This is our first year growing potatoes. Besides sweet potatoes, which aren’t ready yet, we grew three varieties of white potatoes. Red Cloud and Dark Red Norland are red-skinned varieties and Carola is a yellow potato (check out our August newsletter). We tried to get a russet variety, but the farm we ordered from didn’t have a good supply. Which is just fine with us, since red and yellow (and purple) are our favorite varieties anyhow. Let’s see how we did with our potato harvest.
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Today, we’re going to be preserving another summertime favorite by freezing corn. Freezing vegetables does have an extra step compared to freezing fruit, but it’s still pretty easy.
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Fermenting foods has been a method of preservation for millennia. We often hear about gut health and lactobacilli and their role in our health. Making your own ferments at home is cheaper than buying them from the store and can be fairly easy. Yogurt, milk kefir, and raw cheese offer great options to build up the good gut bacteria. But what if you need a dairy-free option? Three popular ones are: 1. water kefir, which is fermented similar to milk kefir but with water and needs to be maintained and fed regularly, 2. kombucha which is tea fermented using a SCOBY (symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast) also needs to be maintained and fed regularly and 3. fermented produce, which is fresh produce placed in brine in an oxygen-deprived environment. That last one definitely makes the easiest dairy-free lacto ferments in my opinion!
Dairy-free lacto ferments — Swiss chard stems, cucumbers, carrots, and beans.
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The summer is still hot, but we’re already looking toward fall. Join us for a tour of our summer garden. Some of the plants in our garden have been harvested completely, some are finishing up and looking a little sad in the summer heat and unusually dry weather, but we still have some we’re very much looking forward to harvesting. Find out what we planted for the first time this year, what did well for us, what didn’t quite work as planned. In addition, what will be in our fall garden.
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Peach butter is like apple butter. But sunny and peachy keen.
Today’s recipe is slightly modified from Pick Your Own, a wonderful resource for great basic canning recipes as well as information on freezing produce and finding pick-your-own farms. However, we halved the recipe, reduced the sugar and added a little extra spice.
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We love peach jam at our house. Likewise, it’s a great way to preserve summer fruit to enjoy for months to come. The process is very similar for many fruits. Most canning recipes for fruit include adding sugar. We like to use a low-sugar recipe and pectin for jam making. This means we aren’t adding quite so much sugar to our diets and the jam has more of that delicious fruit flavor!
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Decadent. Delicious. Peach simple syrup has a variety of tasty uses. Not to mention, you can process it in a canner to use in winter for wistful reminiscences and anticipation of sweet, juicy, relaxing, warm summer days.
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It’s midsummer and therefore peach season! The Peach Truck travels our way a couple of times each summer, so we took advantage of the opportunity to preserve their deliciousness and do a short series on what to do with a box of peaches from The Peach Truck. The absolute easiest way to preserve peaches or any fruit for that matter is to freeze it. Let’s start freezing peaches!
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Growing garlic is so easy, even I can do it! I bet you can, too!
There are two types of garlic, but many varieties.
Hardneck varieties have larger cloves, but fewer per head, develop a flower stalk also called a scape, can be easier to peel, produce better in colder climates, don’t store as long. This type will have cloves that develop around a hard stalk that runs up the middle of the head.
Softneck varieties have more but smaller cloves per head, don’t develop a scape, can store longer
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This year, we are going to try a new approach to starting seeds, hopefully, with more success.
We have used hex cell starter trays but found they get to be too small too soon.
We have also planted seeds in a few spots per pot in larger pots. However, we found it more difficult to have a place for them to be put in the sun but out of the way of mischievous house pets….