First, the science. If you put a tomato in a jar and close the top of the jar – the tomato will go ‘off’ as the bacteria in the air, on the tomato and in the jar will quickly reduce the tomato to an icky and poisonous mush. Good news is you can kill all that bacteria by boiling the jar. So all that is involved with ‘canning’ is learning how to boil the glass jars in a manner that will kill all...
Harvest and Storage
Of all the various types of foods and ways to preserve them — freezing or canning fruits and vegetables, pickling, curing meat, making cheese and yogurt — dehydrating herbs is the easiest place to jump in. Most herbs contain so little moisture that your job is done soon after you’ve bought or harvested them.
Drying herbs is an economically savvy food preservation strategy, too, because...
I was inspired by Sandor Katz book, The Art Of Fermentation, that I wrote about in my last post, to continue by foray into fermented food with vegetables.
My love of hot peppers coupled with the fact that the cayenne peppers in my greenhouse were ripe, and a friend had given me some of her bumper crop of jalapenos, made them the ideal vegetable to start with. Sandor suggests fermenting...
Janisse Ray celebrates the local, organic food movement but fears we’re forgetting something elemental: the seeds. According to Ray, what is happening with our seeds is not pretty. Ninety-four percent of vintage open-pollinated fruit and vegetable varieties have vanished over the last century.
Ray begins The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food by explaining how we lost...
Kimchi, the fiery Korean cousin of sauerkraut, is all the rage these days, showing up at your favorite health food stores and supermarkets, with jars of bright red fermented cabbage lining the shelves. This Korean superfood has been a cultural staple for generations—and for good reason: Kimchi is packed with healthy probiotics, enzymes, vitamins, and beneficial bacteria.
It’s also a...
When I lived in California, land of eternal sunshine, preserving food by drying was virtually effortless. Using big redwood trays salvaged from an old prune orchard and spread out on a huge barn roof in full sun, hundreds of pounds of peaches and pears were dried each summer. We also dipped and dried our own prunes and figs, made raisins from seedless grapes, and dried the walnut crop in the...
Here are some basic seed saving tenets. With these seedy thoughts in mind, you can learn to make Salsa Fresca and save seeds for next season while making it.
Step one: Be curious.
Seed saving used to be an integral part of many farms and gardens. Saving seeds was as practiced and assumed as harvesting a ripe tomato. Over time, as the landscape of seeds has changed from the...
Things are getting round and ripe in your garden. That means it’s time to think about saving seeds from your best tomatoes, peppers, squash, cucumbers, and melons.
If left to themselves, these fleshy fruits would naturally fall to the earth, where some of their seeds would sprout when spring arrives again. Saving seeds from these plants mimics nature’s way—and it’s not at all difficult...
We’re just shellin’….with Jordan Marr (from The Farmer's Filmanac, farmersfilmanac.com)
New video about a homesteader's way to shelling beans! Check it out under the “Seeds” section. Thanks to Jordan, for sharing this great video! From
What’s the difference between hybrids and genetically modified (GM) vegetable varieties? plants in a laboratory
The term “hybrid,” which you’ll often see in seed catalogs, refers to a plant variety developed through a specific, controlled cross of two parent plants. Usually, the parents are naturally compatible varieties within the same species. This hybridization, or the crossing of...
Tomato Canning 101
First, the science.