You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Preserving’ category.
Concord grape wine vinegar on the left, pear cider vinegar on the right. Both in recycled whiskey bottles.
Vinegar, if you believe the natural living information feeds, can be used for everything from killing weeds to cleaning your windows to pickling your cucumbers to dressing your salad (all true). They also claim it can help you lose weight, kill heartburn, and remove warts (more hit and miss), and the true believers will tell you it kills cancer cells (well, in a test tube). Regardless, it’s a fantastic substance to have on hand. I generally buy it by the gallon during canning season, and have used it as a natural cleaner for years. Read the rest of this entry »
Coarse beer mustard on the left, Dijon on the right.
I’ve talked about how learning to bake your own bread and make your own yogurt and granola are probably the gateway recipes when striving towards a more self-sufficient lifestyle. I think making your own mustard should be added to that list. It’s super easy, it’s almost impossible to mess it up, it doesn’t cost much (I recently bought about 2/3 cup of bulk whole yellow mustard seed for $2.25 – enough for 12 oz of finished mustard), there are about a million variations, and it can be really really tasty. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve grown a LOT of different paste tomatoes over the years. When I was in Colorado, they were always short season determinates. When I first moved to southeast Washington, I tried all of those same varieties here since I still had the seeds. Nothing spectacular came of it. Last year, I tried Amish Paste (for the third and last time), Federle and Martino’s Roma. I had bad problems with blossom end rot and wasn’t impressed with any of them.
I’ve probably told this story before, but when my husband and I were moving from Durango Colorado to Walla Walla Washington, he asked me, “what do you want to grow more of, now that you have a longer growing season”? And my answer was “tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes”! Can you ever have too many home-grown tomatoes? Well, come mid August, it might seem like it. Read the rest of this entry »
Yup, that’s a gallon of tomatoes.
I gardened in Colorado, at almost 7,000 feet in elevation, for 10 years. Our last frost date typically fell after the first week of June, and our first frost was in early September. We were having a really good year when we managed a 100 day growing season. Nights, even at the height of summer, were in the upper 40’s/low 50’s. That was NOT tomato growing country. Read the rest of this entry »
You know, as you get older, how you occasionally catch yourself saying or doing something you heard or saw your parents do, and you have that sinking feeling? That “I’m doing that thing that I swore I’d never do. I’m turning into my parents” moment? Well, I think with the purchase of our last refrigerator, I’ve officially careened off the edge of that cliff. Read the rest of this entry »
A finished chokecherry wine. One of the better wines we’ve made.
For the past 20 years or so, I’ve been lucky enough to live in quite a few towns with microbreweries. Boulder, Fort Collins and Durango Colorado, Missoula Montana, Spokane and Walla Walla Washington. In fact, it was a small brewery in Boulder that taught me that I actually liked beer. Read the rest of this entry »
A friend of mine in Colorado Springs loves this recipe, as do his kids, so I make a few jars every year, some for him, some for me (sorry John, we ate the 2011 batch before I could mail it to you last winter). My husband, who is not a huge fan of the sweetness of tomatillos, does not eat this salsa with abandon, which is also good. It gives me a chance to have some. Read the rest of this entry »
My father grew up on a farm in rural Montana in the 1930’s (he was born in 1923). He was second to last of ten children. He used to tell me stories of growing up, one of which included how, as kids, they were so hungry for something fresh that they would eat chokecherries right off the tree. While there may have been some truth to the story (it was the depression, after all), I have also met his brothers. And given that they were the kind of brothers who would put a dead fish in your sleeping bag on a camping trip, my guess is a lot of the chokecherry eating was on a dare. Read the rest of this entry »
Here’s the evaporator in action. I built it next to a fence so I could tie a tarp over the set-up to keep the rain out, which worked pretty well. You know how you can sit and watch a fire for hours? When boiling down sap, you get to do this and be productive at the same time! Note the slightly wonky block placement. Things moved around a bit with the heat from the fire. Keep an eye on your bricks and your pans or bad things could happen!
If you’ve been following along, then you know that the big new experiment this March has been to make syrup out of boxelder tree sap. You can store your sap in food grade containers for a few days until you are ready to boil, as long as you keep it cool. Fresh sap is like fresh milk. You want to treat it the same way. I happened to have a few 6 and 7 gallon water containers and a root cellar that is currently at 40 degrees, so it was easy to hold the sap for a few days. A food grade 55 gallon drum with a lid and a spigot would be ideal. Read the rest of this entry »
MilesAwayFarm
Miles Away Farm Blog 