State of the larder report
As we dug and ate the last of our blighted
potatoes, peeled our last onions, and ate all five of our turnips this
week, I figured it was time to take a good hard look at the food we'd
managed to stock up for the winter. Clearly, if we run short it's
not the end of the world, with the grocery store fifteen minutes
away. Still, I feel much more nourished eating our own
vegetables, and I'd hate to run out halfway through the winter.
On the surface, our haul of 17 gallons of frozen produce this year
looks measly compared to last year when we froze about 44
gallons. On the other hand, about a third of last year's produce
was excess, so I doled it out to my family over the spring and early
summer months.
Last year I froze things like carrots and winter squash that do quite
well storing on the shelf. I figure our carrots add up to another
4 gallons, our sweet potatoes to maybe 8 gallons, our (undug as yet)
parsnips to another gallon or two, and our butternuts the same.
We still have an inspiring four pounds of garlic and we're eating
greens, oyster mushrooms, broccoli, and lettuce out of the garden every
week.
Clearly, we'll be eating many more roots this winter. That was
actually my goal --- to grow more food that could be stored unfrozen so
that we keep getting fresh food throughout the winter. We'll see
if I'm heartily sick of orange things by spring....
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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