Gardening Archives - Urban Homesteading

Category: Gardening

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.

Garden Update: October 2024

Posted on October 7, 2024October 7, 2024 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.

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 September 11, 2024September 11, 2024 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 August 3, 2024September 3, 2024 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.