This past week I shared with paid subscribers that we’re looking for a new homestead, and planning on moving in the very near future, as soon as we can find the right land. Many of you were worried we’d be giving up this life, but far from it. We’re looking for even more space for our growing family and homestead.
It’s hard to give up this land that we’ve tended for the past decade, but at the same time, it’s exciting to start fresh with all we've learned here. We’re still young, and we plan on taking a cutting of each of our plants with us. We’ll have all our favorites within a few years, all while leaving everything in place for whoever comes next own, care for, and love this land.
In the meantime, while homesteading in transition can be tricky, we’re doing our best to live each day to its fullest and love this land while it’s still ours.
In the Garden
At this point, the season for more than a dozen different soft fruits has passed…but there are always more. Each week brings new flavors to enjoy, even in a cool northern climate in Zone 4.
This week we’re harvesting alpine strawberries, unlike cultivated strawberries, they bare all summer, even through peak heat. Nice deep root systems keep them well supplied with water even through drought, and the extra sunshine means more sugar in the tiny but intensely flavorful fruits.
Blueberries are at their peak, and picking them takes up half an hour each day (but it’s one of my favorite ways to spend time for sure)!
Thimbleberries are ripening, along with the first autumn raspberries and our first flushes of blackberries.
In the annual garden, the first meaningful harvests of annual vegetables have begun, and we’re pulling in the old standbys in abundance. We have plenty of tomatoes, eggplants, new potatoes, carrots, and beets for our summer table.
Cherry tomatoes can be especially prolific…
We can them as a sweet tomato sauce, and even peel them (it’s quicker than you think) and can them as whole tomatoes for adding to pasta or Thai curries in the winter months.
Removing the peels ensures they stay sweet and tender in the canner (rather than bitter and tough), and believe it or not, they hold together quite well.
It’s also the season of tomatillos and husk cherries, which I actually don’t even plant anymore. We love them, but they’re such prolific self-seeders that they volunteer just about everywhere. The birds spread them, and my dog even jumps up to steal their fruit…meaning they’ll sprout every corner of our land (even out of the edge of the gravel driveway).
We had them come up in a hayfield one year, and we actually harvested a bucket load of tomatillos with a rake, pulling their resilient fruits right out of waist-high grass.
With a little support (like at tomato cage) you can pull buckets of fruit off of them.
Tomatillos are large and green, and best used in savory recipes and green sauces.
Closely related husk cherries are small and yellow, and they taste like a cross between a strawberry and a pineapple. It’s amazingly tropical, sweet, and refreshing, all from a plant that quickly goes from a tiny seed to a massive plant in your annual garden.
Though husk cherries are little known, they’re nothing new. Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote about them in her books, and they were one of the best ways to enjoy the flavor of fresh fruit in the first year on a new homestead (without waiting for fruit trees to grow big enough to bare).
They make an intensely tropical husk cherry jam, and it’s the closest we can get to homegrown pineapple or mango here in the north.
In the Kitchen
While we’re preserving the garden’s bounty, we’re also working on catching up on what’s usually considered “winter” canning at our house. Last winter I put up 56 quarts of canned pinto beans, and you’d think that’d be enough…but we’re already out.
I can’t complain, with a family that loves beans 100 different ways, it’s easy to put frugal meals on the table. But it also means I spent time indoors this week pressure canning enough dry beans to get us through until cool weather. It takes the same amount of time to cook dry beans as it does to pressure can them, so canning a big batch means you heat the house once…and put dozens of meals in a jar.
The canner also ran several times this week putting up a 28 quarts of chicken stock (bone broth) from all the bones and trimmings we’ve saved in the freezer.
This, in theory, could also wait for winter…but we’ll need the freezer space shortly since we order a side of beef each year from a local farm.
I have plenty of beef charcuterie recipes in the works to share with you all, which will mean the beef won’t be taking up freezer space for long. That beef bacon we made last year was only the beginning. (Recipes coming this winter…hopefully.)
Wild Edibles in Season
Early August means wild versions of all the common garden berries…blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, of course.
It also means some less common wild edibles that you won’t find in your garden, like bunch berries (Cornus canadensis), which are one of my son’s favorites. They’re low-growing, shade-loving plants in the dogwood family (be careful with this one, there are a lot of low-growing toxic red berries, but if you do your homework, there’s nothing that really looks like bunchberries.)
Flavor-wise, they’re sweet and gelatinous, and historically they were used to sweeten and set jams because they contain a lot of pectin and sugar…but not a lot of flavor. Kids have never been turned off by eating a spoon full of plain sugar, so they’re popular with the littles, but adults usually think they’re a bit plain.
Chokecherries and black cherries are ripe this time of year too. Usually, chokecherries come before black cherries, and they’re flavorful but astringent. Black cherries come a bit later, and they all sweet…if you can beat the birds to them.
It’s also peak season for chanterelles, lobster mushrooms, and chicken of the woods mushrooms.
Wild elderberries are ripening in warmer southern locations, but we’ll have to wait another month before we can harvest them for our homemade elderberry wine. That’s honestly for the best, there’s already more fruit ripening, both wild and cultivated, than we can reasonably handle!
What are you harvesting, preserving, building or exploring on your homestead this week? I’d love to hear about it!
Leave me a note in the comments…
(Comments only, please. Emails tend to get lost in my inbox, and as much as I’d love to get back to each and everyone, my screen time is very limited…and things fall through the cracks, and emails get buried in my inbox. If you comment here, they’re all in one place, and it’s much easier to get back to every single one.)
Until Next Time,
Ashley at Practical Self Reliance
Hi! I bought a big sleeve of canning lids from Lehman’s earlier this year. I don’t know if they still have them in quantity, but I’ve been pleased with their quality. I do a lot of canning for my market booth products. I haven’t had a failure with the Lehman’s lids yet. (And this is my second sleeve of them.)
I'm really looking forward to your future blog post on the Thai curries! My husband and I love dinner-in-a-jar from pressure canning and love curries. I saw a curry sauce in Angi Schneider's book that I'm definitely trying this year. I'm also looking at experimenting with making my own butter chicken sauce -- basically tomato sauce with Indian spices instead of Italian spices, which seems to be an acceptable substitution from what I can decipher -- so all I have to do is add coconut milk and butter and chicken when I'm putting dinner together.