October is all about apple orchards, cozy socks, and soaking in some of the best weather of the year…but it’s also when we pack in our root cellar, make winter cold season remedies, pack in the last wood into the woodshed, and test all our systems before the actual cold weather hits.
Things You Might Need This Week
Here are a few things you might need this week:
DIY Root Cellar Plans (Low Cost, Simple Design)
Seasonal Preserving
October means heavy crops of apples, pumpkins, and all the other long-storage crops to keep us fed over the winter months. There’s a lot on the preserving agenda, and here are some resources to help you through:
Apples
How to Make Apple Butter
Simple Recipe for Apple Butter
Pumpkins and Winter Squash
Canning Thai Coconut Squash Soup (Ball Canning Tested Recipe)
Pears, Cranberries, Root Crops & Everything Else
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Things I’m Loving
Tincture Making 101 Mini-Course ~ I’m excited about this new mini-course coming from the Herbal Academy, and tinctures are one of the main ways we preserve herbal remedies for year-round use. When I sent out a newsletter with all my favorite tincture recipes earlier this year, it got so much incredible feedback that I know y’all are into tinctures just as much as I am.
The course goes live on Oct. 31st, and the course is on sale until then with a pre-enrollment discount and special bonuses.
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 every one, 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
Pecans, pounds and pounds of pecans! The chestnuts are safely stored in the fridge, waiting on cooler weather and a peeling party. I’m trying to decide if I have the ambition to do anything with the black walnuts themselves this year. Last year I made a decent batch of walnut husk tincture on the advice of my herbalist friend, for radiation poisoning, and I pray that it is never needed.
50 quarts of wild grape juice canned, two quarts became jelly. Going to use your grape jam recipe when I get time. Finally processed fermented new growth, green, pine cone syrup{ Mugolio Recipe from Forager Chef}. Planted three raised beds, 4' by 25', soft and hard neck garlic. Making three more 4' by 6' raised beds for spring onions. Dug out the potatoes growing in my front yard residential neighborhood raised garden. Finally got my two, 275 gallon food grade totes up on 2' high platforms hooked to roof rain gutters for better gravity flow of stored rain water. And last, I keep debating, weekly with my sweetheart to let me use the rest of the front yard for more potatoes, or tomatoes, or pumpkins, maybe a yard full of sunflowers. So far that request of mine seems to be a bridge too far for her.