Uncategorized Archives - Urban Homesteading

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.

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!

Category: Uncategorized

Garden Update: February 2025