking class at the local cooking school, but it was unfortunately cancelled. I definitely want to learn how to make cheese, so I’m keeping an eye on their website for when that comes up again.

However, in the absence of a cheesemaking class, my mom offered to buy me some items off Amazon. I poked around the site and loaded up on gadgets to help build this homesteading kitchen.

Gnocchi-making supplies

My husband and I love gnocchi, which are pillowy-soft potato dumplings from Italy that are served up with sauce. I’ve tried making them before but they were a kitchen disaster. I’m determined to learn how to make them soon, so as part of the birthday gift, I got myself a potato ricer (to make perfectly smooth potatoes) and a gnocchi board (to get the traditional ridges). I’ll be hopping on Zoom one weekend soon while my bestie and we’ll teach ourselves how to make this.

A potato ricer and a gnocchi board for making gnocchi

Spaetzle-making supplies

Spaetzle is a type of noodle. A while back I came across a recipe for how to make it using sourdough discard. I attempted it a couple weeks ago and it was delicious. However, I didn’t have the appropriate device for making it easily, so I added this spaetzle maker to my Amazon cart!

The dough is pushed through the holes, directly into boiling water. When I attempted it previously, I used a colander, which does the job, but it’s awkward.

A spaetzle maker -- a metal disc with holes in it, with a plastic scraper to push dough through the holes

Wine siphon

I make a lot of country wines. For some of them, I make big five-gallon batches and have all the right equipment for that. For other recipes, I make small one-gallon batches, and one thing that’s I’ve been missing is a small siphon to transfer wine. This will help me get clearer sediment-free wine from my small batches. (And I will have more wine recipes on this site over the next year, I promise!)

The busyness begins next month!

This was a relatively quiet month but May will soon be upon us and we’ll be diving head-first into six months of gardening, harvesting, and food processing. When I’m at the end of it, around September or October, I’m always exhausted and wishing we could scale it down and just not do as much. But when this time of year rolls around, I’m back in love with it all and I can’t wait to get started. See you next month!

Garden Update: March 2025

Posted on March 13, 2025March 13, 2025 by craig

We’re having an unseasonably warm couple of months here in Winnipeg.

While there is normally a warm spell around this time—there’s a winter festival every February that includes snow sculptures and it seems that every year it’s warmish at that time and the sculptures melt a bit—but this year has been warmer than normal. In fact, tomorrow it’s supposed to go up to +8 degrees Celsius. After that, though, we’re expecting a winter storm and some colder temps, so it’s evening out a bit.

The main concern about a too-early spring is that the perennial plants might come up a little too early, then be damaged if there’s a cold spell. However, since they’re perennials, they can likely get through it just fine. We won’t be planting anything until it’s finally and fully on the warmer side of things, which tends to be around the May long weekend.

The one exception is garlic. We normally plant that in the fall and let it rest under the snow all winter so it sprouts up first thing in the spring. We didn’t have time to do it last fall, so as soon as the ground is workable, we might plant the garlic so it’s still in there nice and early.

The seed orders have arrived

Last month’s garden update included a lengthy list of what seeds we need to order, what seedlings we’ll buy at the greenhouse, and what perennials we can expect to come up.

Sometimes it makes me think of this meme that was sent my way a while back:

A meme using an image from Lord of the Rings in which Bilbo Baggins is holding an image of vegetables. It reads "After all... why not? Why shouldn't I plant every single vegetable?"

We plant a lot of different things. When people ask me what we grow in our garden, I rattle off forty or fifty things and end my list with “I’m sure I’m forgetting a few plants”.

But when our goal is to grow all the food we’d need in a year—vegetables, some fruit, herbal teas, and alternative proteins—that requires the huge diversity that we’ve got going. It also helps balance things out if some crops do better than others. This past year, broccoli did very well, but peppers didn’t do as great as the year before, so overall it averages out to about the same total load as last year.

I’m working on a blog post for how to plan a garden to provide food for a year. It’ll mostly be based on our own experience, which may not be applicable to every reader, but it will hopefully provide a good starting point for those who are interested.

Still figuring out mushrooms

Last year we planted king oyster mushrooms under our cedar trees.

The results were…less than stellar.

A very small king oyster mushroom growing in the ground.

After creating two large beds for mushrooms and investing considerable time and energy into it, we got one piddly mushroom.

However, in hindsight that might be best. While oyster mushrooms are great for cooking, they’re not great for preserving—while they dehydrate fine, they apparently don’t rehydrate very well as they turn into mush—and if we’d harvested a huge bounty, we’d either have to eat it all ASAP or throw some in the compost.

We are, however, determined to make the mushroom thing work.

I did some digging around and it looks like winecap mushrooms are beginner friendly for garden growing and my local mushroom supplier has winecap spawn. I still have to do more digging to see how well they dehydrate and rehydrate. However, this will likely be our next mushroom venture.

Keeping busy in the kitchen

I’ve had a little more time on my hands lately, so I’ve been working on a few things here for the blog.

Looking ahead to spring

Next month’s garden update will likely be brief like this one, but then once May rolls around we’re launching full-on into garden season and these updates will be packed with photos and info. The summer is a hectic time of year and we’re always exhausted by the end of it, but we love it. And when it comes to this time of year, we’re already itching to get started outdoors.

Garden Update: February 2025

Posted on February 19, 2025March 13, 2025 by craig

As I’m writing this, we are experiencing one of the coldest Februarys that I can remember. Normally at this time of year we’re having some warmer weather—and I remember this because there’s an annual winter festival right now that includes snow sculptures and I always worry about them melting. This year that’s not a concern.

So it feels odd…that I’m preparing our seed order and am in the early stages of garden planning.

Buying seeds for the garden

When we first started this urban homesteading adventure years ago, we just went to the hardware store and snapped up any seed packets that looked interesting.

Now, though, it’s a careful process.

We receive two seed catalogues in the mail that we order from, I’m eyeing a website I’m going to try ordering from, and after we do all that we still sometimes pick up random packets at the hardware store.

So what is the point of so many sources?

Two things—selection and price.

The catalogues tend to have much greater selection that what we find in our typical hardware store or greenhouse, so they’re my default go-to. Between the catalogues there are sometimes differences in selection—only one offers popcorn and only one offers black beans. And the prices vary between the two catalogues I use, with one of them usually tending to be cheaper.

This year with the website I’m adding to the mix, that’s again due to selection. They have watermelon seeds designed for our climate—and we find watermelon difficult to grow here.

I’ll put our full garden list at the end of this post.

Planning for a year of food

When taking in the challenge of urban homesteading—the challenge of providing for yourself as much as you can—planning a garden can be quite a daunting task.

It involves some guesswork, but it also leaves a lot up to chance beyond your control. For example, do we need six chamomile plants or twelve? We had three last year that have given us a good six months of tea, so theoretically six plants would be what we need. But if it’s a bad year for chamomile flowers or it’s a variety that doesn’t bloom as much, six plants might only give us a small amount for tea.

Hot peppers were like that, but in reverse. The first year we grew hot peppers we maybe had a dozen plants and we got very few peppers. The following year we doubled the number of hot pepper plants, but that was also a very good year for hot peppers, with each plant giving us at least double what comparable plants gave us the previous year. In effect, we’d wanted to double our yield but ended up quadrupling it.

The economy of urban homesteading

Going through all this effort of growing and preserving all our own food is a Herculean task sometimes. The planting, maintaining, harvesting, and processing / preserving is sometimes more than the two of us can manage on our own. It’s also not cheap to buy all the seeds and seedlings we need.

But it’s worth it in the end.

There’s of course the satisfaction of knowing this was something we did ourselves. There’s also the satisfaction of knowing what’s in our food. While we don’t have a mistrust of the food industry and aren’t concerned about deceptive practices, we do like being able to control what goes in what we eat. This means less salt in our pasta sauce, it means higher quality tomatoes in our tomato juice, it means richer tasting beets in our pickled beets, and it means customizing recipes to produce exactly what we want.

But there’s also the savings of it all. While, yes, seeds and seedlings often cost in the range of $400-$600, we easily result in $1,500 in produce value. And that’s using numbers I collected years ago, and doesn’t reflect the skyrocketing prices of fruits and veggies in recent years. It also neglects the final “finished price” of what I make. Twenty jars of pesto might have use up $20 worth of homegrown basil, but twenty jars of pesto could easily cost $100—so the value is actually $100, not the $20 worth of what we grew.

But then there’s also the social reward. We’ve formed great connections with both neighbours over the years from using their yards and from simply being outside. We’ve had friends and family come and help us in the garden. And we’ve had a good reason to invite people over—come see our garden and stay for a barbecue.

The full garden list

Seeds we’ve ordered:

Beans – black
Beans – other
Beans – scarlet runner
Beets
Cabbage
Carrots
Chickpeas
Corn
Cucumbers
Kale
Parsnips
Peas – for canning
Peas – snap peas for snacking
Popcorn
Pumpkin – sugar pie
Pumpkin – for carving
Radish
Sunflower
Spinach
Squash – acorn
Squash – butternut
Squash – spaghetti
Watermelon

The seedlings we’ll buy at the greenhouse (which is subject to availability):

Basil
Broccoli
Brussels Sprouts
Catnip
Chamomile
Cauliflower
Leeks
Mint
Oregano
Peppers – bell
Peppers – hot
Rosemary
Thyme
Tomatoes

Other things to source:

Garlic – we’ll replant some of last year’s harvest
Mushroom spawn for a mushroom bed
Onions
Potatoes – we’ll likely replant some of last year’s harvest
Shallots

Permaculture products—plants we already have in our garden that come up year after year:

Blueberries
Borage
Chives
Dandelions
Dill
Goji – we’ve yet to harvest anything
Grapes
Haskap Berries
Horseradish
Lilac
Mint
Mustard
Peonies
Raspberry
Rhubarb
Saskatoons
Strawberries

Foods we harvest from other people’s yards:

Apples
Cherries

Even with this extensive list, there’s a lot of chance and random decisions that go into gardening on this scale. Some things may not grow, some seeds and seedlings may not be available, a new seed or seedling may catch our attention, or something wild and edible might show up in our yard (which is how the mustard came about).

It’s a massive task to plan out a year’s worth of gardening, but the reward makes all the effort worth it.

Garden Update: January 2025

Posted on January 24, 2025 by craig

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!

Garden Update: December 2024

Posted on December 20, 2024December 20, 2024 by craig

Well, we’ve finally reached Winter here in Winnipeg. As I’m writing this, the city is digging itself out of a week of moderate snow. (Moderate for Winnipeg, heavy for other parts of the world.) The active outdoor side of gardening is fully over until the spring thaw.

The transition from fall to winter was not ideal. There were several days where it was abnormally warm, and when we had a shift to cold, we knew it wouldn’t stay long.

Because of that, we didn’t plant our garlic. It normally goes in the ground at the end of fall, when it’s too cold for the cloves to sprout—they hibernate for the winter and then sprout when the warmer spring weather comes. But with the unpredictable fall, we knew if we planted them too early and then had some warm days, the garlic might sprout and the crop would be ruined for next year. And by the time we were sure we’d fully transitioned to winter, the ground was too solid to do the planting.

So… we’ll plant the garlic in the spring.

Planting in the spring is an equally valid way to do it. For us, though, we like planting in the fall so it’s one less thing to do in the spring—and fall planting means the garlic is one of the first crops to sprout and show life in the garden. It’ll be an interesting experiment to see if spring planting produces different results than fall planting.

Preserving projects still to come

This year was easily our biggest haul. I still haven’t done all the math on the weights and approximate grocery store value, but I plan to wrap that up before the end of the year. Despite not knowing those numbers, the visual evidence alone proves that we’ve outdone previous records. We have three deep freezers full, two fridge-freezers full, the storage room is packed with canned goods, and we’ve got loads of potatoes and squash.

There are a few preserving things still to be done. The vegetables that do well in cold storage usually start to spoil around January or February, so those need to be taken care of soon.

These include:

Onions, which I’m going to preserve as French onion soup, balsamic onion jam, and pickled onions, as well as leaving a handful in storage for dinner use in the hopes that we use them before they go bad.
Garlic, which I’ll preserve as pickled garlic, while also leaving a bunch for dinner use. We usually use our garlic harvest to plant the next one (in the fall), but I’m not sure if this garlic will last till May since we’re doing spring planting this time, so we’ll try throwing them in the freezer over winter and see if the simulates outdoor winter for them.
Potatoes, which we had a smaller harvest of and have given a lot away, but there are still lots left. We’re looking at boiling, mashing, and freezing them. They’re not the greatest when reheated (and with a ton of butter added), but it’s preferable to letting them go bad. We had plans of using potatoes in a lot of dinner dishes in the fall, but with how our busy schedules turned out, we had very few dinners at home, so we ate very few.
Squash, which we typically peel, chop, and freeze, and we’ll do that again this year.
Popcorn, which just needs to be stripped from the cob and stored in an airtight jar.

While the food storage room still needs some tidying, it is *packed* with food. The potatoes are kept in a darker room, and the freezers are in other rooms.

Maintaining this blog in winter

I have to admit, keeping up with posting on this blog is a bit of a challenge when I’m not in the middle of six different food projects on any given day. Winter is a time of relaxing and enjoying the harvest we had.

However, over the winter, you’ll likely see blog posts about wine making and perhaps some more about bread making.

I’ve got six wines on the go right now—pea pod, rosemary, beet, rhubarb, jalapeño, and grape—and a few more waiting to be started when the wine making jars are emptied (namely cranberry, corncob, and cherry).

Other winter projects

I have it on my lengthy to-do list to write a preserving cookbook. I’m hoping to hammer through that in the coming months and get it out and published. So a lot of my winter will likely be writing out recipes, some of which will also appear here.

After that, though I might not get it done this winter, is a wine making cookbook. One of my favourite projects from the garden is turning food into wine and the results are often quite spectacular and tasty.

A new logo

With the help of my bestie, Cali, I’ve created a new logo for Urban Homesteading.

This new logo features a preserving jar, a handful of fruits and veggies (though, admittedly, I don’t preserve bananas), and a retro hipster style to it. I really love this logo and I hope you do too.

Until next month…

Well, that about brings me to the end of this garden update—while I’m still busy with garden-related stuff, it’s quite a bit more relaxed than in the height of it. While I take it easy for the next few months, I’m already looking forward to diving head-first back into it in the spring.

Garden Update: November 2024

Posted on November 5, 2024November 5, 2024 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.