Tag: urban gardening

Garden Update: October 2023

Posted on by craig

With an unusually warm October for Winnipeg, our gardening projects have continued a week or two longer than they normally do.

All of our vegetables and fruit are harvested and preserved (canned, fermented, frozen, and/or put in storage) and as I write the draft of this post, I’m currently drying the last of our herbs. Parsley is in the dehydrator right now and thyme will go in tomorrow. After that, I have to finish up the mustard seed—I have a few plants drying in large paper bags and I need to break out the seeds and filter out the detritus—and with that, make a batch of mustard. The ginger still needs to be dug up, though we’re undecided if we’re going to put it in a pot and turn it into an indoor plant or if I’m going to make candied ginger with it. In my September update, I’d mentioned the plan to dig up and remove the horseradish from the front yard—at this point I think we’re keeping it where it is for one more year.

As I’m typing the draft of this post, my husband is building a pergola in our front yard—a large wooden structure for the grape vine to wrap itself around. Previously he’s used a structure made of dried out sunflower stalks (which are surprisingly durable) held together by rope, but it really wasn’t a long-term solution. This September, a windy storm knocked the whole thing over.

This pergola has become a community endeavour. John (my husband) is one of those people that knows everyone in the neighbourhood. He got initial advice from our neighbour, who directed him to another neighbour across the street—and that fellow has become John’s co-worker on this project. John has little to no experience building wooden structures or woodwork in general, so this across-the-street neighbour’s help is greatly appreciated. In order to put the posts securely into the ground, John borrowed a post-hole-digger from another neighbour down the street, who similarly offered advice on the project.

If it were me doing this, I would have just hired a company, LOL. But, John being John, this has turned into a more-affordable project that is almost community-driven. (On the plus side, when John sent me to the hardware store for the washers he forgot to buy, I noticed another neighbour down the back lane had put their old barbecue out with the trash—so I got a new-to-me barbecue that’s a definite improvement over our old one, which I would have missed out on if John hadn’t taken on this project.)

The pergola is done now!

Our grape vine is certainly going to love this! These are red wine grapes. In the spring, we might buy a white wine grape vine to plant on the other side of the pergola. Hopefully in a few years we’ll have enough grapes in a summer to make small batches of wine.

Speaking of wine…

The garden wines, also from the September update, continue to ferment. (If you’re looking at making garden wines at home, check out my Rough Guide to Making Country Wines post.)

To sum up, the following are still fermenting:

  • Chokecherry wine (this might be almost finished)
  • Beet wine (does not taste like beets)
  • Honeydew melon wine
  • Corn cob wine (does not taste like corn)
  • Grape wine (this might be almost finished)
  • Rosemary wine

Since the last post, the sour cherry wine completed its thing and I bottled it up. It is amazingly delicious! I got seven half bottles (375 ml)—we drank two of them pretty quick, we shared two with the person whose cherry tree we raided, I put two in storage for next summer (my step-dad lives out-of-country and will be back in the summer, so I’m saving a handful of different wines to share with him), and I have one bottle left that John and I will likely pull out soon. We like to share some wine when we’re watching a season premiere or season finale of a show, so we’ll likely share it this week when we start season three of What We Do In The Shadows.

The sour cherry wine retained much of its cherry taste, which was a nice surprise. (Some wines like beet, parsnip, and corn cob lose their original taste—thank god.) And now I’m in a bit of a conundrum. I have a big bag of cherries sitting in my freezer, waiting to be used for something…and I don’t know if I should make more cherry wine, more cherry gin (which tastes phenomenal with simple syrup and lemon juice), or more cherry liqueur (which is also phenomenal). I’ll have to do a survey with friends and family to see which they liked best.

Levelling up

Because of the magic of the Instagram algorithm, the app shows me content from food preservers and homesteaders. Around this time of year, they’re all showing off their pantries filled to the brim with canned and preserved goods.

I think I’m almost at that level. At least for us, a family of two, I’m at that level. (Quite often these social media posts come from content creators who come from families of four or more—they would need to produce and preserve a lot more food than we would.)

Because our house is tiny and doesn’t have a basement, we’ve been using my mom’s place for food storage. Unfortunately, it’s always been a bit of a mess that my mom has thankfully put up with. This year, John got in his organizing mode and decided we needed to treat my mom better. We got a bunch of metal shelving units from the hardware store and lined them along the walls in an unused bedroom in my mom’s basement. It’s now our food storage room. We keep all of our jars of preserved food in there, our wine-making equipment, and the squash.

We keep the potatoes in a separate room in my mom’s basement, one that does not have a window and where the door is rarely opened. The total darkness keeps them fresher for longer.

As usual, we filled up my mom’s chest freezer, mostly with rhubarb. This year we bought a small chest freezer for our house…and quickly filled it up. So we bought another small chest freezer for my mom’s basement…and it’s half full. (And in case you’re wondering, the freezer attached to our fridge was filled to the brim with veggies back in June.)

We clearly have a year’s supply of vegetables.

As a thank-you to my mom for letting us take up so much space at her house, she has free access to any and all food stored at her place. She’s been enjoying the pasta sauce, salsa, and beets that I canned this year.

Celebrating the harvest

Every year as the garden wraps up, I host a Garden Harvest BBQ, where most of the dinner ingredients come from the garden.

This year the dinner included:

Appetizer:

  • Pumpkin sourdough bread
  • Grilled baguette slices
  • Basil pesto
  • Pickled banana peppers
  • Cowboy candy (candied jalapeño peppers)
  • Pickled beets
  • Toum (a fluffy garlic spread)
  • The pumpkin, basil, peppers, beets, and garlic all came from our garden.

Main Course:

  • Garlic and rosemary grilled pork chops
  • Roasted Brussels sprouts, butternut squash, and potatoes
  • The garlic, rosemary, Brussels sprouts, squash, and potatoes all came from our garden.

Dessert:

  • Black bean brownies
  • The black beans came from our garden.

Drinks:

  • Mint tea
  • Rhubarb wine
  • The mint and rhubarb came from our garden.

Unfortunately, I forgot to take any pictures to share with you… but it was delicious!

Looking ahead to November

Gardening is really a year-round activity, especially when you go all-in on food preserving and homesteading (even just urban homesteading like we’re doing). While things certainly slow down in November, they don’t cease.

In early November I’m going to treat myself to a steam juicer—this one, I think—as it will make juicing apples, rhubarb, cherries, and tomatoes so much easier. I’ll have to test it next year to see if it works well with cucumbers; my concern is the heat of the juicing process might dampen the freshness that’s associated with cucumber juice.

When it arrives, my first project will be juicing that bag of sour cherries, provided I figure out if I’m making liqueur, gin, or wine.

Buried in the back of my freezer, I also have pincherries. This is something my stepdad harvested when he was here this summer. I’ve never worked with them before, so I’m not sure what to do. Since I don’t have a ton of them, maybe I’ll soak them in some gin and make pincherry gin. (If I do that, then I think that reduces my options with the sour cherries to liqueur or wine.)

Sometime in the next month or so, our popcorn—what little of it we were able to save from the squirrel—might be dry enough to pull from the cob and start using on movie nights.

The squirrel story: We had somewhere around 60 cobs of popcorn, which would have easily been enough for a year’s supply. In half a day—half a day—the squirrel either ate, partially ate, or absconded with 54 cobs. Yes. Out of 60, we’re down to 6. We harvested them right away, but they’re supposed to fully dry on the stalks before harvesting and then dry further in the house, so I’m not sure if the early harvest will affect the poppability of the popcorn.

Looking ahead to next year

We’re always thinking of what to do next year. What do we want more of, what do we want less of, and what do we want to introduce?

There was some concern that the neighbour whose yard we use would move, but he’s committed to staying at least another year. To sweeten the deal, my husband offered to help him tend to his flowers all of next summer.

We definitely want our lengthy list of usuals: Brussels sprouts, broccoli, beets, onions, cucumber, peas (for canning), sugar snap peas (for snacking), potatoes, squash (pumpkin, spaghetti, butternut, acorn), bell peppers, hot peppers, popcorn, sweet corn, tomatoes, kidney beans, black beans, garlic, celery, mustard, green onions (I think they’re also known as spring onions), sunflowers, Saskatoons (AKA June berries or service berries), blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, grapes, rhubarb, horseradish, basil, rosemary, parsley, mint, dill, and thyme. I’m sure I’ve forgotten one or two things.

I know we want to increase our mint (John has a renewed love for mint tea) and our fruit. Part of increasing fruit means buying more blueberry plants and possibly getting another grape vine. But it also means figuring out what other fruits we want and figuring out if we can grow them in our climate—I definitely want to try watermelon again (we’d tried it this year, but the squirrel…), and if this honeydew melon wine is tasty we’ll want more of that.

Another thinking project for next year is figuring out where we want to plant things.

Part of this means where in the yard. Mustard is better in the back yard because it gets covered with insect eggs in the front yard. This year we moved the celery from the front to the back and nearly the whole crop was destroyed by slugs.

Very little celery was salvageable.

Part of this also means which property. We been invited to use up some of the garden space at a meditation retreat centre just outside of Winnipeg where—(wait for it…)—they do not have a squirrel problem. Our popcorn is definitely going out there.

John may move both our sweet corn and popcorn out to this rural garden, which frees up a ton of space at home. Ideally, corn is alternated with beans year after year—corn uses nitrogen and beans replenish nitrogen—so we will likely be growing beans in our corn patch next year. We can only eat so many beans, so we also need to figure out which beans to grow and at what quantities and what to do with them. We definitely want more black beans as we’ve almost used up this year’s supply already (I made a batch of black bean brownies and today I made a batch of black bean tofu).

As well, it’s gotten me thinking…if we’re looking at alternative protein sources like beans, should we be expanding our meatless meal options? Both John and I don’t eat a lot of meat and we like the idea of being friendlier to the environment, so this is leading me to wondering if chickpeas and possibly lentils could be grown in our climate. As well, we don’t consume a lot of dairy, so can we look at homemade non-dairy milks and cheeses made from legumes? Those are questions to explore over the winter.

The big unknown for next year is the sour cherries. The couple that owns the property where we pick cherries has pointed out that the tree is dying and might not last much longer. If it does die, we’ll have to find a new source of cherries. (I think a house across the street from us has a cherry tree—the strategy might be to send John over there to make friends with yet another neighbour.)

Enjoying the harvest

The big task over the next eight months or so is to simply enjoy the harvest and the months of effort put into food preserving.

We have a full year’s supply of vegetables—we’ll run out of broccoli pretty quickly, since we didn’t get a big harvest, but that’s easily made up for by our over-abundance of bell peppers—and we easily have a year’s supply of lots of canned goods. As the wine fully ferments and gets bottled, we’ll likely have a year’s supply of it. Grocery bills dip in the winter due to all this, but more importantly, quality of life skyrockets with all this gourmet homegrown produce.

I mentioned in an earlier post about how we expanded into our other neighbour’s yard this year with just a strip of their property along our shared fence. We may or may not expand beyond that strip in their yard next year. I think they want us to expand so they don’t have to mow the lawn, but it’s also a lot more garden work for us, and we’re realizing we do have limits. This neighbour is a group home with a couple residents and a few regular staff. One of the absolute joys this year was to show up at their doorstep and give them bags and boxes of vegetables, most of which were grown on their property. We’ve learned that one of the residents there absolutely loves fresh corn on the cob, carrots, and potatoes. Whether or not we expand further in their yard next year, I think we’ll be sharing more of our over-abundance with them. It helps build neighbourly relations, but more importantly, my husband loves knowing that someone is truly enjoying the work he puts into gardening, and he definitely has a very appreciative fan next door.

The only appreciative fan my husband dislikes is the squirrel.

Garden Update: September 2023

Posted on by craig

As the height of summer passes and we inch our way slowly toward fall, we find ourselves entering the busiest part of the year for me. While my husband is the primary gardener, I’m the primary food preserver—and everything needs to be preserved in the next few weeks.

Harvesting and Preserving

We learned our lesson last year. We used to like keeping things in the ground as long as possible, meaning that when we get the notification that frost is coming (usually in mid- to late-October), we then hurry to harvest everything all at once. And that means having to preserve non-stop for days or weeks to make sure nothing goes rotten.

I think I really burned myself out last year.

This year, we’re harvesting things when we think they’re ready rather than leaving them as long as possible. Really, an extra couple weeks won’t make much difference.

This means that this past weekend we harvested all the beets—53 pounds—and I pickled 26 pints / half-litres. We also gave some away to both our neighbours, my mom, and some friends of ours. We still have a small pile left. If I can find the motivation, I might try turning them into beet chips.

This past weekend also saw our potato harvest—234 pounds of Yukon gold and red-skinned potatoes. Thankfully, these don’t need anything done with them, at least not right away. In the past, a restaurant has taken some of our Yukon gold potatoes off of us, so I’m hoping they’ll be interested again this year. The red-skinned potatoes are good for canning, so once things settle down in November/December, I might look at canning some potatoes. These make great last-minute additions to dinner (fry them up like gnocchi) or breakfasts (fry them up like hash browns)—and since canning fully cooks them in the process, adding them to dinner or breakfast just takes as long as heating them up and maybe getting a little crispy on the outside. I’m hoping to convince a coworker to teach me how to make gnocchi, as I’d love to have bags of homemade gnocchi in the freezer, ready to be pulled out for dinners.

The tomatoes are ripening at a nice pace. They keep me busy but don’t overwhelm me. I just finished canning a batch of salsa and I’m stewing up a batch of butter chicken sauce that’ll be canned later today.

Looking ahead, I think this next week or two is going to be the herb-harvest period. We’ve got lots of basil that I’ll turn into pesto, lots of oregano that I’ll dry for kitchen use, some mint I’ll dry for a friend for tea, and rosemary that I’ll likely turn into a batch of rosemary wine. We also have some thyme, but I don’t know if I have a use for it—I could dry it, but it’s not really something I cook with—so I might just leave that one in the garden.

A lot of the other remaining things can wait till I have time. The peppers are slowly ripening but they’re fine sitting on the plant until I’m ready; the carrots and parsnips can wait till we have time; and the black beans and kidney beans are slowly drying and I’m in no rush to harvest them.

Legal Mustard

A few years ago, a wild mustard plant took root in our garden and we decided to let it grow. Though mustard leaves are edible, we never really came to like them. The seeds, though…I taught myself how to collect mustard seeds and make homemade mustard.

The first batch was terrible. Absolutely terrible. I threw it in the back of the fridge and forgot about it. And when the following spring rolled around and we were doing our first barbecue, I pulled out that mustard with a wary look. We gave it a try and ohmygod it was delicious. The flavour clearly matures over time.

Mustard plants grow millions of seeds and no matter how hard you try to collect them all, some always scatter. Year after year our mustard harvest grew as the plants spread. We never had to plant them ourselves—nature took care of it all.

Then, last year, we got a letter from the city about property maintenance bylaws. The letter was very unclear but mentioned tall grass (we have about two square feet of grass that got a little long) and noxious weeds. After researching it, wild mustard is a noxious weed. We had to tear it all out.

Turns out, after we tore it all out and contacted the inspector to verify we’d done everything right, he told us he hadn’t even noticed the wild mustard. The letter was just about the tall grass and the generic language included noxious weeds even though that wasn’t what he flagged for our property.

(Wild mustard is a noxious weed because it resembles canola and can infiltrate canola fields. If a canola harvest has too much mustard in it, the whole lot has to be dumped.)

We’ve still got half a jar of now-illegal mustard in the back of the fridge that I pull out when friends are over.

This year, we discovered the seed catalogue we order from has mustard—a legal kind!

The mustard plants are slowly dying off now—the seeds are harvested when the plant is brown and brittle—and I’m throwing the plants in one of those large paper lawn bags. In a few weeks I’ll work on harvesting the seeds and then set out to return to the world of mustard-making.

Since this is a new variety, the heat level of the seeds might be different. Wild mustard was black and dark brown seeds, which are the hottest. I’m not sure what colour these seeds are yet. But I’m looking forward to the adventure.

Looking Ahead to 2024

We’ve been gardening at this scale for a few years now, but we always learn new things and make new plans.

Next year our front yard will fully be fruit-only. My husband is planning to take out the horseradish plant before the summer is over, which is the only non-fruit/non-flower plant on that part of the property.

In the past, our neighbour who lets us use his yard has talked about moving to somewhere that requires less work and upkeep, and he’s talking about it again. This means we have to start coming up with contingency plans in case he does follow through on the idea of moving. (Given what’s been going on in this part of the city, if our neighbour moves, his house will be torn down, his property divided, and two or three new houses will go up in their place. The garden will be gone.)

This year we started gardening a little strip in our other neighbour’s yard. I think they don’t like mowing the lawn, so they’re eager for us to convert their whole property to garden space. If we lose our big space, this could be the route we go.

We’ve also talked about how we could downsize things and do it all on our property. (Do we really need 234 pounds of potatoes, 130 ears of corn, and 53 pounds of beets?)

Lately, my husband has been connecting with a meditation retreat place just outside the city and has volunteered some of his time to help out in their garden. They’ve offered to let us take some of the space for our own use. It’s a bit of a drive, but it’s a big space and it could be ideal for things that don’t need lots of attention (since we can’t get out there everyday), like onions, carrots, parsnips, and potatoes.

Of course, for all the talk of moving, our neighbour with the giant garden might end up staying there for several more years. But it’s always good to talk about these things so that if and when it happens, it’s not a disaster and we already have a plan in place. It also gets us thinking of what we’re growing and why. Like, this year we grew honeydew melon and realized that neither of us really like honeydew melon. If we’re crunched for space, that’ll be the first to go.

Update since I wrote the draft of this post: I decided to give honeydew melon wine a try—and I had just enough melon!

Honeydew melon wine (green) and corn cob wine (yellow).

Wine Failures

In my recent post about winemaking, I listed the country wines / garden wines I’ve made and the ones that are currently in process.

Well, I’ve had two disasters—one is salvageable and the other, well, we’ll see.

I noticed the airlock on the chokecherry wine wasn’t bubbling. This is concerning as it means that the yeast might not have taken hold and might’ve died off. If that’s the case, then I don’t have a bucket of wine, but rather a bucket of sugary juice that runs the risk of going mouldy.

I do these big batches of wine over at my mom’s place where there’s more room, so I’ll head over there this weekend and see if it’s salvageable. It’s certainly possible that the lid isn’t airtight and the excess gas is escaping elsewhere (and it is indeed fermenting), which is why the airlock isn’t bubbling. We’ll see.

Edit since I wrote up the first draft of this post: The chokecherry wine is indeed fermenting. It smells alcoholic and there have been some positive changes (like there’s no longer a layer of sugar on the bottom). I’m not sure what’s going on with the airlock not bubbling, but wine is certainly being made.

That seems to be the exact problem I had with the Saskatoon wine, though that one is salvageable.

The Saskatoon wine did actively ferment during primary (the first stage of fermentation where the yeast is most active), but after moving it to a new jar (called a secondary), the bubbling seemed to have died off quickly. I left it like that for a few weeks to see what would happen…but no bubbles ever came.

Well, it had certainly fermented earlier, so I knew the yeast had taken hold and survived, so maybe this was a wine that just finished early for some reason? It could have a low sugar content and the yeast ate up all their food quickly.

Anyway, I bottled it and let it sit around for a few weeks. I started to worry, though, that I might’ve bottled it too early. Maybe the lid wasn’t tight enough and gas escaped that way rather than through the airlock?

It didn’t take much convincing my husband when I said we should try a bottle of Saskatoon wine to see if it turned out.

I opened the first bottle…and it shot out like a geyser. There was wine everywhere.

Clearly, I had my answer. The wine had not finished fermenting before I bottled it and it continued to ferment in the wine bottle. This creates a safety hazard because if the pressure builds up too much, it could shatter the bottles. Not only would that be messy, but it’s potentially dangerous.

We opened two more bottles to see if they were the same. They did not shoot out geyser-like.

Anyway, now we had three open bottles of wine, though one was half-empty after the geyser. These are 375 ml bottles (half the standard wine bottle), so collectively it was just shy of a litre of wine.

We got some snacks, poured out the wine, and settled in for the first couple episodes of The Enfield Haunting.

The wine was great! I definitely want to try it again next year and see how it tastes when it’s fully and properly fermented and aged.

There were still three more bottles of Saskatoon wine, but we didn’t want to drink that all in one night. We have a friend that was really interested in trying this wine, so we wanted to save it for our next hangout.

To be safe, I put the three bottles in extra-large Ziplock bags, hoping that this would prevent glass shards and massive spills if they shatter, and then put them in the bottom of the fridge, as the cold air will slow the fermenting if it’s still occurring. When we bring it to our friend’s place, we’ll tell him to put on rubber gloves (in case the bottle shatters in his hand…which has happened to my husband once and required a hospital visit) and do it outside (in case it’s another geyser).

Preparing for Winter

Though Winter is still a few months away, we’ll soon be in fall and then very quickly the snow will fly.

The next month or so will see me harvesting the last of what we’ve got (which is still a lot) and finding ways to preserve it. Last year, we managed to grow enough veggies to last us the year, except for mushrooms, which we don’t grow. I’m hoping this year is the same. Although I’m soon going to an indoor mushroom growing workshop, so mushrooms might soon be off our grocery list.

The only thing we buy in the produce section at the grocery store are mushrooms, apples, oranges, bananas, and ginger (which we’ve got in our garden this year!). That’s it. The rapidly rising cost of fruits and veggies hasn’t really hit us.

As the food preserving winds down in October, I hope to get back into baking bread and bagels. I’ve been maintaining my sourdough starter but haven’t had time to use it to make anything.

I’ve also got other projects I’ve been long neglecting because of the garden. Outside of this, I’m an author and a publisher and while I’ve managed to keep the publishing going, I really need to get back into writing. My favourite part of winter is the slower pace and just enjoying all of the food and drink that we’ve grown and preserved. It tastes so much better when we know we did it all ourselves.

For my husband, preparing for winter means slowly clearing out the gardens and planting the garlic so they come up right as the spring rolls around. As the snow falls, he wedges tree branches in our chain link fence and strings Christmas lights through them, giving it all a sort of enchanted forest look.

And as we get into the real depths of winter, well, that’s when the seed catalogue arrives in our mailbox and we start preparing for the upcoming spring.

Garden Update: August 2023

Posted on by craig

It’s becoming abundantly clear to me—as if I somehow hadn’t already learned my lesson—that it’s near impossible to do anything else but garden during garden season.

Keeping up with this site has been a challenge. I’ve been making recipes and taking photos and making notes, but finding time to sit down and type it all out has become quite difficult. I suspect that once the end of fall hits and we roll into winter, that’s when I’ll be able to sit down and write about all of my kitchen adventures.

When I tell people we have a big garden and it keeps us busy, I don’t think they truly understand the scale of it until they see it. I had some new friends come to our place for the first time this summer for a BBQ. I gave them the address, but then added “there’s no number on the house, so look for the garden, you’ll understand when you see it”.

Most properties in our area have just plain grass front yards. There are a few front yard gardeners in the area, but they still come nowhere near matching our scale.

The first thing that’s immediately noticeable, especially in late summer, are the sunflowers. My husband lines our front fence with sunflowers and we easily have the tallest ones in the neighbourhood, with them regularly reaching up to 15 feet in height. Along one side of our property is our wall of corn. So when you’re pulling up to your house and you’ve never been there before, it’s like a cube of greenery. And once you pass through the front gate, it’s been described as almost like a secret garden, likely aided by the fact that the sunflowers sort of hang over the entryway, making it look almost magical.

The Crops and the Harvests

The purpose of our front yard has evolved over the years, but it’ll be our fruit garden moving forward. Here’s where we have in the front:

  • Those sunflowers I mentioned along our front fence
  • Snap peas
  • Scarlet runner beans
  • Saskatoons (also known as juneberries or service berries)
  • Raspberries
  • Blueberries
  • Strawberries
  • Grapes
  • Watermelon
  • Horseradish (not a fruit but it’s where we planted it years ago)
  • Goji berries (we planted the bush this year, haven’t had fruit yet)
  • We also tend to plant squash in the front to fill up the remaining space. In future years, this remaining space will likely be taken up with more fruit bushes. Currently, though, we have:
    • Acorn squash
    • Butternut squash

The front yard is also our most floral area, with a lilac bush, a rose bush, a double flowering plum tree (which just gives us flowers, no fruit), lilies, pots of flowers, and a handful of other things.

Along the side of the house, we have:

  • Corn
  • Snap peas
  • Basil
  • Rosemary
  • Thyme
  • Parsley
  • Mint
  • Dill

Our back yard is bit of a mishmash:

  • Various flowers and non-edible plants
  • Borage (an edible flower/plant but we mostly grow it to keep the bees happy)
  • Ginger
  • Garlic (and garlic scapes!)
  • Green onions / spring onions
  • Mustard
  • Spinach
  • Celery
  • Pumpkin
  • Peppers
    • Bell peppers
    • Banana peppers

That’s all we can fit on our property, but we don’t stop there.

Our neighbour to the west is a lifelong gardener but isn’t able to manage his entire garden anymore, so he lets us plant what we want as long as we take care of it. We do, and we share some of our harvest with him, and we help him maintain the patches of produce he’s growing for himself.

On that property, we have:

  • Beans
    • Black beans
    • Kidney beans
  • Tomatoes (several types and sizes)
  • Popcorn
  • Peppers
    • Bell peppers
    • Banana peppers
    • Jalapeno peppers
    • Cayenne peppers
    • Scotch bonnet peppers
  • Squash
    • Butternut squash
    • Acorn squash
    • Pumpkin (both small edible pumpkins and big jack-o-lantern pumpkins)
  • Melon
    • Honeydew melon
    • Watermelon
  • Potatoes
    • Yukon gold potatoes
    • Red-skinned potatoes (good for canning!)
  • Cucumber
  • Alaskan peas (good for canning!)
  • Onions
  • Shallots
  • Beets
  • Broccoli
  • Brussels sprouts
  • Swiss chard
  • Rhubarb
  • Horseradish

This list still isn’t over.

Our neighbours on the east side have asked us to help them garden a bit—partly because they hate yard work and partly to cut their grocery bill a bit. Since it’s primarily us that would be tending to it and we’re already stretched thin, at this time we’re just doing a little strip along the shared fence between our properties. We share our harvest with them, particularly if it’s something we’ve grown on their property; one of the folks living there loves the corn.

Over there, we have:

  • Corn
  • Tomatoes
  • Potatoes
  • Parsnips
  • Carrots

They’re eager to get rid of their grass, so as a solution for next year, they’ll likely put a tarp over their grass and we’ll plant all our squash and melons around the perimeter, filling their yard with the big leafy plants—essentially, the effect of a giant garden, but with minimal work since it just requires watering around the edges.

And… that’s still not it.

That’s what we’re growing, but that’s not the limit of what we’re harvesting.

My husband up on the ladder picking cherries

I’ve also managed to gather:

  • Apples from a friend’s trees (200+ pounds with more coming this week!)
  • Sour cherries from a tree on that same friend’s property
  • Grapes—boxes and boxes of grapes—from a friend’s vine
    • While we have grapes, so far we get just a few bunches a year, most of which the birds eat
  • Saskatoons, foraged by my step-dad from a local park
    • We have our own Saskatoon bush, but the birds ate every single berry before I had a chance to harvest them. I distinctly remember looking at the bush on a Saturday evening and thinking “Hmm… some of these are ready for picking, I’ll start harvesting tomorrow morning so I get them before the birds do.” The next morning, the bush was bare.
  • Chokecherries, also foraged by my step-dad from a local park
    • With this, he had the specific request that I make chokecherry wine because he has good memories of his mom doing the same. Here’s hoping my wine lives up to that memory!
  • Pin cherries, also foraged by my step-dad from a local park

This has been and will likely continue to be a year of abundance. Last year with approximately the same number of plants, we had an abundance of broccoli but everything else did just okay. This year, everything is in abundance… except the broccoli. At this point I have more than a year’s supply of certain vegetables, and there’s still more coming.

The Preserving Plans

With a garden as big and as overly-productive as ours, the huge challenge is always: How the heck do you preserve all of it so you don’t end up throwing out tons of food?

Well, the answer to that will slowly be revealed over the coming year as I upload all my recipes here. However, I will say that it’s definitely a challenge.

Our little house doesn’t have a basement. (We have a little dug-out crawlspace where the furnace and hot water tank are, but it’s prone to flooding in storms and in the spring melt, so we can’t store stuff there.) Until recently, we only had a side-by-side fridge/freezer. This year I bought a 3.5 cubic foot deep freezer that fits nicely in our kitchen, doubling our freezer space.

However, I rely heavily on my mom’s house. She has a cold storage room in the basement that’s perfect for the potatoes and a deep freezer twice the size of ours that’s great for the rhubarb and various other things that get frozen.

But if we froze everything, we’d need a dozen freezers.

When my husband started in on this ambitious garden project (which began as just a strip in the back yard), I quickly taught myself farm wife skills, to borrow a phrase from a friend. I’ve written about my food processing journey here, but over the years I’ve learned what I like frozen, what I like canned, what I like dehydrated, and what’s fine to just sit as-is.

The biggest challenge has been to get an understanding of what my husband and I like to eat. Sure, there are hundreds or thousands of recipes online to preserve food, but if you don’t like the end result then it’s the same as just not doing anything.

For example, there are lots of great jelly and jam recipes, but we don’t eat jelly or jam. (The one exception is this Inferno Wine Jelly that tastes amazing on a bagel breakfast sandwich.) We’re also not really dessert people, so there’s no point in canning up a bunch of fruit pie fillings. These dislikes of ours immediately cut out a lot of uses for the fruit that we grow.

This Year’s Theme

One challenge I gave myself this year was to try making a bunch of different wines. It’s a great way to use up some of the produce and it ultimately saves us a ton of money down the road. (Here in Manitoba, alcohol is quite expensive.)

The wines I’ve made and plan to make this year include:

  • Dandelion wine (done and aging, but I’ve made it before and know it’s good)
  • Apple wine (super delicious and more coming)
  • Lilac wine (nicely sweet and floral)
  • Cherry wine (still fermenting)
  • Corn cob wine (got some cobs stored in the freezer)
  • Grape wine (notoriously difficult to make but I’ll try it!)
  • Parsnip wine (made it before, quite nice)
  • Rhubarb wine (a favourite of a friend of ours)
  • Chokecherry wine
  • Rose hip wine (not sure about this one for this year)
  • Hot pepper wine (just came across this idea yesterday, so I need to dig in more before deciding to do it or not)

In addition to wine, I have various recipes for flavouring store-bought alcohol. So far all the ones I’ve tried have been incredibly good. These recipes will show up on this site, likely in the winter. So far I’ve tried or will soon be trying:

  • Rhubarb ginger gin (a crowd favourite)
  • Sour cherry liqueur (mind-blowingly good)
  • Sour cherry gin (fantastic over ice)
  • Apple cinnamon brandy
  • Apple pie liqueur
  • Dandelion cordial
  • Hot pepper vodka

Looking Ahead to September

As August slowly reaches its end and we head into September, and then on into the fall, the busiest time of the year for me is about to be here. The tomatoes are just starting to ripen and soon I’ll have boxes and boxes of them. The potato plants are dying off, which means in a few weeks we can dig them up. And the kidney beans and black beans are forming now, and they’ll eventually mature and dry and be ready for harvest.

My husband has his own routine for the end of summer and oncoming of fall. He carefully puts away all the sticks he’s used to brace plants, he prepares the gardens for the winter, and he plants garlic cloves so they pop up first thing in the spring.

The best part of winter, though, is enjoying the fruits of our labours—all of those home-grown and preserved vegetables, the fancy drinks and wines that remind us of summers when the weather is hitting -40 C, and perhaps most importantly, sharing this abundance with family and friends.

But as winter sets in, there’s always one thing on our mind…planning for the upcoming garden season.