Planning for Food Preservation, Part 2

In this second part, I'm using the term "food preservation" rather loosely.  These are the foods you don't have to do any work to preserve, but that form an important part of the winter and spring pantry.  While your canned foods tend to be heavy in condiments and sauces (important to sustain your spirit), these are the calorie crops that will really sustain your body.

First, the root vegetables.  Potatoes are critical, and we're planting more this year, but still not as many as we should.  That's because we had a total crop failure of potatoes last year, and we're being cautious about how much space we give them, until we find a reliable system of growing them.  Potatoes are supposed to be one of the easiest things you can grow, so getting a negative harvest (fewer than what you planted) is very frustrating.  Sweet potatoes also did very poorly for us last year, and we are trying them again this year, but I ordered some heirloom varieties, including one from right here in Virginia that is supposed to do well in clay soil (ordered from Sand Hill Preservation Center).  Sweet potatoes store really well at room temperature in my pantry (we keep our house around 62 degrees in winter).  In fact, I don't think I've ever had one go bad, though they will start sprouting in April.  I've got a box of them I need to finish off now, in fact.  

In the fall garden, turnips and winter radishes grow quite well for us, and, at least in winters like this one, keep right in the garden until spring.  I will be planting a lot more turnips and winter radishes this year, because we ran out of the latter and could have eaten more of the former.  These crops take so little work to grow, and whatever we don't eat can just be tilled in to add organic matter to the soil, so there is no reason not to grow plenty.  I cut up the turnips, radishes, sweet potatoes, carrots, and whatever else I've got and toss them with oil and/or butter and salt, and roast, for our basic winter side dish.

Collards are reliable and also overwintered well this year.  I will add kale, cress, and spinach next year to have more variety of greens.  Now, if I could just get someone in the house besides me to eat them....

I am growing some keeping tomatoes this year.  Keeping tomatoes are a type of tough-skinned tomato that keeps well in storage.  It's not a popular thing these days, because greenhouse tomatoes have replaced them.  But, I think it's important to preserve these varieties for our descendants, who won't have plastic greenhouses. 

Winter squashes and pie pumpkins are an important part of most local diets in winter.  I always end up buying some kind of winter squash seeds, because the descriptions are so wonderfully romantic.  The incredible variety of squashes, their beauty, their size, and their keeping qualities make them very appealing.  If I have a few big pumpkins in my pantry, I feel secure.  The problem is, I don't like eating them.  Other than in pie, I much prefer sweet potatoes to winter squashes.  And, I always end up with some winter squashes that I either can't resist buying at the market, or that someone gives me, so I have no need to grow them.  So, I'll be growing seed pumpkins instead.  Pumpkin seeds are the most expensive ingredient in a seeded granola recipe I like to make, and they are in ingredient in Mexican sauces.  I don't know how to shell the seeds from ordinary pumpkins, so I'm growing a naked-seed type called Lady Godiva.  This marvel is quite hard to find - of all my seed catalogs, only Sand Hill offered it this year.  The flesh of these pumpkins is good food for livestock, like goats.

Oilseed crops are an important part of our diets, which most of us don't grow.  In addition to the seed pumpkins, I'll be planting peanuts, sesame, sunflower seeds, and rapeseed this year, all of which, besides sunflowers, are new crops for us.  I want to buy a hand-cranked oil extractor and start making fresh vegetable oil.  Fats for cooking are something I wouldn't want to be without, and I don't have a way to produce significant amounts of animal fats on my homestead.  

Grains are also important.  We will be growing field corn, more seriously this year than we have in the past.  Corn is not only the easiest grain to process at home, but is central to my husband's food culture and therefore to his happiness.  This is the crop I have the hardest time narrowing down to only two varieties, and this year I've chosen a gourdseed corn, which I will plant early, and a flour corn, which I will plant late, both of which are supposed to be good for tortillas.  I'm growing sorghum Sudan as a cover crop this year, but next year I want to start experimenting with grain sorghums, which can also be used to make tortillas, are excellent chicken feed, and require less fertility than corn.  We will be experimenting with amaranth this year.  We will grow millet for the chickens.  I am planning to plant a little buckwheat as a cover crop, and since we don't like it, the chickens will probably get that too.  Feeding chickens is something I'm taking very seriously this year, because I'm tired of buying GMO grains for them.  The good thing about pressing oil at home is that the oilcake that is left over afterwards, which is high in protein, is a good ingredient for homemade chicken feed. 

Dried beans are also an important staple for us.  Growing dried beans is one of the least profitable uses of one's time and land that I can think of, considering what they cost, but it's something we want to know how to grow.  My husband loves fresh blackeyed peas, so those can't be skipped.  We're also going to experiment with planting the ubiquitous Central American bean, the red silk bean.  No one grows it in the USA that I know of, and we don't know how it will do, but we're going to try it.  There simply isn't any other dried bean we like as well for a simple bean soup and for refried beans.  I don't often have good things to say about Central American cuisine, but they do have the best beans.

Planning for Food Preservation, Part 1

I am taking stock of my pantry and how we fared over the winter. This was the first year that home-preserved foods made up a significant part of our diet.  There were things I wished I had (or had more of) and things it's been a chore to eat, so I will plan my garden and shopping this year around these changes.

I really love the pickle relish, which was something I only made to get rid of a surplus of different-shaped cucumbers.  My husband wants some dill pickles, and wasn't crazy about the bread and butter pickles.  I need to plant more cucumbers because I didn't have enough that were the right size at the same time for different pickle recipes - the mental note I made last year was to plant 10 (I had 4 last year).  

I love watermelon rind pickles, but two batches was probably more than enough, because they really aren't something I serve with a meal, they're almost a candy.  The pickled beets are pretty good, but I'll never again can plain beets - they bleed out all their color and flavor.    

The last time we raised chickens for meat, in 2010, I canned a bunch of chicken pieces (skin-on, bone-in), and those have been surprisingly good, considering they look like they belong in a mad scientist's lab.  I'll do that again this year.  

Red salsa (the kind you eat with chips) is good, but I don't need much of it.  No one was crazy about my ketchup, but I might try a different recipe.  I really wished I had more spaghetti sauce and/or whole or crushed tomatoes.  My assessment last year was that 50 tomato plants would give me enough for our annual consumption, if I stay on top of harvesting and preserving.  When my husband asked me what I want for my birthday next month, I told him I want him to build me a solar dehydrator.  Tomatoes are going to be the #1 thing I dehydrate, for grinding into powder, which will be used to make tomato paste.  The bulk of the tomatoes we grow are paste varieties, or small-fruited varieties that can and dry well, and are also more productive and less fussy than large tomatoes.  

I am also planting some squash varieties for drying, as discussed by Carol Deppe in The Resilient Gardener.  Canned squash is another never-again for me, as is frozen squash; but squash pickles are good.

The tomatillos and green salsa I canned haven't been as useful as I'd hoped.  I actually enjoyed the frozen versions I made better, so some tweaking is needed there.  

With jams and jellies, I've had more failures than successes by far, and very frustrating failures.  My strawberry jam, which is too ugly to share, tastes and smells good at least, so I'll plan to try that again.  That means a pick-your-own field trip, because my strawberry patch is small enough that the berries never make it indoors.  I want to make mulberry jelly this year with our own mulberries and some foraged ones (our one tree would probably provide enough if 95% of them weren't too high up to pick.)  My gingered peach preserves were delicious, if a little stiff, and I might make two batches of those this year (and be more careful not to overcook them).  The canned peach halves are so pretty I can't bring myself to eat them, but they were great for Christmas gifts.  So, I might need two boxes of peaches this year.  The early peaches I bought were much sweeter than the late ones, which is the opposite of what at least one of my canning books suggests.

A single $20 box of sweet corn grown down the street (I grow field corn so I don't grow sweet corn) gave us more than we could eat this year, though we would have eaten it if times were leaner.  I felt like the pressure canner gave it a funny, metallic smell.  I don't know if it's my old canner, or if this is a characteristic of pressure-canned foods (I've noticed it in other mild-flavored foods I've pressure-canned too).  I might try dehydrating some sweet corn this year.

I'll cover root cellared and overwintering vegetables, and grains, beans, and seeds, in Part 2.

Neighborhood Foraging

My goal this year of foraging one wild plant food a month has met with total failure.  For one, I started in the wrong season.  For two, I don't know of any good places to go foraging, especially with a 3-year-old in tow.  For three, to be perfectly honest, I lack any survivalist fantasies that feature fleeing with my child on foot into the wilderness.  Maybe it's my urban surroundings, but it's hard to imagine that scenario.  So, for now, I've decided to focus on neighborhood foraging, and other nearby, known sites (I'm thinking of the house we lost to foreclosure, which is still bank-owned, and has a bunch of mulberry trees in the backyard).  I took my son on a walk with the objective of harvesting some bamboo shoots from a site about half a mile away.  When we got there, I realized that we'd have to go down a steep bank and cross a small stream to get to it, and I couldn't see any shoots, so I didn't.  I don't know if I was too early or too late for shoots.  But I found something better than bamboo: access to a small, fast-running stream half a mile from our house, which looks much more promising as an emergency water source than the drainage pond that is our other option (though it looks like it might dry up in the summer).

I'm keeping my ears open for local wild-food walks.  Meanwhile, I've been making mental notes of all the houses that have prickly-pear cactus planted by their mailbox (it's a thing here), figuring some of them will be vacant in the future.  There aren't a lot of other edibles nearby, but there are other useful plants.  According to my Richter's catalog, forsythia has fruits that contain antibiotic and fungicide, who knew?  And a friend pointed out that the shrubs growing all around the drainage pond I mentioned are bayberry trees.  I plan to harvest their berries this fall and make candles.  I also want to try processing some acorns for food this year, because oak trees are pretty much everywhere.  One "edible" that I can't bring myself to eat is those nasty lawn onions that are so plentiful in the winter.  I hate the smell of those things.  I do plan to transplant some dandelions and plantains from the lawn to a more protected place this year, if not for us to eat, at least for the chickens.  Our hens really like dandelions, more than garden greens or comfrey. 

I also want to inventory the plants that are growing in the power line easement (all around our garden), which they cut with a tractor a couple of times a year.  If there isn't anything poisonous, I might be able to rake up some free hay for the goats I still hope to get.  Otherwise, I can rake some up to mulch my potatoes.  I might overseed the area with some perennial alfalfa or something to improve the quality of the hay.  As long as no one else is making productive use of that land, I might as well do so.  

Foraging isn't just food, it can be any resource that's available, that can be responsibly harvested or would otherwise go to waste.

Toothpaste

I've been buying natural toothpaste for a while now.  The problem is, a $5 tube of toothpaste lasts about two weeks in my house because my husband is a big waster of products (he loads up his toothbrush like they do in the toothpaste commercials, while I put just a smidgen on mine).  So, I've started making my own.  I didn't like the recipes I found because they tasted so salty they made me gag, so I made up my own.  Here is the basic, supermarket-ingredient version.  Start with one tablespoon baking soda.  Add a tooth-friendly sweetener.  I used Truvia because I had bought some, hated the taste of it, and it's sitting in my pantry.  Stevia or any sugar alcohol would work.  If your sweetener is large crystals you will want to grind it to a powder.  I used 6 packets of Truvia, but sweeten to your own taste.  Add a few drops of mint or cinnamon extract or essential oil.  Then add hydrogen peroxide, stirring, until it's moist enough to form a paste.  There's all kinds of things you can add to this, such as kaolin clay, tea tree oil, neem powder, saponins, etc., and I'll be experimenting more in the future.  Store your paste with a clean popsicle stick which you will use to stir it up and put it on your toothbrush.  It will be a little gritty at first but that gradually decreases as the crystals dissolve over time.

Seed Starting and Labeling

Seed starting season is well under way.  I've been starting onions, perennial herbs, flowers, and tomatillos so far; I'll start tomatoes today.  I've never included many flowers in my garden before, but I will this year, partly just for pleasure, partly to feed the bees I anticipate having, and partly to increase diversity in my garden.  If you, like me, get a kick out of seeing seeds germinate, I recommend planting a flower called stocks.  They are sprouting like crazy in my flats!  

My seed-starting techniques have evolved a bit over the years.   I'll share a few tips with you that I've learned.

When planting perennial herbs, I put down a lot of seed.  I mean about 20 seeds per cell or pot.  For one, I've had a lot of germination failures with these plants, and I hate watering empty pots for weeks.  For two, I'm not interested in having a bunch of leftover seed for perennials.  Some germinate well and I'll have to thin mercilessly, but others have only a 5 or 10% germination for me, and putting down a lot of seed is the key to success.

Don't buy plastic seed flats.  You think they'll last you several seasons, but you'll end up leaving them on the edge of your garden with a few leftover plants in them, and the sun is no friend to plastic.  By the second year they'll be broken and leaky.  Here are two better options.  This one I learned from a farmer: if you have some sheet plastic lying around, pick up some low-sided boxes, like the ones they give away in Costco, Sam's and BJ's.  Cut out a piece of plastic big enough to line the box and fold over the side, and staple it in.  Option 2: buy aluminum baking pans.  I just picked up a package of them at BJ's, which fit my electric seedling heat mat perfectly.  These will last longer than plastic and they're recyclable.  For seed containers, you can use salvaged containers, such as beverage cups, yogurt cups, and cut-down bottles.  This is awkward because they don't fit very well in a flat, but I use it for larger plants that I plan to leave in the pot for a while.  For smaller plants, I use peat or coir pots or pellets.  I don't recommend using egg cartons, as some people do, because the cells are just too small and will dry out too fast.

Be sure to label your starts well.  In pots and flats, I use masking tape, popsicle sticks, and clothes pins to label.  I've read a cool tip on the internet though, you can cut up an old set of mini-blinds to make labels.  Don't transfer these pot labels to the garden though, because they will get lost.  Last year I ended up with a bunch of peppers and tomatoes I couldn't identify.  This year, I'm making aluminum hanging labels for my larger plants.  Cut up a soda or beer can or a pie plate, punch a hole in each label with a paper hole punch, and write on them with a ball-point pen.  It will not ink on the aluminum but will make a permanent, readable impression.  Then hang them on your plants with twine.  I'm putting these on my fruit trees too, with the variety name and planting date, for the benefit of whoever might live here after us, but using wire (very loose to allow for tree growth)  instead of twine.