A Totally HomeGrown Meal in Early May

The other night, we had Smoked Ham with Garden Potatoes and Carrots from last year!

I thought I would post these pictures to show you that we are Still eating out of our last years Garden.

Because we have a Cold Room down in the basement, where we can keep the temperatures between 32 and 40F, we can store all kinds of veggies down there.

These potatoes and carrots were put into the Cold Room last September. Eight months ago we pulled these veggies from our garden and moved them downstairs.

We leave the dirt on them and actually bury the carrots in buckets of garden dirt.

Here's Dinner....totally HomeGrown using vegetables harvested eight months ago and tasting as fresh as the day they were harvested. The Homegrown Ham is from our Pigs.

Do you have a Cold Room? Or a room that could be turned into a Cold Room? It's not hard to do, it just needs venting. If you have a window in that room, that can be your vent.

Find a spot in your home that you can use as a Cold Room and then get your Garden planted. You will be able to enjoy your veggies all Winter long!

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Busy, Busy....Brining Bacon, Rhubarb Wine

Boy, have we been busy! I'll try and catch you up with what's been happening.

A few days ago, we had packages of lamb brought over to us - folks we bartered with. Trading one half of a pig (to be butchered this Fall) in exchange for a lamb and part of a goat.

So that meant the meat had to go in the freezer. That meant something had to come Out of the freezer, in order to make room.

We're surprised how fast we are filling the two freezers this year. And we still have a LOT of meat to shove in there. Thinking probably another freezer is going to be on a shopping list soon!

So...out came the rest of last year's bacon. The Gman just put it all in a cooler to thaw.

Then he made up his brine, got all the bacon in there and shoved it in the fridge. He'll let it sit in there for about 7 days, then he'll fire up the smoker.

Moving on....

So then, we figured we should do one more picking of rhubarb....that means we now have yet another (our 3rd) batch of rhubarb wine started.

Also, we picked more and more and more Saskatoons. We got another 25 pounds for a second batch of wine. They're all sitting in the deep freezers, waiting to get made into wine.

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Canning Pea Soup

The other day, the Gman made up a big pot of ham and pea soup....homegrown and homesmoked ham, along with those Alaskan peas that we grew in the garden this summer. He added some other goodies, carrots, lovage and other herbs and cooked it for the day over our woodstove.

We decided to can up the leftovers, we've got 6 jars in the canner.

Since we got the smoothtop stove, we're leery of using it for canning....so we picked up one of these things....it attaches to the propane tank of our barbeque....so now I guess all the canning will be done outdoors!

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