Home grown -- cellared, frozen, and dried
We planted the following vegetables last year for winter storage:
- two dozen sweet potato slips (yield: 3/4 bushel)
- five hills of winter squash, two of delicata (for fall use), one of pumpkin (for early winter), and two of butternut (for late winter)
- two onion sets, one of white sweet spanish (for fall use) one of stuttgarter
- two pounds (approx.) of shallots, one of french gray (for fall use) one of pikant
- 50 cloves of garlic (primarily german white, also german red, bulgarian, music, polish)
- approx. 20 fall leeks and 40 winter leeks
- a patch of evergreen scallions (approx. 2x4 feet)
- a patch of walking onions (approx. 2x4 feet, but neglected and weedy)
- two pounds fingerling potatoes, one of swedish peanut (for fall use) one of banana (for early winter)
- four pounds general purpose potatoes (keuka gold and adirondack blue)
- eight paste tomato plants (yield: 30-40 pints, frozen, plus a dozen cups of salsa)
- twelve (?) bell pepper plants (yield: 2 1/2 full cereal bags, frozen)
- one jerusalem artichoke plant (yield: more than we will eat)
Of these, we still have:
- a dozen and a half sweet potatoes
- two butternuts
- a few pounds stuttgarter onions and one or two of pikant shallots
- two dozen or so miniature winter leeks (they didn't grow well this year) still in the ground
- approx. 2x2 bed of scallions still in the ground
- unknown status of walking onion bed
- 16 pounds keuka gold potatoes
- enough garlic and tomatoes and salsa and bell peppers to last until summer
- more jerusalem artichokes than we will eat
We also froze the surplus of a few vegetables that were primarily intended for summer eating. We still have:
- snow peas: approx. 4 cups
- shell peas: approx. 5 cups
- shelly beans: approx. 3 cups
- zucchini: approx. 2 cups
- cooking greens (spinach and mustard): approx. 4 cups
- rainbow chard, approx. 6 cups
- several jalapeño peppers
In addition to this, we have an ungodly number of habañeros left from two years ago, which are still plentiful partly because we grew a sampler of three different varieties and they love love loved the weather that year, and partly because Greg uses hot peppers a lot more than I do, and he's not sure what to do with frozen ones. We have a half dozen anchos as well, which I'm intending to make chiles relleños with, some time when I'm feeling adventurous.
Root CSA
Really this is a bulk buying club, but we call it a CSA, I guess because that terminology is more familiar to people. We built a community root cellar a few years ago (this was Tina Nielsen-Hayden's last big neighborhood project before she started New Roots.) And one of our neighbors (Katie Creeger, owner of Kestrel Perch Berry Farm) organizes a bulk buy of roots from local farmers each fall, and stores them in the root cellar for winter use. We order what we expect to eat, and pick them up twice a month for the months of January, February, and March. We had our fifth of six pickups yesterday. Each of my pickups contains:
- 2.5 pounds carrots
- 1 pound beets
- 1 pound onions
- 3/4 pound parsnips
- 1/2 pound celeriac
- 1/2 pound kohlrabi
- 1 pound napa cabbage (done as of this pickup; it doesn't reliably last much longer.)
Hoop house
We have an unheated hoop house that we use for season extension. It has a 9x16 footprint, with ten 2x4 in-ground beds. We sized it by comparing Eliot Coleman's recommendations in The Four Season Harvest with the size of Greg's back yard. The size is turning out to be more than adequate, though I do run into scheduling problems because it does double duty as a summer growing space for heat-loving crops, such as hot peppers and watermelons.
I planted some early spring greens in there yesterday -- it's possible that we might have baby lettuce by the end of the month, but most of them won't be ready for harvest until mid- to late April. We still have a few things left, though, from our fall planting:
We have an unheated hoop house that we use for season extension. It has a 9x16 footprint, with ten 2x4 in-ground beds. We sized it by comparing Eliot Coleman's recommendations in The Four Season Harvest with the size of Greg's back yard. The size is turning out to be more than adequate, though I do run into scheduling problems because it does double duty as a summer growing space for heat-loving crops, such as hot peppers and watermelons.
I planted some early spring greens in there yesterday -- it's possible that we might have baby lettuce by the end of the month, but most of them won't be ready for harvest until mid- to late April. We still have a few things left, though, from our fall planting:
- one collard plant (mostly harvested yesterday, for use this week)
- two dozen kale plants, with some smaller leaves left on them -- still enough for three or four dinners. These will leaf out again once the sun gets stronger, yielding spring greens and kale raab, but probably not until April.
- about 10 square feet of mache, with a little bit of claytonia, wild daisy, lettuce, and wild mustard mixed in (we had a mache salad with dinner last night.)
Preserved and canned
We have about 3 1/2 quarts of white sauerkraut left from a recent batch, and one quart of red. I usually do two batches a year, one of each color. And we have some pickles -- a jar or two of cucumber pickles, getting old but probably still good, a quart of purslane pickles, and a small jar of green plum tomato pickles that we haven't eaten because they're so darned acidic (the recipe called for a pickling vinegar with 5% acidity, eeks!) And we have three cans of olives left, and possibly some pimientos and artichoke hearts at the other house.
So, this far into the effort, how critical to such preparedness would you consider a (good sized?) freezer to be?
ReplyDeleteI live off the grid and would have to put up a panel or two to swing a freezer [and propane is obscene from an energy economics and localization perspective...gotta be electric]
It depends on how you eat.
ReplyDeleteFor vegetables, you get more winter variety, but it's easy enough to do without. I don't like to can vegetables, because they need pressure canning, but it's possible to get by on root cellar & hoop house & pickles/krauts. Our main freezer veggies are green beans, summer squash, and peas.
For fruit, larger fruits are easy to dry, and most fruits are easy to can, but I like the berries a lot better out of the freezer. You can make fruit leather instead, but I don't know how well it keeps (I haven't tested.) Jellies and jams and syrups can just as easily be canned -- I store fruits & juices for those purposes in the freezer mostly out of convenience. (I have a lot more free time in winter than I do during the growing season, and I'm less reluctant in winter to add extra heat to my home for canning.)
For meat, the freezer is a godsend. I do occasionally make jerky, but other ways of preserving meat are more challenging. I've never tried salting or smoking or making a cured sausage, and all of those completely change the way you prepare it for eating. I think the easiest way to manage meat without a freezer might be to keep small animals, such as rabbits or chickens, and kill them one at a time when you're ready to eat them. Or you could just eat less meat. In a colder climate you could store meat in an unheated space in the winter, but winters are too mild for that here.
People used to have ice houses, which they would fill with blocks of ice in late winter to keep things cold thru the summer -- I don't know if they were able to achieve freezer temps with those, tho, or if it was just non-electric refrigeration.
I have noticed that the freezer uses a lot less energy if it's kept in a cold room. If you root cellar the freezer, you only have to bring the temp from 40 to 0 instead of 70 to 0; you can save a lot of energy that way. You could also keep it in an unheated room, so you need less energy in the winter.
Refrigerators can be used that way too, but if the air is below freezing outside the fridge the inside may freeze too, and if it's cold enough outside not to turn on at all, the freezer compartment may stop freezing things. (I also pre-cool leftovers in the doorway in cold weather, before moving them into the fridge.)