preservation

Six on Saturday | 18th November 2023

First post of winter, brrr! Our nights have consistently been dipping below 0°C now, though not very far below most of the time. Enough to justify a fire in a woodstove and candles everywhere, though! There are about six hours between sunrise and sunset at the moment, though that’s closer to five hours of usable light on a good day, and it’ll drop to four by next month. It’s dark when I leave the house in the morning and dark when I get back from work, so the first time I’ve seen the garden all week was actually Friday afternoon. It keeps me from dwelling too much on outdoor chores, at least.

1. The last of those chores was to dig up the Jerusalem artichokes for storage in the root cellar. The bag I got wasn’t labeled, but I believe these are ‘Red Fuseau’ after reading some descriptions online. I planted only one tuber in the spring, so didn’t know what to expect. That resulting plant has given us a little over 20 tubers of various sizes, so that worked out pretty well! I plan to cook half of them in some sort of soup and plant up the rest this spring in their own bed. In the meantime, they are safely snoozing away in a root cellar bin.

2. Speaking of the root cellar, I was asked for specifics about carrot storage, so I thought I’d show you what I did. I’ve found that carrots and beetroots will survive the winter just fine in a mesh basket in the cellar, though they start to get wrinkly after a few months. Packing them with damp-ish material is supposed to help, so I chucked my first crop of carrots into a big bucket with sterile bagged potting moss. Potting moss mix is made from sphagnum moss (not peat!) which stays nice and airy, absorbs moisture well, and also seems to inhibit microbes. It serves as packing material in the winter and then is used for potting up plants in the spring!

After calculating the amount of space I needed for the rest of the root vegetables, I bought some stacking plastic feed bins to store the rest. Since I harvested the carrots during the wet season, I didn’t bother to dampen the moss, and let it instead suck out any excess moisture from the carrots, to be used later. Roots are placed in the moss so they don’t touch, with a layer of moss separating each layer of carrots like a giant veggie lasagna. Anything else that’s prone to drying out got similar treatment.

3. A walk in the garden this morning found everything covered by a light layer of snow. Not enough to make for pretty landscape photos yet, though. These rose hips have colored up well and provide welcome relief from all the brown and white. I’m leaving them for the birds, who are currently more interested in emptying the feeder under the kitchen window. That’s been refilled with oil sunflower seeds, which always attract a party. Speaking of sunflower seeds, I shall have to buy new packets for spring because the heads that I harvested last month got eaten by sneaky mice in the barn whilst they were drying! Lesson learned.

4. Back inside we go to visit some green friends. Here are two baby brugmansias. The one on the left is a white one I started from seed. The one on the right is a cutting from a local gardener and should have peach flowers. They will both take a few more years before they are mature enough to bloom, so I am happy that they have adjusted to life under a grow light on a windowsill.

5. Back at the beginning of 2021, I saw this thing on Pinterest about growing your own lemons from seed and decided to try it. They said to go buy a nice organic lemon from the store because those would have the best seeds. So I came home with this big, beautiful lemon from the fancy fruit section, which I let sit on the counter for a few days until I could have some uninterrupted gardening time. I dreamt of a pot full of fragrant little seedlings from this plump paragon of a lemon. Then I finally cut it open to find… it was all flesh and no seeds. Not one. Nada. Oh, the disappointment. It made great lemonade, though.

I still had a pot with a little greenhouse dome prepared for planting, so I rummaged through the fridge drawer and pulled out one of those six-in-a-plastic-net-bag bargain lemons from Lidl and cut the seeds out. They all sprouted and I was giving out baby lemon trees that spring to anyone who wanted one. Here is the one I kept, 2.5 years later.

6. One of our current propagation projects. My son’s Echeveria disintegrated this past summer. Whether it was due to overwatering, underwatering, or some other factor (probably cat-related), we are not certain. He was upset. This kid loves his succulents. I told him not to worry, we could plant them like seeds and get more plants! Thankfully, I was not proven a liar. Look at all the baby Echeverias!

Thanks for visiting and please do check out what the other SoSers are doing over at Jim’s page!

Six on Saturday | 11th November 2023

It’s supposed to rain for most of this weekend, but I’ll be ducking out during the lighter portions to harvest what I can because winter officially begins for us next week. The nighttime temps will be consistently below 0ºC, the snow will fall, and the ground will be frozen solid after a few weeks. I’ve left more vegetables out later than I normally would this year and I must say that it’s worked out rather well! It’s given me a lot more time between harvesting each crop to prepare them for storage, which is just as important as growing them if they’re to be usable for the next six months.

1. The first time growing kohlrabi ‘Azur-Star’ has been a success. It was sharing a bed with golden beets and still produced a basketful of good-sized bulbs to use for the next couple of months. I’ve also really enjoyed using its leaves and stems in soups. I plan to give a whole bed to kohlrabi next year and grow both colors to see if there is any difference in flavor between them.

2. First time growing Hamburg parsley, which suffered a little from my mistakes. Which is a shame, because after nibbling on some of those tiny roots, I think I rather like the taste. The problem came when I didn’t thin them out and ended up with many tiny baby roots instead of bigger ones, much like what happens with carrots. I intercropped them in rows with radishes since those were pulled out much earlier on. Perhaps next year I will just mix the two seeds before sowing so that the spaces created when the radishes are harvested will be more uniform. I love that this is a twofer crop, providing fresh leaf parsley through the summer (which I also dehydrate for winter use after harvest) and nice mellow-tasting roots.

3. The salsify and scorzonera are still in their bed, being very cold-hardy. I put a thick fleece over them to keep the soil from freezing for as long as possible and will see how long I can harvest them this winter like that. I haven’t pulled any up, so don’t know how big they are yet. If they do get frozen in there, we might just have to wait until spring to taste them!

4. The baby lettuce bed with its plastic greenhouse cover is alive but doesn’t seem to have any interest in growing. I’m guessing the waning light is to blame. We’ll see how they do for the rest of the winter.

5. My biggest surprise this week came when I started harvesting my son’s carrot bed. I planted a bed of early Nantaise 2 carrots before the last frost and although it had a very healthy amount of green growth, the root harvest ended up being mediocre at best, perhaps because of the very dry spring conditions. We ended up with one large basket. The Berlicum 2 carrots that my son planted a month later had much less greenery, were growing in a shallower bed, and had been grazed on by local herbivores at some point, as you can see in the picture to the left. We figured that between the two beds, we’d have enough to last a couple of months, used sparingly. And yet.

So I went to pull them out this morning, mostly out of guilt because I had left his carrots too long last year and they’d all frozen to mush. And I kept pulling. And pulling. And pulling. There were tiny carrots and good-sized salad carrots and big old soup carrots and everything in between. I ended up having to turn over my stool and use it to carry carrots. Then went back and got another bucket to carry more carrots. It started raining heavier and I was. Still. Pulling. Carrots.

The moral of this story? I’m not sure, but this kid better not be lying about liking carrot salad.

6. Last of all, an update on the herb cuttings I took last month. The mints all rooted easily in water, as expected, and are now moved into their pots for growing out over the winter. The main plants are still in the garden, but these are backups because the ones outside don’t always survive. The three thymes also rooted amazingly fast and are now sitting around my olive tree like kindergartners at storytimethyme.

Thanks for visiting and please do check out what the other SoSers are doing over at Jim’s page!

Six on Saturday | 28th October 2023

A year and a month ago, I shared a weekend project where I added shelving to our root cellar which had been sitting unused under the house for a good couple of decades. Since I’ve finished storing most things in the root cellar this autumn, it seemed a good time to catch up on how it’s worked out this past year!

1. The stairway downstairs, with temperatures warmer than the basement but cooler than the house proper. This also happens to be the perfect place to store onions (hanging along the wall) and baskets of apples (in the corners). Last winter, we had a big box of apples stashed here for over six months in perfect condition that provided not only convenient fruit but a lovely aroma as you went down the stairs.

2. The view from the door into the root cellar. The small shelves attached to the wall on the left came with the house. I installed the middle set of three shelves last year. The set of three more shelves to the right was installed this past spring. I’m considering taking out the small shelves next year and lengthening the middle set of shelves, as well as adding another set along the wall to the right of the door, to give the whole room a more uniform appearance. That is, if the shelves don’t end up being discontinued, which seems to be a real concern at the moment.

3. Anything that does better in cold storage is kept down here. That includes jars of various canned preserves and juices, dried herbs, packaged items from the store, and baskets of root vegetables.

4. Spare jars, pots, dormant bulbs, and overwintering plants are along this side.

5. This year, I’m storing my garden carrots in this big bin filled with potting moss. It keeps them from drying out, which was the main problem I had last year when I kept them out in mesh baskets like the potatoes.

6. You can see in the pictures from last year that I originally was keeping my potatoes in cute little rattan baskets. This proved to be an epically bad idea, as the material soaked in too much moisture and started molding after only a few weeks, ruining the entire batch of potatoes inside it. Everything ended up going straight into the compost heap and I ordered these metal mesh baskets to store anything that remained. They have been enormously useful for all sorts of purposes over the year and are now back on potato duty for their second winter.

Thanks for visiting and please do check out what the other SoSers are doing over at Jim’s page!

Dandelion Jelly Time

For the past few years, I have been looking forward to the end of May because it means… jelly-making time! We’ve always observed an unofficial sort of No-Mow May, if only because things don’t really dry out and start growing until June anyway. Even the weeds take a while to get going this far north, so there doesn’t seem to be any point in fueling up the mower. Meanwhile, our lawn got a lot of impatient glares as I kept peeking out to see if there were enough fluffy yellow blooms yet to warrant getting out of my jam jars.

And finally, at the end of last week, there they were! Which was good, because our supply from last year was just about depleted. Out of all the flower jellies I have experimented with, dandelion was the only one that leaped to “be sure to make enough to last for the year” status. It tastes like honey, but in a scoopable jiggly format, which makes it especially kid-friendly.

There are tons of recipes online for making floral jelly, so I’m not going to format one here. My food blog days are far behind me and this is mostly a diary to share with family and friends. Also, I use a mishmash of US and EU measurements that I’m sure will annoy people on both sides of the Atlantic.

Right! I make my infusions in 1.8L IKEA jars because we have so many of them around for storing dry goods. Each one gets 4-4.5 cups of dandelion petals. I think one of the best parts of making this jelly is sitting in a patch of flowers on a sunny day, lazily plucking petals and listening to audiobooks.

Once the jar is full, it’s filled with boiling water and steeped for 24 hours. It gets moved to the fridge after it cools down a bit. Actual cooking process, speed run: 8 cups infusion, 1.5 teaspoons citric acid, 35g pectin powder, and 7 cups sugar. With bulk pectin powder, I find it easier to mix half the sugar and all the pectin in a shaker, then slowly stir it into the warm infusion. Everything dissolves so much easier that way. When the liquid is looking smooth, turn the heat up and stir in the rest of the sugar, then let it boil for one minute. Meanwhile, the hot water canner is warming up the jars and the lids, which are then pulled out just in time to be filled with jelly. They are processed for 10 minutes, then tucked away in the root cellar to set and store.

What do we use all that jelly for? Sandwiches, mostly. I also like it in porridge and yogurt. The picture above is of homemade peanut butter and dandelion jelly sandwiches from a couple of summers ago. Which reminds me, I really should be make more bread this summer…

A Weekend Project

So. Much. Storage.

Root cellars. I love the idea, but in practice, it’s taken me a bit longer to get the hang of them. Like all farmhouses of a certain age, ours had one built into the basement as a matter of course. We saw it, along with a vintage loom and spinning wheel, while poking around downstairs very early on. Then I sort of let that knowledge drift to the back of my mind for the next several years. It was always either too cold, too dark, or too damp to feel like making a trip down there, it seemed. Especially when there was a perfectly serviceable pantry and freezer to store most of our food in.

Then I started getting into making juices and jams from all the fruit we would pick every autumn and before I knew it, there was no more room on the shelves in the kitchen and my jars had started taking up an alarming amount of space in the laundry cabinet. Add to that a particularly generous haul of potatoes from the garden this year, and I was in dire need of storage space. It was time to rethink the root cellar.

I cleaned up a bit before the delivery guy got there, so this isn’t even that bad anymore.

As you might imagine, the place didn’t look too hot after a few-cough-several decades of neglect. Luckily, we are talking about what is basically a hole in the ground. In this case, a quick sweeping of the walls and floor pretty much got it into serviceable shape.

Courtesy of a certain Nordic furniture and home goods superstore.

I went with a sturdy-looking outdoor shelving unit made from acacia wood, making sure it was expandable since I fully plan to line all the walls in the next few years. One day spent building, then the next was spent scurrying up and down the stairs, feeling like a very industrious hamster amalgamating my stash.

At the time of writing, I have only about half the shelves filled. There is still a harvest of carrots to bring in and some apples to wrap up, so that will be taking up more space in the weeks to come. How this will all hold up during the winter, when temps drop well below freezing, will be the real test. Not for the root cellar, perhaps, since it has been here for better part of a century, but definitely for me getting down there to grab things for daily use. Hopefully, making it a little more organized will help!

The view from the other corner, showing the double wooden doors for extra insulation.