I kind of feel like I'm cheating with today's post. It's a non-post, really. I have done a lot of these kinds of things over the years and already this season, but it's one that does in fact come in quite handy over the course of the year. It's putting up the fruit harvest, and there are a couple of ways you can do it. I'll show the simplest ways, and will endeavour to make a fermented version of fruit-keeping in the days ahead, seeing as I just hauled home some great finds from a produce stall in the Shuswap. I tell you, the harvest season is quite easily one of my most favourite times of the year, it has all the excitement that Christmas had for me when I was a kid, but in fresh food form. I know, geek, amiright?
Read moreToday's post is a relatively new addition to my roster of tasks when it comes to putting up my harvest every year. I dabble a bit more every year in the business of growing biodynamically in my yard, adding whatever I can to my toolkit as time and energy allows. I learned a few years ago of the magic of companion planting: see, I have been growing food crops in my little patches of back yard along the way since a basement apartment off St. Clair in Toronto some 14 years ago. Everyone else had a balcony but us, and so I rallied to dig up a patch of mint-bedraggled-grass in the courtyard to which our landlord at the time agreed. Before this, my first attempt as an independent grownup gardener, I helped tend our backyard plot and our 2 acres of rows at our farm in Fabre, Quebec (some people have cottages, we had a farm. How cool is that. Never appreciated it enough back then. Sorry Maman et Papa. Making up for lost time!) and learned from my parents the ins and outs of growing our own food organically before it was such a term, and how to put up the harvest for winter times. Companion planting came about as I was interested in growing without the use of 'plant food' and low-grade pesticides for home use. Never did use pesticides, but I had one year of particularly bad bugs at a house we rented in Edmonton. It was time to hone up on alternative ways to grow my own vegetables.
Read moreToday is Monday, a perfect day for a harvest. This is one of those things that is dead easy, and for whatever reason, I have a hard time ever getting around to this most summers. I don't know why, it's really so quick and again, big bang for your investment/buck/time. Let's keep this one short and sweet kids. Hanging herbs to dry. It's really just what it seems: you pick herbs, and tie them together, and leave them to dry. Done deal.
Read moreTo end this first week's roll call of how I am putting up the harvest 2015, I am going to make plenty from the spoils of Mother Nature. Well, not really spoils, but to some may be seen as spoils. See, here in Calgary this week, we've been hammered by a few big storms as they have swept through our town with deluges and flash floods and huge garden-decimating hail. There was even a tornado spotted just outside of the city this week. I don't know how it is where you live, but our summers here are so very brief that for one to dedicate your time and love to growing a vegetable patch in this so very short season (always turbulent; hey, it's the Prairies!), it's pretty heart-breaking when in one fell swoop of Mother Nature's whim, your hard work and dedication can be wiped out just like that.
Read moreTomato tomato tomato tomato tomato tomato tomato. All around me these days there are tomatoes. They are fresh, they are juicy, they are plump, they are delicious, they are plentiful, and I feel this urgent need to somehow retain this brief snapshot of summer sun and heat and flavour that it is all I do, it seems, is figure out ways to keep that tomato lovin going all year round.
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