The garden bounty provides half of our food for the winter months which last December through April. The storage of this food is called the homestead larder. Below is a quick slideshow of the big big garden and kitchen garden before the fall harvest to give perspective of where so much of our food comes from.
For me, growing food is the fun and easy part. "Putting up" the food is what takes all the time. We grow food specifically for the purpose of putting it up for the winter months. While we enjoy crops like greens, cucumbers, and asparagus when ripe, most of what we grow needs to be processed and stored as our larder.
Once harvested, crops like winter squash, onions, and garlic must be cured before they can be stored. Zucchini gets processed into loaves of zucchini bread, cucumbers into pickles, apples into applesauce, tomatoes and friends into salsa and sauce, and a variety of fruits and veggies like peas, summer squash, garlic scapes, kale, spinach, and berries all get frozen - see recent post about freezing peas and berries. Herbs get dried for spices, teas, infusions, and tinctures while root veggies get stored in sand in cold storage.
Once harvested, crops like winter squash, onions, and garlic must be cured before they can be stored. Zucchini gets processed into loaves of zucchini bread, cucumbers into pickles, apples into applesauce, tomatoes and friends into salsa and sauce, and a variety of fruits and veggies like peas, summer squash, garlic scapes, kale, spinach, and berries all get frozen - see recent post about freezing peas and berries. Herbs get dried for spices, teas, infusions, and tinctures while root veggies get stored in sand in cold storage.
Having all of the ingredients at the same time and actually having the time to process food is a delicate balancing act indeed. Cucumbers can be one of the trickiest - they are one of the easiest crops to grow, but if you don't pick them and pickle in the same day, they are not nearly as crunchy when canned. Tomatoes can either delay or expedite processing. We use a variety of fresh veggies in salsa along with tomatoes, so we can salsa in early fall. We cut the seeds and juice out of the rest of the ripened tomatoes and then freeze them and make sauce later in the fall.
The easiest crops to store take the longest to grow. Garlic bulbs need to get cured away from direct sunlight. We use the best bulbs to plant the garden in the fall for the next year's harvest and the rest get stored as food for the fall and winter. Onions and winter squash should be cured to start right in the garden once harvested in the fall and then moved inside to a warm, light place for a few weeks. Then they stock the shelves in the cold storage room in the basement. The onions last into March, but the squash must get processed by mid-January or it gets too stringy. We spend a good amount of time during the holidays roasting squash and making pumpkin seeds. We store the lightly processed squash in cubes or pureed in the freezer.
We were blessed with freezer space when we moved into the homestead. We have a full size freezer where we store all of the berries and blanched veggies like peas, summer squash, kale, garlic scapes, and spinach. The big freezer also holds meat pies and dessert pies we make in bulk over the holidays and bulk meat we purchase from local farms. The homesteading kitchen has a regular fridge with top freezer that stores breads, frozen squash, and plethora of sauces. We make cilantro peanut sauce, rhubarb sweet and sour sauce, cooking broths, and creamy soups with leftover garden surplus from veggies like celery and turnips. We either make these freezed goods when we have surplus ingredients or when we're making a sauce for a meal and will triple the recipe so we have lots of extra sauces over the cold months and surprisingly into the spring. Grocery shopping in our basement is one of the best rewards on the homestead!
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