A Week in August for a Food Preserver

If you’ve been a regular reader of this blog, you will know how invested I am in food preservation. In any place with such a short growing season the best way to be a year round local food eater is to can, dry, freeze, root cellar and grow long keeping foods. So, starting in July, bringing in and putting up the harvest is one of my main concerns. In fact, I have a goal of preserving something every day.

Here’s what that looked like for me for the week of August 12 2024.

Ripening Peaches

Monday

More peaches are ripening! We brought in 32 pounds mostly from our Redhaven tree. We cut and cooked them but it wasn’t quite enough to justify heating the water to can. There is a big pot of them in the fridge to combine with tomorrow’s harvest.

Canned Peaches

Tuesday

Canning! Another 30 pounds of Redhaven and Starfire peaches came in to cut, cook and water bath process. Three rounds for 21 quarts to store. A peach processing session like this takes up most of my day.

Wednesday

Basil

The basil has been gorgeous and lush. I cut a pound for making pesto. The garlic and salt is also ours – the olive oil is not local! I skip the pine nuts and cheese for my version. Since tomatoes don’t agree with my digestive system, I use pesto instead of red sauce in everything. So it’s important to have enough for a year’s supply. I freeze 3/4 pint jars of it, and this hour long session yielded 5 of those.

Beans Prepped for the Freezer

Thursday

Our string beans were a little slow to get started but now here they are, 5 pounds at a time. Our Blue Lake pole beans are especially prolific at the moment. In a couple of hours, I picked, snapped, blanched, and froze a few pounds for future three bean salads. In the past I used small plastic freezer bags but glass wide mouth pint jars work great and hold the right amount for each round of salad making. I’m always looking for ways to use less plastic.

Our Milk Makers & Kids

Friday

We have 2 gallons of milk in the fridge, about five days worth. I find our raw milk is perfect for about one week so it’s time to move some along, in this case as chevre cheese. One gallon of milk equals about five half pints for the freezer and one to go straight to the fridge. I start the process of making it late at night and the cheese really makes itself overnight. I strain and jar it the next morning. I love this cheese in salads – lettuce based salads in the spring, thinly sliced cucumber salads for the summer and a wonderful beet and kale type nearly year round. I also end up with a 1/2 gallon of whey which the chickens love.

Saturday

More peaches! These are still from my three earliest ripening trees: a Lars Anderson, a Redhaven and a Starfire, all 8 or 9 years old. We’ve gotten better at pruning the trees (as I wrote in my last post) and thinning the fruit, so we have nice, big peaches. I can’t explain why the birds and squirrels have spared us this year, I know some of my local friends lost their crops. I did two more canner loads and now have 48 quarts on my shelves.

Eggplant

Sunday

The eggplant is finally kicking in. I have good years and not so good years with the eggplant. It’s too early to decide for 2024, but we did just bring in five pounds to preserve. I diced, cooked and froze them specifically for making Eggplant-Almond Enchiladas. Next time I will slice them into rounds for eggplant parmesan.

So that was my August 12-19 food preserving week. And I hadn’t even pulled out my dehydrator yet! I hope to have enough harvest and time to keep on like this for a couple of months, filling my freezers and shelves to ensure homegrown food all through the winter.

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Joyful Pruning!

“Nature is not a place to visit, it is home.” — Gary Snyder

To plant a tree is to be connected to a place with depth and longevity. When we were finally settled somewhere, “owners” of a place, it was a thrill to plant trees and bushes and other long lived perennials – anything beyond annual crops. We started with asparagus, rhubarb, berry bushes and trees. Fruit trees especially, plus a few for pollinators and medicine: peaches, pears, mulberries, linden, and unusual permaculture choices like persimmons and pawpaws.

This signified a level of stability and rootedness that I had been working towards for years. During all of that preparation I had studied how to plant and care for trees and other perennials. Now that it was time, though, having to do all of that and do it well was intimidating. I needed to sift through all the information I had garnered to figure out how best to keep them healthy and get a yield (permaculture principle 3).

Getting and preserving a yield

There are many pruning books, videos, and methods. Having read “The One-Straw Revolution” by Masanobu Fukuoka I knew that one could choose to be very hands off. Then again, permaculture orchardist Stefan Sobkowiak has an amazing organic orchard that he prunes and shapes intensively. There are also many variations in between. What should I do?

Feeling unsure of myself, and fearing hurting the trees, I started with minimal pruning. I saw the problems with that quickly with our peaches. We’d been warned that peaches could be difficult to grow in New England, especially organically. While I can confirm that it’s not easy to grow a perfect looking peach, our experience is that they grow fast, flower like crazy and make tons of delicious fruit! We still get hit by polar vortexes or super late frosts and lose a year like everyone else, but usually they thrive.

See the two big cuts we had to make after this overgrown peach broke?

The first peach we planted and barely managed ended up leaning sunwards, overloaded with fruit on long, high branches. Unsurprisingly, a main branch cracked and broke after just a few years. Luckily, it was above the graft so it has come back, but we lost a couple of harvests and I doubt it will live as long as it could have. So, I started pruning harder.

I also began to feel more confident in what I was doing and not second guess every single cut I made. I was able to visualize how the tree would respond to my cuts and what it would look like later on. The constant worry that I was doing it wrong faded. I could even enjoy spending time with the trees in the late winter cold, looking forward to their spring growth and summer fruit.

Pruning the Red Haven Peach in Winter

The Red Haven in Summer

 

 

 

 

 

 

I found a new level of satisfaction in the process when I read “Sprout Lands: Tending the Endless Gift of Trees” by William Bryant Logan a few years ago. In it, the author describes how most people lived in close, reciprocal relationship to the forests around them. They depended on and used their products for survival, intensively managing them with coppice and pollard techniques. Not only did these pruning techniques not

Pollarded Maple

kill the trees, but they made for longer lived individual trees, and healthier, more diverse woodlands. In Sproutlands he visits England, Spain, Japan, California and other places, finding the same story everywhere.

 

 

“I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want.” -Andy Warhol

This is a narrative we recognize in permaculture. Rather than seeing humans and nature as two clashing entities, we recognize that humans are a part of the biosphere that evolved to have good, useful relationships with our fellow beings. That is how every species survives and thrives. So, I shouldn’t be surprised to once again have that reality shown to me, but given our species recent tendency to destroy things we depend on I find it hard sometimes to discern appropriate from destructive behavior.

When I first found permaculture this is part of what spoke to me. I was coming from both a farming and an activist perspective. As a farmer I appreciated permaculture’s practical improvements towards a sustainable, healthy food growing system. As an environmental and peace activist it was refreshing to find a way of looking at the world that did not assume that humans could only be problematic.

“The one who plants trees knowing that he or she will never sit in their shade, has at least started to understand the meaning of life.” – Rabindranath Tagore

This story of connection continues to this day. A 2022 study found that “the world’s healthiest, most biodiverse, and most resilient forests are located on protected Indigenous lands.” Even the World Bank with it’s poor track record of protecting land or people, recognizes that “Indigenous communities safeguard 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity and forests on their land are better maintained, with a higher preserved biodiversity than those on non-Indigenous lands.”

Now that I have gained skills and practice, and a larger understanding of what is possible, interacting and working with the plants brings me great joy. So does the abundant harvest that the trees and our work with them bestow upon us. It is my wish that all people have access to this level of interdependent security and resilience.

Unpruned Grapevines

Pruned Grapevines

Grapes to Harvest

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My Favorite Part of Winter

The more I have adopted an agricultural lifestyle the more I have learned to embrace winter. While I am still not happy with the cold or the lack of lush, green surroundings, the break from the hard outdoor work is appreciated. I am tired by the end of the growing season. Plus, there is other work in the world that is important to me and the winter gives me time to focus on that.

Yogurt With Our Peaches

But, if I had to narrow it down to my top favorite aspect of winter I think it would be this: yogurt.

When you produce your own food, you learn the nuances and variations that are lost in a standardized, commodified industrial system. From year to year and season to season differences in the weather and other conditions impact taste, texture, and production. This is particularly true for milk. To some extent what we feed our goats actually changes the taste of the milk, but, more obviously, the seasons greatly change the texture. In the summer when the sun is high and the fresh green plants are abundant our goats give us much more milk. It is delicious but not very thick. The amount of milk they produce in the winter is much less, but the fat percentage is significantly higher thus it is sweeter and more nutrient rich.  It also makes extremely thick and creamy yogurt. The winter goat yogurt that I make might be my favorite food in the world.

Yogurt with Strawberries

Years ago, actually decades by now, I was a vegetarian and then vegan for environmental and ethical reasons. I did OK for a few years as a vegetarian but when I cut out eggs and dairy some serious problems developed. I love beans so was getting plenty of protein but I could not get enough fat or B12 to stay healthy. After about six months, I stopped being able to eat at all. Everything I tried made me incredibly nauseous. Then, my roommate ordered a pizza. It wasn’t particularly good pizza, but the smell was heaven and for about a week it was almost all I could eat.

I did not take the hint from my body, however, and went back to being vegan. I again lasted about six months before things started to unravel again. At that point I had to admit that this was not working for me, and move through my disappointment and a small existential crisis to re-embrace animal products. I could have chosen to take pills, but I decided that supporting the pharmaceutical industry was worse than supporting my local farmers. After about a week of putting butter and cheese back on my plate I felt so much better I knew I would never give them up again. Given that my ancestry is from the dairy producing area of Ireland and various goat-keeping places in the Mediterranean I guess it makes sense that this works for my body.

Goat Kid Nursing

And, yogurt cultured from raw milk created in my backyard from the animals I know and love really does sound like a perfect food. Topped with fruit I canned from the previous summer and either honey or maple syrup from the neighborhood… what food could be better for me or the planet?

Nourishing, delicious food is something I am grateful for every day, especially when I remember that there are people in the world who don’t have anything to eat at all.

I eat my yogurt year round, but it is at its best December through March and that is a bright spot in an otherwise dark time of year, one that I will miss as we head into Spring.

Our Goats in Winter: Georgia, Lily & Honey

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