A Friend You Can Visit Anytime
How are you going to eat if the farmers all of the sudden decide to quit growing your food or die off? Or worse, you can’t afford to buy food anymore.
A garden is a friend you can visit anytime.
It’s true.
The first garden I ever attempted was an herb garden. I’ve grown herbs in the ground, in deck containers, in flowerpots on the kitchen window, for, well over 35 years. What’s great about herbs is that they are pretty, fragrant and will reward you with flavoring your food.
They are pretty indestructible and can be neglected – somewhat.
I read a statistic recently where in a poll of 2000 Millennials, sixty seven percent of them said taking care of plants is more of a challenge than they bargained for. And, forty seven percent are apprehensive to own plants because they don’t know how to take care of them.
Is it because they don’t really teach real Science anymore?
When I was in grade school in second grade (age 7) all of us received green bean seeds as part of Science class. We sprouted and grew them in paper cups on the windowsill at the school. Once they outgrew the paper cup, we were to transplant them into a garden spot our parents chose and then continue to care for them in the garden until it produced beans.
I did the same thing for my homeschooled Millennial, only we planted a row of them, in addition to the bean in the cup project.
There is nothing better than harvesting your own food.
I find it ridiculous that sixty seven percent of a Millennial sampling of 2000 find keeping care of a plant “difficult”.
Who’d they ask?
Is this statistic representative of the whole population of Millennials?
Urban Millennials?
Country Millennials?
I know my Millennial wouldn’t say that.
Can I throw out Darwin’s1 “survival of the fittest”?
Have you seen you local reporters putting up lists like these:
Eggs: up 60% in the past year
Flour: up 23%
Butter and margarine: up 35%
Lettuce: up 25%
Canned fruits and veggies: up 18%
Flour is up 22.7%,
Chicken up 17.6%,
Milk up 15.6%,
Ground beef up 9.7%
Bacon up 9.2%.
Fruits and vegetables up 9.3%.
Kind of scary isn’t it?
I haven’t seen this sort of inflation in a long time.
If you can’t grow a plant, how are you going to eat if the farmers all of the sudden decide to quit growing your food or die off?
Or worse, you can’t afford to buy food anymore.
The average age of an American farmer is fifty-eight, that’s us Boomers in case you haven’t worked the math. The average age for organic farmer is fifty-two (more Boomers) and the average age of a beginning” farmer is forty-seven.
One third of America’s 3.4 million farmers are over the age of sixty five, and nearly a million more of them are within a decade of that milestone, according to USDA (US Department of Agriculture) Census of Agriculture data (2017). The average age of new and beginning farmers is 46.3 years, says the 2017 census while young producers, age thirty five or younger, account for nine percent of farmers. The census was taken in 2017 and published in 2019.
If I were in my twenties or thirties right now, those would be some frightening statistics.
Especially if I thought keeping care of a plant was “difficult”.
I wrote recently that the government is hell bent on destroying the family farm. I concluded that essay with a pretty depressing thought:
You can’t grow the food you need with a balcony garden, a small backyard garden, or even in a community garden.
But if you have a rood (rood is an Old English unit of area equal to one quarter of an acre or 10,890 square feet or a 100 ft x 108.9 food plot), you can grow enough in all four seasons and be able to preserve some of it. (U.K. friends - am I using this word correctly?)
They say a quarter acre is the minimum if you want to be self sufficient when it comes to much of your fresh food. Planning is essential, remembering that crop rotation and succession planting adds to the efficiency.
A great quarter acre planner here.
If you don’t have 100 x 108.9 food plot, you can have a smaller version plus head to the country in the summer to acquire fresh produce for storage.
If you’re going to hit the farm stands, go early, early, early, and at least an hour or more from a metropolis (large city) to get the best prices.
Flipping Through Seed Catalogs
It’s fun to think about planting a garden. The beautiful pictures in seed catalogs take you immediately to summer, barefoot in the garden. There are many interesting plants you could choose to take up the real estate in your garden, but if you’re planning on relying on your garden for your food, plan on stuff you like to eat, and that preserves well.
What do you like to eat?
Do you like your fruit preserved in the form of a jam, or ready to pour on pancakes, pound cake or ice cream?
Cucumbers are great fresh in salad, but they’re even better as pickles, or as a relish.
I bet you never thought of preserving lemons. Preserved lemons can really liven up dull chicken. Preserved lemons are great finely sliced and tossed with butter, parsley and pasta.
Preserve potatoes? What if you can’t get them? Or what if you want a nice potato salad but don’t really want to wait for them to cook up? Do you like potato soup?
How about sweet potatoes?
Like marinara sauce? Stewed tomatoes? Tomatoes are one of the basic items we use in many recipes. They are also easy to can. I generally process somewhere between 100 - 150 pounds in a summer as whole, quartered and diced, as sauce, marinara, tomato juice and stewed.
This is a basic list of produce that can be preserved and still taste good.
Tomatoes.
Beans: Green beans, pole beans, shelling beans.
Corn.
Berries: Strawberry, raspberry, blackberry, blueberry.
Apples.
Watermelon rinds (for pickles).
Stone Fruit: Peaches, nectarines, plum, apricot, cherries.
Cucumbers (pickles).
Lemons.
Potatoes: New, yellow, sweet.
Hot peppers: jalapeño, lunch box or mini sweet peppers.
Root Vegetables: carrots, beets, parsnips.
Asparagus, Brussels sprouts, cabbage.
This is a list of fresh produce items that keep well if you have a cool dry place (cool basement, attached garage or root cellar).
Onions.
Garlic.
Potatoes: New, yellow, sweet.
Root Vegetables: carrots, beets, parsnips.
Preserve Your Food
There is a whole lot of Science that goes into food preservation, in fact you can get a college degree in it, but don’t let that intimidate you. People have been preserving food since the Ancient Greeks and Egyptians.
While it is a fun and whimsical (lightly fanciful) activity to preserve your own food, there is going to come a time in your life when having a stored supply of food is important.
Getting laid off from a job, all of the Boomer farmers die, a pandemic, are some of the reasons I can think of.
When you think about preserving food, you need to look at it from a practical point of view.
If I got laid off from a job, will I be able to pay for electricity to keep my stuff frozen?
If I have to move, will I be able to take my food with me?
Preserving food can be thought of in two categories.
Shelf Stable.
Environmental (freezing or cold storage).
Shelf stable preservation means it doesn’t need to be frozen or refrigerated.
Or another way to look at it, it doesn’t require electricity to keep it.
While some methods also require electricity to preserve, the most reliable ones don’t.
I’m off grid, we use solar and propane for most of our kitchen tasks, so I have to really think about how I preserve food.
Here are the four methods I like to think about with preserving shelf stable food:
Canning: Water bath method and pressure canning.
Dehydrating: Drying, dehydrating, freeze-drying.
Fermentation.
Curing: Salting, Smoking.
There are many books that will explain methods in detail to preserve your produce.
I’m going to cover ideas about canning and dehydrating.
Canning Your Produce
I have been canning food I have grown for over 35 years. It always makes me laugh when I read online or in a new book about methods we used safely and consistently years ago, being slammed as “unsafe”.
“Pansies” is generally what I think.
Maybe the reason our bodies can’t withstand anything these days is because we’ve made it too “safe” for everyone.
Some claim fruits and vegetables have changed and I do agree with that, they have been modified to be less nutrient dense, but that happens when you fool with a good thing. This may be the reason for all the new alarm surrounding old canning methods.
It doesn’t preserve like it used to.
I always plant heirloom(cultivar of a vegetable or fruit that is open-pollinated and is not grown widely for commercial purposes. An heirloom often exhibits a distinctive characteristic such as superior flavor or unusual coloration) varieties, you can harvest the seeds for seed saving, the nutrition is better and you can rely on old canning methods if you want to.
The reason you are “canning” food is to make it shelf stable, but also to ensure the food in the jar is safe.
Improperly preserved foods can result in botulism (food poisoning caused by a bacterium growing on the food inside your canning jars). If you’ve ever had food poisoning you know how awful it can be. I have to admit, the only times I have ever had food poisoning is eating food from outside my home. Restaurants, grocery stores, food trucks can all introduce botulism regardless of how good they’re cleaning and food rotation practices are. But with practice and learned skills there is no reason you can’t can your own food.
There are two methods of canning that I know well, water bath and pressure canning.
Water bath method is the easiest and the best place to start if you’re new to this food preservation game. A water bath canning method simply means that you’re going to put the produce either raw or cooked into canning jars and you’re going to submerge the sealed canning jars in a large pot filled with water and boil them in the pot for a set amount of time and as the jars cool they seal.
Pressure canning is basically the same thing except you are going to place the jars into a special pot that seals completely and allow pressure to build and then steam for a set amount of time and as the jars cool, they seal.
So, from our list of produce above here is what you can preserve using the water bath method:
Tomatoes.
Berries: Strawberry, raspberry, blackberry, blueberry.
Apples.
Stone Fruit: Peaches, nectarines, plum, apricot.
Lemons.
So, from our list of produce above here is what you can preserve using the pressure canning method:
Beans: Green beans, pole beans.
Corn.
Potatoes: New, yellow, sweet.
Root Vegetables: carrots, beets, parsnips.
Asparagus, Brussels sprouts, cabbage.
You’ll read a lot about “high acid”, “low acid” and “acid added to low acid foods” in canning books. The good books will explain all of that in a way you can understand.
But here’s my way of looking at things. “High acid” foods are most fruits, tomatoes (which really is a fruit) and citrus. “Low acid foods” are everything else.
There’s a third category, “Acid added”. This means adding lemon juice to low acid foods or it means pickled foods, which means you are going to add vinegar to what is considered a low acid food.
“High acid” foods are canned using the water bath method.
“Low acid foods” are pressure canned.
Most pickled foods can be processed in a water bath; you need to make sure you’re using distilled white vinegar in part of the recipe.
If you enjoy pickles, finding recipes can be easy, but pay attention to how they put together the “pickling” ingredients.
While there are plenty of vinegars to play around with, you want to make sure distilled white vinegar is part of the ingredients list. Also know that cane sugar is considered a preservative and often you’ll want sugar in your pickles as well to offset the vinegar.
From our list above here is what can be pickled:
Beans: Green beans.
Cucumbers (pickles).
Watermelon rinds.
Hot peppers: jalapeño, lunch box or mini sweet peppers, biquinho (Brazilian Little Beak peppers).
Root Vegetables: carrots, beets, parsnips.
Asparagus, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower.
Drying Your Food
Sun/air drying, dehydrating, freeze-drying. I have to admit, I have never tried dehydrating or freeze-drying, as they require too much electricity.
I air dry herbs and I sun dry mushrooms, tomatoes and shell beans (horticulture beans)
With herbs, I’ll generally take a bunch of 5-7 stems tie them together with a rubber band and hang them upside-down from the rafters in the barn. Before I had a barn, I had a dedicated strip on the wall of my laundry room with little nails in the wall where I could hang bunches of herbs to dry.
How long it takes them to dry depends on your weather. I have humid, summer weather, so it takes a while.
You want to keep the bunch down to 5-7 stems, again because of your weather so they don’t mold in the center of the bunch. When the leaves and stems become crispy-crumbly you remove the leaves from the stems and place them in an airtight jar. I use quart size mason jars to keep them.
Culinary herbs that dry well:
Basil.
Oregano.
Thyme.
Sage.
Rosemary.
Lavender.
Mint.
Stevia.
Medicinal or herbal tea herbs that dry well:
Lemon balm (Sweet Melissa).
Catnip.
Chamomile.
Bee Balm (Monarda).
Stevia.
Mint.
Rosemary.
Hyssop.
Dandelion (whole plant).
With mushrooms and tomatoes, you need to slice them paper thin if you’re in an area that is not a dessert. I have a razor sharp knife (it’s actually a scalpel) I use to cut them and then I place them on an old window screens (cleaned!) in windows where I know the sun shines most of the day.
How long it takes them to dry depends on your weather.
The best tomatoes to dry are the Amish paste kind or Roma.
The best mushrooms to dry:
Morel.
Chanterelle.
Maitake (Hen of the Woods).
Chicken mushroom.
Wood Ears.
With shell beans, I remove the pods spread the beans on a cookie sheet and place in the sun or somewhere clean and dry.
Best shell beans:
Horticulture or cranberry.
Cannellini.
Black.
I didn’t want to get into the “hows” of canning here because there are plenty of great books, websites and this handy “how-to” .pdf from Purdue University extension.
I hope this post gets you excited about growing your own food.
It really is a satisfying way of life!
Books Worth Your Time
Mini Farming: Self-Sufficiency on 1/4 Acre by Brett L. Markham.
Worms Eat My Garbage: How to Set Up and Maintain a Worm Composting System, 2nd Edition by Mary Appelhof (Author), Mary Frances Fenton (Illustrator).
Carrots Love Tomatoes: Secrets of Companion Planting for Successful Gardening by Louise Riotte.
Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving by Judi Kingry (Editor), Lauren Devine (Editor), Sarah Page (Editor, Introduction).
The Complete Guide to Pickling: Pickle and Ferment Everything Your Garden or Market Has to Offer by Julie Laing (Author).
Rosemary Gladstar's Medicinal Herbs: A Beginner's Guide: 33 Healing Herbs to Know, Grow, and Use by Rosemary Gladstar (Author).
The Spice and Herb Bible Paperback by Ian Hemphill.
All wonderful suggestions! Thank you
What an excellent resource you have provided. Thank you. We do have some younger farmers in our neck of the woods and that makes me hopeful.