Today, we’re going to be preserving another summertime favorite by freezing corn. Freezing vegetables does have an extra step compared to freezing fruit, but it’s still pretty easy.
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farm
Peach Barbecue Sauce
As we continue discovering what we can do with a box of peaches and revealing What’s in the Mason Jar, we arrive at Peach Barbecue Sauce. A little sweet, a little spicy and a little tangy.
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Easiest Dairy-free Lacto Ferments
Fermenting foods has been a method of preservation for millennia. We often hear about gut health and lactobacilli and their role in our health. Making your own ferments at home is cheaper than buying them from the store and can be fairly easy. Yogurt, milk kefir, and raw cheese offer great options to build up the good gut bacteria. But what if you need a dairy-free option? Three popular ones are: 1. water kefir, which is fermented similar to milk kefir but with water and needs to be maintained and fed regularly, 2. kombucha which is tea fermented using a SCOBY (symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast) also needs to be maintained and fed regularly and 3. fermented produce, which is fresh produce placed in brine in an oxygen-deprived environment. That last one definitely makes the easiest dairy-free lacto ferments in my opinion!
Dairy-free lacto ferments — Swiss chard stems, cucumbers, carrots, and beans.
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Tour Our Summer Garden
The summer is still hot, but we’re already looking toward fall. Join us for a tour of our summer garden. Some of the plants in our garden have been harvested completely, some are finishing up and looking a little sad in the summer heat and unusually dry weather, but we still have some we’re very much looking forward to harvesting. Find out what we planted for the first time this year, what did well for us, what didn’t quite work as planned. In addition, what will be in our fall garden.
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Peach Butter
Peach butter is like apple butter. But sunny and peachy keen.
Today’s recipe is slightly modified from Pick Your Own, a wonderful resource for great basic canning recipes as well as information on freezing produce and finding pick-your-own farms. However, we halved the recipe, reduced the sugar and added a little extra spice.
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Peach Jam
We love peach jam at our house. Likewise, it’s a great way to preserve summer fruit to enjoy for months to come. The process is very similar for many fruits. Most canning recipes for fruit include adding sugar. We like to use a low-sugar recipe and pectin for jam making. This means we aren’t adding quite so much sugar to our diets and the jam has more of that delicious fruit flavor!
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Growing, Harvesting, and Storing Garlic
Growing garlic is so easy, even I can do it! I bet you can, too!
Types of garlic
There are two types of garlic, but many varieties.
Hardneck varieties have larger cloves, but fewer per head, develop a flower stalk also called a scape, can be easier to peel, produce better in colder climates, don’t store as long. This type will have cloves that develop around a hard stalk that runs up the middle of the head.
Softneck varieties have more but smaller cloves per head, don’t develop a scape, can store longer
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Our Grow Lights Set-up for Plant Starts
While we have started plants from seeds in years past, we have not always had luck. Last year, for example, we used some existing shelving in our mudroom. We thought that room was perfect with the many windows on the southern side of the house. However, the room is cold because it is just an old framed in porch has the door we use to go in and out of the house. Also, in this part of the world, the sun isn’t exactly reliable in shining every day this time of year. We did purchase seed warming pads, which helped. But the biggest problem was that our indoor cats decided to eat most of the starts that popped up! We did buy organic starts locally, but were limited to what was available a bit later in the season.
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