The Hopeful Homesteader

Tag: gardening

  • When life gives you chokecherries…

    When we moved into our house and I was looking at our yard, I was most excited about the fact that we had apple trees. I had already made apple sauce from my mother-in-law’s trees for Cece when she was a baby, and so I was thrilled to have my own. I was also excited about the possibility of expanding our garden from what the previous owners had initially set up and enjoyed looking at all the different plants and trees. Not once did I get excited about this giant bush/tree that was growing near our apple trees. It had little tiny black berries, which I naively believed must be inedible. I was quickly informed that they were chokecherries. This did not increase my excitement. First tasting one of them also made me less than thrilled. If anyone has ever eaten a chokecherry right off the stem, you know how bitter it is. Not to mention that the seed is pretty sizeable compared to the size of the cherry. All in all, I thought, it was a complete waste of a plant. However, I also did not like the prospect of trying to take down this giant bush/tree and Brent liked it and said we would end up using the berries. In my head, I laughed, as I saw no way that the berries would ever be enjoyable. Cut to this year, where we harvested over 7 gallons of berries and suddenly found ourselves with a ton of juice that needed to be dealt with. So, without further ado, here are my 3 suggestions for dealing with a bunch of chokecherries other than leaving them as bird food and a lovely wasp attractor (I do not recommend this).

    1.  Chokecherry Jam

    This is by far the favourite for Brent and the kids. The girls would gladly eat the jam just with a spoon out of the jar. I feel like this is the most palatable way of eating the chokecherries however, it is also the most time consuming of the three options we tested out this year. For starters, you need to make your chokecherries into juice. This is necessary for all three of the options. I am sure there are many different methods to do this, but here was our approach.

    First, we washed all the berries. This was extremely time consuming because we had to pick out the leaves that had been thrown in by letting the girls help us with the harvest. Once the berries were all washed and leaf free, we put them in batches into our biggest pots that we had with enough water to just cover the berries. We let the berries come to a boil and then let them boil for 15 minutes. I would highly suggest anyone planning on trying any of these methods to keep a close eye on your pots to avoid boiling over. After the berries were done boiling, the real fun started.

    You cannot eat the pits of the cherries as they are poisonous when crushed and consumed. So you have to smoosh the berries to extract the juice while keeping the pits and pulp separate. Some methods I saw online suggested using a sieve and the back of a spoon and then running the whole thing through cheesecloth. Luckily, we had inherited a fancy gadget from Brent’s aunt called a food mill. I have no clue how old this thing is, but it was ordered from the Eaton’s catalogue so that should give a hint. With the food mill, you put it over your bowl or pot then place your cooked berries and juice mixture in the top and then you turn the crank repeatedly to extract all the juice. What is left in the mill are the seeds and pulp with we had to continually dump into a bowl to be thrown out in the back field. It took many, many, many batches to get all 7 gallons of chokecherries through the mill, but finally it was done. I have to give a big shoutout to Brent at this point because he did most of it as I had carpal tunnel surgery in January and my hand and wrist are still not back up to 100%.

    Once we had the juice extracted it was time to make jam. We found all our jars, seals and rings and sterilized all of them. We then went and bought 10kg of sugar and 5 boxes of Certo (pectin), figuring that should be good enough. Spoiler, it wasn’t. The recipe we followed had the following measurements:

    3.5 cups of chokecherry juice

    1 tsp butter or margarine

    1 box of Certo

    4.5 cups of sugar

    0.5 cups of lemon juice (OPTIONAL)

    First you take a pot and combine your juice(s), margarine and Certo and bring it to a boil. Once it is boiling you add your sugar and continue to boil for 2 minutes. Once done you pour it into your jars, place the seals and rings on. After that, you place the sealed jars into a boiling water bath for 15 minutes and voila you have jam (once it cools and congeals).

    This recipe was very simple to follow, however it warned, as did Brent’s mom, that you cannot double the recipe you need to do separate batches. Apparently, it is something to do with how the pectin works. At any rate, 3.5 cups of juice were barely making a dent in our buckets that we had harvested, and it became very quickly apparent that our 5 boxes of Certo and 10 kg of sugar simply wasn’t going to cut it. We had to make a few more trips to the store during the few days we spent processing all the chokecherries. In the end, we ended up with 53 jars of jam, varying in size from pints to full quarts.

    • Chokecherry syrup

    After 53 jars of jam, we still had juice left and wanted to try something different. Brent had the idea to make syrup as the recipe seemed simpler. It said to boil 3 cups juice with 4 cups sugar for 15 minutes, then put in jars. No water bath, no pectin. It sounded so simple and easy. It probably would have been very simple if one of the pots hadn’t boiled over with sticky syrup all over the stove top and then leaked into the oven door. We can still see the marks on the door. The house also smelled of burnt sugar and we lost a few good towels to the incident because chokecherries really stain. All in all, this one gets second billing because I believe it to be an acquired taste, and Brent is determined to acquire it to make sure the terrible boiling syrup incident was not in vain. We only made 4 jars because we weren’t sure whether the girls would eat it, but Brent refuses to let things go to waste and has vowed he will learn to love it and eat all 4 jars.

    • Chokecherry liqueur

    This one was really out of jam fatigue. We didn’t want to waste any of our harvest, but we also really didn’t want to end up with 100 jars of jam. So, I found a recipe that would use up more of the juice without requiring mountains of sugar and time spent boiling and water bathing cans. Here is the recipe:

    2 cups chokecherry juice

    0.5 cups sugar

    0.5 cups clear alcohol (we chose vodka)

    You heat the juice and the sugar, just long enough that the sugar dissolves, then take it off the heat. Allow to cool slightly, then add the alcohol. Pour into a sealed container or bottle and let it rest for a month.

    Now truth be told, we have not yet tasted this one as it needs to sit for a month. It did however, allow us to finish the chokecherry juice and wasn’t super expensive as I was able to buy 1.14 L of vodka for around $30. I will update on my Instagram page when the official tasting occurs to see whether or not it is really worth doing. But I was happy, just to have the juice out of my fridge.

    This is only the beginning of the harvest season. We have started making pickles as our cucumbers have taken off now, we have harvest about 30 lbs of green beans and the plants are still producing more, we boiled several cabbages to be used for cabbage rolls and even more that was turned into sauerkraut. The next thing to be harvested will be our apples, followed by tomatoes (if they ever start ripening), then potatoes, peas, beets and the last will be our pumpkins at the end of October hopefully (weather permitting). Needless to say, I will not have my kitchen for the next two to three months as it will be continually covered in jars, or fruit or vegetables.

  • My reluctant journey into gardening

    As I have mentioned before, gardening is not something that came to me naturally. I am the youngest of four daughters. All three of my older sisters each worked a summer at a plant nursery. They each spent a summer, in the heat, working long hours with plants, doing manual labour. I would see them come home dirty, tired and often sunburned. Despite all the work, dirt and sunburns, they all told me it was worth it as they made great money for a summer job. I opted instead to make slightly over minimum wage at Starbucks. I am embarrassed to say that back then the idea of my hands having to get super dirty, or the possibility of bugs being around, freaked me out way too much even if it meant making a lot of money. I preferred to consume way too many frappuccinos and burn my hands with ridiculously hot milk when certain customers would insist on specific temperatures for their milk as if somehow drinking scalding milk made you more sophisticated than drinking regular lattes. This was of course back when you could still request exact temperatures at Starbucks, and we had to write down every preference on the cup with a sharpie instead of the computer just printing off the order to stick on the cup. Yes, I am still to this day a bit jealous that we had to do so much more than the baristas must today.

    It wasn’t like we had tons of plants growing in our small cement pad of a backyard growing up. There was a little flower bed in front of the house, that included some giant bush that was apparently always taking over everything. I remember we had some chives as my dad liked to have fresh chives. Mom always had some plants and flowers growing in the backyard flower bed, but I couldn’t tell you what they were as I always just remember the ivy that seemed to take over the whole back fence. There were a few house plants growing up, but I don’t think I ever watered them or even took an interest in knowing how often they should be watered. I will always remember when we tried to have an apple tree, and we got a little one in the back yard. Our dog promptly chewed it down to nothing, and that was the end of that. We also didn’t need to ever mow our lawn or use a weedwhacker because we lived in a townhouse, and they had someone who was responsible for yard maintenance. When I was living with my sister and her husband, when I first moved to Winnipeg, I remember being so fascinated by his electric mower that I pleaded with him to let me mow the lawn because it was such a novelty. That novelty quickly wore off and I never did it again.

    Even when Brent and I moved into our first house together, I rarely mowed the lawn. He used to work on the railways and would sometimes be gone for two or three weeks at a time, and I would leave the grass to grow until he got back. I never raked the leaves or did any weeding, I took the approach that dandelions gave a little colour to our boring grass out front, much to the horror of my mother-in-law. She only lived a few blocks away and I would often look out my front window and see her there pulling weeds from my front lawn. She is an avid gardener, and her backyard always looks like something out of a gardening magazine. The first time I met her was when Brent brought me home for a backyard barbecue dinner, and I was so amazed at all the flowers she had and how perfect they all seemed. Not only did she grow beautiful flowers, but she had raspberries and tons of vegetables that she used for canning. It was amazing, but it seemed like so much work that I continued to happily tend to my one lilac tree that had come with our house that only required the occasional trimming, which I would generally pass off to Brent. She tried, in vain, to plant flowers in our yard, and I promptly managed to kill them all. Not exactly a recipe for a great future homesteader.

    We did have some small success with a few vegetables in our small yard. We planted cucumbers which actually vined up the lilac tree which was pretty impressive and made picking them very easy. We got a few cherry tomatoes, though we lost a lot to bugs. Our peppers never lasted and always got bugs or diseased before they were ripe enough to pick. Our biggest successes were our potatoes and raspberries that we planted in front of our house. Our raspberry bush went crazy and was producing awesome berries. The potatoes I found to be the most satisfying to cultivate. Every time you dig into the dirt, it feels like you are searching for buried treasure. The potatoes and raspberries were the first big crops, or at least I thought they were big at the time, and they really sparked my curiosity in my gardening potential.

    When we moved to our new house in the country, it was the first day of September, so we were not going to be harvesting any crops that year. We did, however, inherit two crab apple trees, a mini apple tree, a chokecherry bush and grape vines from the previous owners. We collected box, after box, after box, of apples during that first month in the house. There were apples everywhere. I had no idea what we would do with this many apples and it felt extra daunting as I was 8.5 months pregnant at the time. Ultimately, we chose the easiest option which was to make them into applesauce. We filled almost our entire small chest freezer with applesauce. My mom came by to help with the chokecherries which she graciously offered to turn into chokecherry jam for us as long as she got to keep some. Free jam and free harvesting, um yes please! She also decided to pick all the grapes and turn them into jam as well. Seeing all of our preserves from doing absolutely nothing, I was certain that I would be able to handle this gardening thing and that I would be able to make all kinds of foods with our fresh produce.

    In the spring, we started planning out what we would be putting into our garden. As Penny is born at the beginning of October, I became obsessed with the idea of having a pumpkin themed birthday for her and insisted that we make a pumpkin patch, something that we had never had the space, nor the interest in my case, in doing before. Brent got some help from our neighbour and tilled a patch behind the barn that turned out to be bigger than our entire lot of our old house. He threw in the seeds we had saved from the 9 pumpkins we had bought in October when we had first moved in, and we figured we would see what happened. What happened was we ended up with close to 400 pumpkins. I was shocked and pleasantly surprised. We also had another huge crop of apples, zucchini, tomatoes, peas, beans, potatoes and cucumbers. All from just testing out throwing some seeds in the ground and seeing what came up. We thought we had hit the motherload for planting. Clearly it was going to be easy to grow our own vegetables out here. We had barely done any research or planning and had huge success with our vegetables.

    Last year, we thought we would take some more time to plan things out as to maximise the growing potential. We started seeds indoors in early/mid spring. We had about 70 tomato plant seedlings ready to go, although some certainly got damaged with having a 1.5 year old and 4 year old wanting to touch them all the time. Regardless, we were optimistic that our gardens would be bountiful again and we even decided to try corn. Unfortunately, Mother Nature had other plans. No sooner had we transplanted our 70 tomato plants that we were hit with weeks of intense rain that flooded our entire garden. Sadly, there were no survivors out of the tomatoes. Our pumpkin patch, which had been so promising the year before, had the opposite problem and promptly dried up leaving our vines scorching. The weeds got away from us and we were dealing with thistles the size of our daughters. Despite efforts from both my mother-in-law and my mother to come help with the weeding, we gave up halfway through as I had little time to deal with it when Penny was still very dependent on me. I managed to get my hands dirty a little, especially with the teeny beets that we ultimately ended up composting as they were so small they weren’t worth much. We got a few cucumbers, four pumpkins, and a couple potatoes, although the potato bugs ravaged our crops last year.

    This year, instead of scaling back we decided to go all out on our seeds. We tested a few seeds from each of our vegetables by placing them in between damp paper towel and sealing them in a Ziploc bag to see if they would sprout.

    We ordered new seeds online, and I decided to no longer fear my flower killing abilities and I ordered a dozen new flowers to try to make my own cut flower garden. Now, is this ambitious, absolutely. We are planting potatoes, corn, peas, beans, pumpkins, broccoli, tomatoes, peppers, spinach, romaine lettuce, beets, carrots, garlic, onions, raspberries, strawberries, and blueberries. Would it perhaps have been more prudent to scale back and try to hone our gardening skills to make sure we don’t have another bad crop year like last year, probably. But Brent and I have always been the type to just leap in and figure it out later. We bought our first house 4 days after we decided we should start looking for a house. Brent quit his job when he decided to start his own company 5 months before Cece was born. We have always just believed that things will work out and if not, we will figure it out. This is our approach to this homesteading adventure, and our grand gardening plans, what’s the worst that could happen?