2022 Garden Haul & Food Storage

This year marked our 3rd on the homestead and our 2nd year of garden! I’m realizing more and more how important it is to know where your food is coming from and it doesn’t get much more transparent than just growing it yourself. It’s hard work but I’ve found a lot of joy in the process and so far each year has gotten much easier (it’s still frickin hard).

June 2022 - The garden has begun!

Before moving to upstate NY we lived in the concrete jungle of Brooklyn with our above ground garden. More and more I’ve realized just how much living there had affected me and my perspective. While energetic and inspiring I always felt not quite right like I wasn’t meant to stay.

It was never my plan to live in the city but I got a sick job that at the time I really loved but jobs aren’t the only reason to be somewhere. Standing amongst thousands of blurry bodies hustling around trying to make a living, find love, find themselves etc was overwhelming for me. So we left and started our next chapter upstate.

Our garden now stands in hopefully it’s forever home and boyyyyyy am I so frickin proud of the it this year. We’ve started to figure out what we really like to eat (kale, tomatoes, squash) and what gets wasted (eggplant, cucumbers, green peppers) along with how we can store food for the winter. And what seemed really daunting last year felt so much easier this year, which I was really thankful for. Currently we freeze, dehydrate and use the water canning method to store our food.

Dehydrating was probably one of my favorites. After a month of drought we finally had a weekend of rain and with moisture comes mushrooms. I was in luck because on our land was a ton of oyster mushrooms ready to be harvested. The ones we couldn’t eat right away were then dehydrated to use for soups and other recipes. Also a fun veggie to dehydrate is squash & zucchini! Scroll down to see what it looks like.

Next year we plan to start our seeds early esp the luffa, which you know I’ve been trying really hard to grow but our growing season is very short. In other news - we’ll be expanding the garden to include a chicken run that is full of fruiting trees, building out water collection and drainage systems, we’ll grow as many strawberries as possible (my favorite jam), finally making hot sauce… and much more. Can’t wait to start planning!

Let me know in the comments what you’re excited to grow or looking forward to in Spring

Last haul of the 2022 season

Dehydrated Summer Squash & Zucchini - great for soups and stews

Homemade Fire Cider for the days we need a boost in immunity or just a little extra flavor in our soups - Recipe

Some of our canned food - mostly tomato sauce and paste

Foraged Oyster Mushrooms - Our summer was so dry soI didn’t expect to see any mushrooms. These popped up at the very end of Summer after a few days of rain. The majority of these were cleaned, cut up and dehydrated for soups and stews.

Strawberry Picking + Oatmeal Bars

Our goal was to make homemade strawberry preserves, which is my home’s overall favorite jam. For those who are new to Preserves - they are a thick fruit spread made from fruit cooked with sugar, but in this case, large pieces of the fruit, or the whole fruit that are suspended in a firm jelly or less-gelled syrupy base. Read more here.

Anyway, with that in mind, we probably went a bit overboard with the amount of strawberries that we picked - 5 Quarts! With about 3.5 quarts went towards the jam we now needed to figure out what to do with the rest…

Lost Quarry and Wild Bower Ceramics <3

Hey Friends!

Have you ever tasted a perfectly ripe strawberry? Though, I’ll probably claim this for every in season fruit, I must say that freshly picked strawberries are pretty dang heavenly.

As you can probably tell, strawberry season is upon us in Upstate New York (mid to late June) and wow, is it magical! These beautiful little red fruits are abundant and ripe for picking so that’s exactly what we did.

Early one morning Lost Quarry and I set out for Saunders Kill Farm in Accord NY to pick our own.

This is where Strawberry Oatmeal bars comes in. Now, I’m not a baker or a chef so most of the recipes here will be linked back to other talented folks who actually create recipes.

These Oatmeal Bars from Well Plated are so easy to make and contain almost no processed white sugar.