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Preserving Your Favorite Soft Fruits. There is nothing quite like opening a jar of bright, sweet jam in the middle of winter and smelling the sunshine of a summer afternoon. If you’ve ever been intimidated by the idea of making your own preserves, take a deep breath! Preserving berries and other soft fruits is one…
Transforming Cucumbers and Beans into Quick Pickles. Pickling is one of the easiest and most flavorful ways to preserve your harvest, and you don’t need a pantry full of specialized equipment to get started. Quick pickles, also known as refrigerator pickles, are the perfect entry point. Unlike traditional canning, there is no boiling water bath…
Preserving Your Spring Harvest. Spring has officially sprung, and if your countertop is currently buried under a mountain of strawberries, blueberries, asparagus and peas, you’ve probably thought: “I wish I could keep this flavor forever.” Good news! You can. Water bath canning is the perfect entry point for preserving your hard-won harvest. It’s essentially a…
Composting is more than just a pretty way to say “I’m letting stuff rot in the back corner.” The process of allowing nature to break down organic matter is vital for planetary health. Ecosystems need to feed off and into each other: We eat the food. We create waste. We feed the waste to insects…
Like most of us out here, trying to be more self-sufficient, I’m re-learning what real scratch cooking actually looks like. That includes remembering that condiments are recipes, not ingredients. Making mayonnaise is one of those recipes we’ve somehow become convinced is too complicated. It’s not, and it’s quick. I live less than a half mile…
Part V – The Myth of Self-Reliance Eventually I had to burst the bubble, right? While a person can do a lot of things for themselves,, true self-reliance isn’t real … or, at least, it is very, very rare. Individually, we are amazing creatures capable of so much. But it is when we connect with…
Part IV – What to do with all that food Along with growing all this food comes the question of what to do with it. Harvests normally last a few weeks with all that glorious fruit ripening at once. Even if you share, sell and eat fresh, there will likely be too much at once,…
Part III – For the Birds! Deciding to keep chickens is a decision akin to getting married. One must never make the decision lightly. All of those vows you take … they’ll come back to haunt you! I didn’t want them. I was adamant. I had been responsible for chickens as a kid, and was…
Part II – What we’re Planting Planting isn’t a new thing for us. We have always had gardens of some kind or other. Even when we were dirt poor, that dirt was put to use growing tomatoes, broccoli, and eggplants. When our daughter was young, we thought we had failed spectacularly at growing cherry tomatoes…
