Frugal Babe

This morning has been all about preserving garden goodies.  I started out with tomatoes.  I’ve been roasting and freezing them lately so that I can make roasted tomato soup this winter.  I harvested a huge tub of beautiful tomatoes.

Then I washed them, sliced them in half lengthwise, and laid them in glass baking dishes.  I’ve found that it’s best to coat the inside of the baking dishes with coconut oil first (or some other oil that works well at high temps).  Otherwise, cleaning the pan afterwards is a two hour job.  Trust me on that one.

My counter runneth over.

And you can see a big bowl of whole tomatoes in the upper left corner.  I used all of my baking dishes (and all my oven space) but only had room for about half the tomatoes.  So I’ll be starting another tomato roasting session this afternoon. 

I put all of those dishes into the oven – preheated to 375 degrees – and let them roast for about 90 minutes.  The kitchen smelled nice.

While the tomatoes were roasting, I bagged up some peppers that I had frozen last night.  Peppers are pretty easy to preserve.  I chop them up, spread them on a cookie sheet, and put them in the freezer.  Once they’re frozen, I use a spatula to get them off the cookie sheet and dump them into a bag.  It starts as this:

Then they get chopped and frozen:

And ends up as this, perfect for sauces and stir fries this winter:

Once I finished with the peppers, I moved on to chard.  I made another trip out the garden and filled that giant bowl with chard:

Apparently I also harvested a lady bug and a wasp, both of which were returned to the outdoors, since I doubted they wanted to be blanched or frozen.

I washed, chopped, and blanched the chard in four batches, and now it looks like this:

I haven’t counted lately, but I would guess that I have about 60 of those bags full of greens in the freezer.  My hope is that between the cold frame over one bed of greens and the bags of frozen greens, we won’t have to buy greens at all this winter.  Right now it seems do-able, but winter lasts a long time, so we’ll see.

Once I had finished the peppers and greens, the first batch of tomatoes was nicely roasted.

Once they cool a bit, I’ll put them in jars and freeze them.  I prefer to use glass for food storage whenever I can, and roasted tomatoes work pretty well in glass jars.  You just have to make sure they’re not too tightly packed, and leave them room to expand as they freeze.  But it would work just as well to store them in ziplock bags in the freezer.

Now it’s time to get cracking on the second batch of tomatoes.  I love seeing our freezer and pantry shelves fill up with food from our backyard.  Fall is definitely in the air these days.  We’re starting to see nighttime temperatures in the 30s, so I’ve got a fire under me to get the garden harvested as much as possible before it freezes.

Hope you’re all having a wonderful Friday!

For the last several weeks, I’ve been spending some time every few days preserving our garden harvest.  I’ve canned a few batches of tomato sauce, and this afternoon I’ll be roasting tomatoes to store in the freezer so that I can make this amazing soup during the winter when fresh tomatoes are scarce.  I’ve also frozen lots and lots of chard and turnip greens – I’m hoping that between the frozen greens and our cold frame, we won’t have to buy greens this winter at all.  We’ll see.

One of my favorite preserving projects so far this fall has been pumpkins.  We grew a pie pumpkin plant this year, and our son helped me harvest these four beautiful little pumpkins a few weeks ago:

I put them in the oven (I think I set it to 350 and cooked them for about 40 minutes?) until they were soft enough to stick a fork into them.  Then I peeled them, removed the seeds (which ended up in that day’s green smoothie), and blended up the pumpkin flesh.  Then I added a few apples and a pear, along with lots of ginger, cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg.  I didn’t measure any of the ingredients, but I used quite a bit – I love fall spices!  I blended it all up into a wonderful pumpkin spice mixture, and added just a touch of maple syrup (maybe 1/4 cup, and I had a 64 ounce blender full of pumpkin puree). 

From there, I spooned the puree into ice cube trays and made little frozen cubes of pumpkin spice deliciousness.

I saved quite a bit of it and used it fresh that week in smoothies and in my oats.  But ever since, I’ve been loving the frozen pumpkin cubes that I have stashed away in the freezer.  Something tells me they aren’t going to last long.  I may have to buy a wagon load of pie pumpkins at the pumpkin patch when we take our boys over there next month for the hayrides.

Most mornings, I melt one of these into my oatmeal, and I’ve also been on a banana/pumpkin smoothie kick lately.  A banana, some almond milk, two cubes of spiced pumpkin and a few seconds of blender time = instant fall goodness.

For all of you with gardens, what have you preserved this year?  I’m wishing I had frozen our spinach before it went to seed.  We had a ton of spinach in the early summer, and we were using it every day.  But then it all went to seed and we replaced it with other greens.  If I had frozen it instead of letting it go to seed, I could make lots of amazing spinach artichoke dip this winter without having to buy spinach.  Definitely on my list of things to do next year!

We’ve spent all of our free time over the last week working in our garden, and we’ve got nearly everything planted.  We had a dumptruck full of compost delivered, so we spent last weekend with our shovels and wheelbarrow, mixing compost into all of our beds.  We did the same thing last year, and I think our alkaline clay soil is finally looking pretty good.  From now on, we shouldn’t have to have compost delivered – the compost we create ourselves should be enough in future years.

Last year, instead of tomato cages ,we installed metal stakes in a single row down the middle of each tomato bed, and attached chicken wire fencing (six feet high) to the stakes.  The beds are only four feet wide, so we had a row of tomato plants on each side of the fencing, and they all climbed up the fence together.  In order to rotate our crops, we had to pull out the fencing and move them to other beds last weekend, which was actually a pretty easy process.  We got all of our tomato plants – that had been growing in our hydroponic garden for the last several weeks – transplanted out to the new tomato beds a few days ago.  We also had peppers that we transplanted outside earlier this week.

Other than the tomatoes and peppers, we’re starting everything outside, from seeds this year.  Our potatoes, spinach, and onions have all been in the ground for several weeks now, and are looking good.  Most of the potatoes have sprouted and will be ready to be hilled up in another week or two, and the onions are several inches tall.  Everything else got planted over the last week, so most of our garden beds still just look like bare dirt – but soon there will be little sprouts everywhere.  (I love this time of year – it’s like magic!)  We gave one bed to our three-year-old, and we’ve got six more beds (out of 27 total) that still need seeds (those will be getting planted this evening).  I had wondered how our garden process would go this spring, since we knew we’d have a brand new baby right at the start of garden season, but so far we’ve managed to stay on track.  I’ve done quite a bit of gardening while wearing the baby in the Moby Wrap, and my husband and I have also taken turns working in the garden and taking care of the baby.  It’s a bit more of a juggling act, but so far, so good.

All of our fruit trees are looking good, and we’ve had lots of blossoms this spring, so we might even get some fruit this year.  The berry bushes are also looking great, and some of the raspberry bushes have already spread out with new growth in a three-foot circle.  Last year we planted three beds with asparagus, and those have all come back nicely, as did our rhubarb, and mint plants.  Wouldn’t it be nice if all veggies were perennials?

In early March, I planted seeds for various greens into our cold frames, and we’ve been harvesting lettuce, kale, and all sorts of other greens from those beds for several weeks now.  Given that we go through at least one large bunch of organic kale/collards/swiss chard, etc. each day, having the growing season for greens extended by a few months each year is definitely a money saver when it comes to our grocery bill.

We’re going to experiment with straw mulch this year, hoping that it will cut down on the amount of weeding and watering that we have to do.  I tried hay mulch in one of our beds last year, and practically turned the bed into a sod farm – the grass seeds that were lurking in the bale of hay sprouted like crazy when they got into the nice moist garden bed!  We’ve read that straw doesn’t do that, so we’ll see how it goes.

Anyway, I hope all my northern hemisphere readers are having a good spring so far!  Have you got your gardens or container gardens going yet?

Anyway

For months now, readers have been asking for a picture of our garden.  Sorry it has taken me so long, but better late than never.  Across the front, the beds are filled with greens, beets, beans, peas, peppers, watermelons (we ate the first one yesterday – it was awesome!), and herbs.  The back row of framed beds has greens, onions, carrots and more greens.  You can see the patch of corn at the back left, and the beds with tomatoes are on the far left and the back middle, with wire fencing in them to support the vines.  Our potatoes, asparagus, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower and Brussels sprouts are on the far right towards the back (behind the scarecrow).  There is a giant volunteer sunflower in the middle bed in the front row.  It didn’t start to get huge until the beans were mostly gone, and it’s pretty, so we let it stay.  In all, there are 27 veggie beds, all dug by hand to a depth of about 18 – 24 inches and augmented with lots of compost.  The orchard is off to the left and the berry patch is off to the right.  You can see a bit of the orchard in the picture, but not the berry patch.  In the bottom right corner is a blueberry bush, planted in a giant planter that we sunk into the ground.  Blueberries need very acidic soil, and our soil is alkaline.  So we filled the planter with peat moss and compost and buried it, to give the blueberry bush it’s own little acidic oasis.

When we moved in, the backyard was nothing but weeds.  My husband planted the grass from seed, and has tended to it ever since (no chemicals – everything in our yard is organic).  With the lawn in the foreground of the picture, it looks much bigger than it is.  In reality, we have a relatively small patch of grass and the majority of the yard is devoted to the orchard, berry patch, and veggie beds.  But when I tried to get closer to the garden with the camera, I couldn’t fit the whole thing in the picture.

Last weekend, my husband picked enough corn from our garden to fill our wheelbarrow.  He and our son sat on the back porch husking the ears while I blanched the cobs and then froze the kernels on trays.  We now have about 20 quarts of corn in our freezer.

That part was easy.  I wasn’t nervous about freezing corn.  But I was nervous about canning. 

I knew that we were going to have to can tomatoes.  We have 60 tomato plants, and there’s no way I was going to be able to fit all that sauce in the freezer.  Canning made sense, but I had an irrational fear of it.  What if I screwed it up?  What if I poisoned my family?  What if something exploded in the kitchen while I was toiling away?

Turns out, it was a pretty easy process once I got started.  Getting started is usually the hardest part of any new adventure, and this was no exception.

We ended up getting a pressure canner last weekend, because it gives me more options than a water bath canner would (and I can use it as a water bath if I ever choose to).  We had a whole bunch of jars that my mother in law gave us last month, and they all have rings so the only other thing I had to buy was some new lids (actually, a lot of the jars she gave me had never been used, and still had their lids with them.  But the lids were 30+ years old, and I wasn’t sure if the rubber seals would still be good) and a little set of canning gadgets (funnel, jar lifter, and a little gizmo for picking up the lids out of the hot water that they sit in before they go on the jars).

First, we harvested tomatoes.  We filled two huge saucepans, although you can’t even tell that we took anything, as the tomato plants are still a sea of tomatoes.  I washed them and dumped them straight into my VitaMix (love that thing), skins, seeds, and all.  The VitaMix liquefies everything I put in it, and made quick work of the tomatoes.  I ended up with about two gallons of fresh pink sauce.  I simmered the sauce down for a few hours until it had reduced to about a gallon, gotten nice and thick, and turned a beautiful bright red color.

Then it was time to can.  I had read the instructions that came with our canner about 700 times.  I also had a book I was referencing and a web browser with an embarrassing number of canning tabs open.  I double and triple checked everything.  And then I got started.  And it was one of the easiest things I’ve done in a long time.  I ended up with four quarts of organic tomato sauce that all sealed perfectly and are ready for the pantry. 

Now that I did it once, I am excited to get the rest of the tomatoes harvested and canned.  I’m planning to make most of them into sauce as it takes up less room that way, and we go through a lot of tomato sauce around here.  I’m not adding anything extra to the sauce right now, but it will be easy to add whatever seasonings and veggies we want throughout the winter as we use each jar.

I have no idea how many jars of sauce we’ll end up with, but I imagine that we will not need to buy spaghetti sauce anytime soon.  And I am thrilled that I got past my fear of canning and learned something new.