I went looking for some jam in the big cabinet that holds my home canned food and found PICKLES. Okay, not good on a popover but still, I was pretty pleased as I thought I was out. I found eight jars of beets, beets and cabbage and some mixed whatever pickles. I even found a lone jar of bread and butter pickles. I will use a couple of jars for Easter dinner and save the rest to dress up an otherwise bland meal.
I plan to do a lot more pickling this year . Bruce went to a bee meeting at a commercial farm last year and this guy had a field full of cucumbers left after the harvest. They were free for the gleaning and I ended up with a couple of boxes. This year, I am growing many more but will be open to taking leftovers too. We love bread and butter pickles. I never have luck with dills. They always get soft on me. I like kraut, especially jar kraut which is so easy and takes up little room. My big winner this past year was mixed vegetables. I like to pickle those things that might otherwise get wasted.
I am thinking about all of this because we are planning our garden space. It occurs to me that, for all we grow, we still buy more than I wish we did, especially this time of the year. If the EOTW happened in October, we would do pretty well but if it happened in March-well-not so much. I have quite a bit of commercially canned food but we would still be nutritionally deprived until the garden began to produce. Tonight, we are having flat bread stuffed with black beans, salsa, corn, lettuce, cheese and diced tomatoes. I have some yogurt to top it with. I am making the beans but they are not home-grown and the salsa and corn are commercial (all my home-made stuff is gone). The yogurt is commercial. Even the flat bread is store-bought. Maybe it’s the gloomy weather, the gloomy news, the head cold that goes on forever, or just the ennui of not eating my own food. My get up and go has got up and went.
What I need is to find some fiddleheads or ramps. They should pop up soon as the weather is warming up fast. Too fast. It is hard to hear city people going on about the lovely, early spring. They do not get the relationship between weather and food. If things like apple trees bud out now, we will have no apple crop. People who rely on store-bought will not realize the damage until September when all that’s available is expensive, mealy stored apples from someplace far away.
March 30, 2010 at 8:46 am
I know what you mean. I just started last year to add fruit trees to my yard and right now I’m praying the cherry tree and pear tree won’t flower! It is to soon!. I won’t have much of a crop anyway as the trees are still really young, but if they bloom now I won’t get any. I love the warm weather but everything in it’s time.
March 30, 2010 at 9:55 am
i’ve never had ramps..have to check them out. I don’t mind the flavor of fiddleheads, but i’ve never been able to get the gritty out.
We don’t eat nearly enough pickles! lol
I think people are always shocked at how much food they go through in a year. Just one jar a day would mean over 30 cases of canning jars!
March 30, 2010 at 5:10 pm
We found out (thanks to Google) that radishes are really easy to pickle – and taste like pickled onions. It’s also a crop that (at least here) you can grow all year round, full of vitamin C, and you can also roast them, bake them, boil them, and of course eat them raw. Plus you can eat the greens too. A great addition to any food garden I think.
March 30, 2010 at 5:24 pm
I never grow radishes as I don’t care for them raw. It would not have occurred to be to pickle them. I also didn’t know you coud eat the greens. The amount of food we eat in a year would floor most people. I am rereading Deep Winter. It’s one of those post apocalyptic novels that is dreadfully written but has some good preparedness info in it. He discusses how many TONS of food it will take to feed his family for a year. 80 degrees this weekend. Yikes!
March 30, 2010 at 5:28 pm
We had a lot of snow in central Virginia this year. I got the comment several times about how it proved there was no global warming. I disagreed – I thought it did prove that the weather was seriously disrupted.
People who don’t eat seasonally are not aware of how an event impacts the food table months later. All the pumpkin crop failures from last fall are starting to hit the shelves now. Maple syrup, honey and things pollinated with bees could be next.
Some of it is clearly cyclical – harvests are never smooth and consistent. But some of it is scary as to what is really behind all of this.
March 30, 2010 at 5:39 pm
I refer to it as climate change to make it clearer.
March 30, 2010 at 7:51 pm
It seems a lot of people don’t like radishes raw
Ironically their taste changes completely when cooked. When roasted, it is nearly like parsnip. You can also flavour them with some spices and honey before baking them, and they turn out very nice. The leaves are peppery which is nice in a salad (they don’t taste like radishes).
I was amazed by the versatility of the crop, especially as they are easy to grow and quick to come up. Perhaps this would come in quite handy for example if other crops fail and you need to grow something else to cover a period of time.
March 30, 2010 at 11:01 pm
The Native Americans used to call March “hunger month” because the food that they stored needed to stretch until seasonal hunts and harvests returned. For most cultures eating seasonally in temperate areas (ie – not cultures living in tropical, things-grow-year-round climates) there is usually a season where food stores are running out before new crops come in. I would guess that most human bodies are capable and adapted to storing up extra fat/nutrients just for that time of year – the annual March “diet”…