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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