Heading out to the vineyard to plant a new bed of strawberries. Strawberries are one crop I can count on to always do well where I live, and I think they might be the best fruit crop you can grow anywhere. They flower and fruit so early in the year, there isn’t time for anything to get to them. They’re also easy to establish and they fruit abundantly a year after planting. In this video I give some tips for moving a strawberry bed and ensuring the plants get a good start in the spring.
One of the canned foods I eat most of every year is salsa. In the late summer, I get a bounty of tomatoes and other salsa ingredients pouring in from my gardens and I like to turn them into a good supply of salsa for the year. If you’ve never had real fire-roasted salsa, you should try it sometime. It’s like a different animal from store-bought salsa. So much depth of flavor and a smokiness that liquid smoke just can’t replicate. In this video I take you through the process of making it from scratch.
For a long time I planted small plots of corn in my garden and was disappointed with the harvest. Often the ears wouldn’t fill out properly, missing kernels in spots or not filling out to the end of the ear. This trick helped me get full ears nearly every time and effectively doubled my harvest of food. There’s nothing better that sweet corn in summer, except maybe getting more of it out of the same space.
You can’t always rely on the starts you pick up at the garden center to be sustainably grown, and you never know what varieties are going to be available. One easy way to eliminate the uncertainty around garden starts is to grow your own. Continue reading
Part of living sustainably is getting your food as locally as possible. To maximize the productivity, diversity, and sustainability of foods you get in your diet locally, it’s a good idea to know all the crops that produce the best in your climate using organic methods. There may be many potentially useful fruits available and adapted to your climate that you don’t know about. Continue reading
When I built my house I noticed that one corner of the foundation was really deep, so I planned to make it into a root cellar. Now I use this space to keep the food I grow in the summer fresh through the winter, without refrigeration. It was a rather simple design feature, but it saves me a lot of energy in the long run and allows me to eat my harvest year round.
Our economy expends a huge amount of energy on refrigeration, not only to preserve food so that it can be shipped across the world and eaten fresh, but so that the food industry can recreate the climate conditions of a root cellar. Continue reading
