Garden Update: December 2024

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.

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.