A garden that feeds your family in every season sounds like a dream, but it is completely possible even if you are brand new to gardening. The key is thinking beyond the traditional “spring rush” and instead designing your garden for a continuous harvest. Year-round gardening is about timing, smart crop choices, and protecting your plants through the seasons. With some ...
PRESERVING FOOD
How to Start an Urban Homestead on a Tiny Backyard
You don’t need a hundred acres or a red barn to start homesteading. In fact, some of the most productive homesteads I’ve seen fit comfortably into a small suburban yard. If you’ve got a patch of ground (or even just a patio and some containers), you can grow food, raise small animals, and build a more self-reliant lifestyle right where you are. Urban homesteading is about ...
Easy Root Vegetable Storage Ideas That Need No Root Cellar
As a gardeners, one of the goals of growing your own food is to achieve good nutrition to put on the dinner table. Most crops are preserved by some sort of food preservation method like canning. However, if you have a root vegetable storage plan, you can cut out a lot of extra work for yourself! Root Vegetable Storage Made Easy The benefits for storing root vegetables ...
How to Make Fruit Leather from Any Fruit
If you have your own fruit trees or partake in loss leader deals at the store, you may find yourself with lots of extra fruit on hand during the summer. Rather than letting your overripe fruit go into the compost pile, why not take advantage of the sweetness of fruit at this stage and learn how to make fruit leather? It's nature's candy! So you've made your strawberry jam, ...
How to Make a Delicious Peach BBQ Sauce {+ Canning Instructions}
Whether you are purchasing peaches from the store or using your peach harvest, you may not have thought of making something savory with them. After you've made your jam, fruit leather, and wine, make sure to save a few lbs to make peach bbq sauce! Barbecue is some of the best food on earth, thank God it's so easy to do! Todd and I ran across this recipe when we were trying ...
How to Make Fig Wine at Home {Step-by-Step Instructions}
Summer is the season when many delicious fruits are harvested. Sometimes the windfall more than provides more than enough jam, frozen fruit, fruit leather, and other fruit products until next harvest. A great way to use up all of your extra figs is to learn how to make fig wine at home. A few years ago, we were invited to a friend's farm to harvest figs from her huge tree. ...
How to Make Strawberry Wine Step-By-Step
There's little more satisfying than filling your plate or glass with something you made with your own hands. Even better if it's something you have grown on your homestead! Making fruit wine is one of those satisfying activities, and this one yields the best flavor. This post will teach you how to make strawberry wine with store bought, or home-grown berries. If you ...
How to Make Strawberry Sauce {Using the Tops!}
It seems such a shame to throw away some of the kitchen scraps we generate. If you are a gardener, chances are that you throw yours into the compost pile, or if you have chickens, to them. But have you ever thought of eating some of them? This recipe will teach you how to make strawberry sauce out of the scraps you may have leftover from canning or dehydrating! There is ...
How to Make Dehydrated Beans for Convenience Food
As homesteaders, we are constantly busy, aren't we? There is so much to do on our properties that needs attention, and all of it seems to be RIGHT NOW. Despite the fact that we have plenty of food at our fingertips from growing food in our gardens, chicken coops, and perhaps even our livestock, the one thing our homesteads can't really give us back is time. Let me show you how ...
How to Can Pinto Beans {and other dried beans}
Pinto beans, and really, beans of all kinds are a nutritious, inexpensive way to get protein into our bodies. They are so versatile -- great in burritos, chili, soups, salads, and other recipes. Still, paying $1 per 15 oz can is so much more expensive than canning them yourself. Here's my safe instructions on how to can pinto beans in a pressure canner. Pressure canning ...
How To Eliminate Food Waste When You Harvest
Gardening is a lot of work, and throwing any part of the harvest away can feel excruciating. Learning the ways to use more of our harvested produce will put more food on the shelf and eliminate food waste in the kitchen. Love finding ways to use up every bit of what you harvest from the garden you work so hard on each season? I get you! For some reason, I feel a ...
How to Process a Fresh Mint Harvest
Springtime is prime time for harvesting herbs for medicines and teas. The temperate weather allows delicate and not-so delicate herbs to grow abundantly in the garden, and if you are growing mint, plentiful harvests of fresh mint are sure to follow. Mint plants produce and multiply like crazy and trying to figure out all the ways we can use it can be pretty tricky. ...