Since our move to Vermont, I’ve been dreaming of maple syrup, and thinking ahead to what we need to get ready for backyard sugaring season. Back in Missouri, we tapped the trees available to us: black walnuts. Black walnut tree sap makes a delicious syrup with a woodsy, earthy, nutty flavor, but I really prefer the clean, bright sweetness of maple syrup for baking and cooking. Fortunately, we are renting a property that has a small sugarbush of mature sugar maples. Right now, we’re preparing the supplies we’ll need to tap our backyard trees. In this post, I teamed up with Vermont Evaporator Company to help you get ready now so you can head into sugaring season ready to make syrup! What … [Read more...]
How to Blanche and Freeze Fresh Green Beans
One of the simplest ways to store food is in the freezer. You can freeze just about anything - fruits, veggies, herbs, meat, jelly, baked goods - with little equipment save a freezer and some plastic bags or other containers. This week I had the opportunity to buy 20# of fresh green beans from a local farmer. While I saved some for fresh eating, and made a small batch of lactofermented dilly beans, the rest of the green beans were frozen. This post will show you how to blanche and freeze green beans so you can enjoy them all winter long! Should I Blanche Green Beans Before Freezing? Almost all vegetables should be blanched before freezing. Blanching stops enzymatic activity which can … [Read more...]
Canning Equipment for Beginners – Your No-Frills Equipment Checklist!
If you are new to canning, this beginner's canning equipment guide from Jenny at The Domestic Wildflower will help you get started canning in a way that is easy, fun, and safe! Jenny is going to walk you through her essential list of canning equipment and supplies so you can finish out the harvest season with a collection of home-preserved goods! (But don't worry - you don't have to spend a fortune - many of these items can be found at thrift stores or yard sales!). Welcome, Jenny! Your homestead is likely producing all kinds of bounty, and preserving that harvest is such a satisfying, fun, and important step. I’m Jenny and I teach beginners how to can over on my blog, The … [Read more...]
Leaving our Off Grid Homestead
A few weeks ago we packed up our homesteading essentials and moved across country to Vermont to begin a new chapter of our lives. To my regular readers, the ones that have followed our off the grid journey for the past five years, I know this sentence may seem shocking. In many ways, it has been hard for us to wrap our brains around: “We’re leaving a beautiful property with maturing fruit trees, wonderful neighbors, and very low expenses to move to a rental in a state with a high cost of living and start all over again?!?” I’ll start by saying that the decision to move was incredibly difficult, as we love our home and adore living off the grid. But we are also very practical people … [Read more...]
Elderflower Kombucha Recipe :: Wildcrafted, Fizzy, and Delicious!
Elderflower season is a glorious time in the Midwest. Everywhere you look - along roadsides, wood edges, and creek bottoms - you see elderberry bushes in full bloom. In addition to the delicious elderflower kombucha recipe that I'm going to share with you today, the range of recipes you can create with the simple elderflower is vast - check out my collection of elderflower recipes to get inspired! And don't forget that the elderberry itself is immune-boosting and tasty. I like to enjoy it as an elderberry syrup. Yum. Elderflower kombucha is very simply a combination of an elderflower simple syrup and your homebrewed kombucha. In the secondary ferment, the elderflower syrup's sugar content … [Read more...]
How to Make Kombucha in 3 Simple Steps!
Kombucha is a tasty, easy to make fermented beverage that delivers a probiotic kick. If you've ever purchased kombucha at the grocery store, you know it is delicious, but expensive! I'm going to show you how to make kombucha at home - for pennies a serving - and in just three simple steps. If you want to take the kombucha love up a notch, you can continue the process with a secondary ferment. I'll give you some suggestions for flavor combinations below, and also check out my super delicious wild-foraged elderflower kombucha recipe! What is Kombucha Anyways? If you haven’t yet experienced kombucha, it is a fermented beverage made from tea, sugar, and a culture called a SCOBY, or a Symbiotic … [Read more...]
20+ Elderflower Recipes for a Summertime Treat
Driving around rural Missouri in mid-June, it's impossible to miss the glorious clusters of white flowers that crown large bushes on the sides of roads, in pastures, and along creeks: Elderflowers. On our homestead, in addition to the wild bushes on our land, we also planted 20+ Sambucus canadensis, the American elder, so we have abundant berries for canning and making elderberry syrup, and also plenty of flowers to use in these creative elderflower recipes. Of course, when foraging any wild foods, it is important to make sure you are safely and ethically harvesting wild foods. In particular, because elderflowers do resemble some other common wild plants (some of which are inedible, and … [Read more...]
Foraged Food :: How to Safely Enjoy Wild Edibles
Foraging is the act and art of searching for, finding, and harvesting wild foods. Perhaps the most common foraged foods are mushrooms gathered in the woods, but foragers also enjoy wild greens, aquatic and marine plants, nuts, berries, seeds, sap, and more. The beauty of foraging is that edibles can be found almost everywhere, even in urban and suburban areas. Some of the most prolific plants - the most ubiquitous dandelion, for instance - have parts that are edible, once you know how to identify them safely. I’m a huge fan of foraging for a few reasons. First, foraging gets our family outdoors in all seasons, connecting to the natural world and its bounty. Second, foraging fills our … [Read more...]
7 Ways to Grow More Food in Less Space with Succession Planting
If you have a small garden, or even if you have a large garden but you like to grow year-round, you need to know how to maximize your food production by making use of every bit of garden space available. Today I'll share my top 7 tips to grow more food, even in a small space, with succession planting. What is Succession Planting? Very simply, it’s the action of following one plant with another. For instance, planting peas in the spring, pulling them out in the summer, and planting beets in that same bed for fall harvest. If this is as far as you get with succession planting, you’re still going to increase your harvests, but we’re going to dive deeper. For me, the push to grow more food … [Read more...]
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