We’re back! Join Angela @axeandroothomestead & Annette @azurefarm for their second LIVE cooking class! They will cook in real time and show you how to make delicious spring-based garden-to-table recipes.
What: For this spring class we will teach you how to make homemade pasta, a delicious tart, and more! When and Where: The class will be on Sunday March 26, 2023 from 2-4 pm via ZOOM. How: Sign up here. You will receive: 👩🏻🍳A box of goodies for the class (We created some beautiful and useful items specifically for this class). 🧑🍳Pantry Items + a gift card from Country Life Foods 👨🍳A booklet with all new recipes for spring. The booklet also includes homestead checklists for spring, guides on how to harvest and store your spring produce, and more. This will be an interactive class where you cook some of the dishes alongside us! There are LIMITED SPOTS so sign up before the class fills up. This class is for residents of the US only (but should you really want to attend send us a DM and we will do our best to accommodate). You can find The Harvest Table Cookbook on Amazon.com It's garden planning season! How do you know how much food to grow for canning? Well, there’s no straight answer because there’s too many variables. While canning recipes are consistent, plant yield is based on crop variety, season length, weather, soil type and quality and soil inputs. We also need to account for family consumption rate, ages, number of family members, etc.
But what we *can* do (no pun intended) to determine how much to grow is start by evaluating what you make for meals in an average week: 1. How often do you buy specific canned goods/ingredients? 2. From there, determine how many canned goods of a certain type you need. 3. Next we look at how many pieces of produce (on average) go into your desired can size. 4. Research crop variety average yields. 5. If we know how much food we need, we can better determine how many plants we need. Here’s my calculations for what my family of four eats based on the following common items. Yours will look different and this is just an example. TOMATO SAUCE Stats: 13 pounds are needed per canner load of 9 pints / 3 Tomatoes per pound /39 tomatoes in 9 pints / 4.3 tomatoes per pint / 1 plant can yield 20 tomatoes (average) / 104 pints needed 448 tomatoes needed 23 plants for preservation + fresh eating + donation = 35 PLANTS ...... BLACK BEANS Stats: 175g (6oz) black beans in pint / 1 pint per week / 52 pints per year 175x52 = 9100g per year Plant yield highly variable, can’t estimate weight so go by average plants per person 20 plants per person for a year 20x4 = 80 PLANTS ...... APPLESAUCE Stats: 28 medium apples = 9 pints / 10 pints for the year / 280 apples 125 apples per bushel, on average I need 2 bushels for canning + fresh eating + donation Single semi dwarf apple tree produces up to 500 apples in a season = 1 SEMI-DWARF APPLE TREE ...... DILL PICKLES Stats: 3-4 average sized cucumbers to fill pint jar / 25 pints needed for year / 12 cucumbers per plant, average 4x25 = 100 cucumbers needed 100/12 = 9 plants for canning + fresh eating + donation = 16 PLANTS  We hear about “eating seasonally” all the time but what does that really mean? So many of us have had the luxury of relying on grocery stores for our food that we have no idea about what crops are native to specific times of the year (greenhouse and large-scale industrial grow houses aside)… at least I didn’t before I started gardening and homesteading. Why eat seasonally? Fresh, seasonal food is loaded with more nutrients per bite (and tastes better too). Plus our bodies require more or less of different nutrients by season which those seasonally available produce items helps to fulfill. Out of season strawberries, for example, have to be harvested before their prime—or before they even ripen, for that matter!—to be shipped and distributed elsewhere. They lack the flavor and nutritional content of in-season, local strawberries. Do I buy avocados at the grocery store? Yes I do. Do my children like to include bananas in their homemade lunches? Yep. Neither of which are local nor in-season to me. But the majority of the fruit and veg in my diet comes from homegrown, freshly harvested, frozen, canned or stored homegrown produce. It’s about setting realistic goals rather than giving into the criticism of nay-sayers and not trying at all. So with that, here’s an abbreviated list of common items in season NOW. 👉🏼If you’re interested in looking up your area specifically, there’s a great resource called SeasonalFoodGuide.org. Simply plug in your state and it’ll tell you what’s available for any given month of the year. ❄️WINTER❄️ Apples Beets Broccoli Cauliflower Celery Brussels Sprouts Cabbage Carrots Grapefruit Kale Leafy Greens Lemons Limes Oranges Potatoes Swiss Chard Turnips Radishes Winter squash (butternut, spaghetti, etc)  |
Blog content is authored by Angela, founder and steward of The Arcadia Project.
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