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I harvested about 15 pounds of organic carrots yesterday out of my kitchen garden. My kitchen garden is a large raised bed outside, right next to my — yes, you guessed it — kitchen! By Golly, Ned, you just won a free copy of my limited edition Guide To Parallel Universe Travel For Less.

Carrots store very well in the fridge, but I will slice and freeze about 9 pounds of these carrots for stews and soups and roasts this winter. I have carrots growing in my main garden in amongst my tomatoes and the end of this month I will sow my fall crop of carrots. My daughter will eat Mom’s fresh garden carrots raw but not “store ones”.

I harvested more calendula yesterday and hung the flowers to dry. We ate fresh green beans with our dinner.  There is quite a measure of assurance for me to grow some of our own food. Not to mention that it tastes superior to anything you can buy in a grocery store.

My daughter and I then canned 10 jars of blueberry jam. This jam cost me 6$ in jars, $2.50 in Reduced Sugar Pectin, $4.50 in fresh blueberries and about .30 cents in sugar. For $13.30 we made $30 (at least) in jam. Next year, we will have the jars and hopefully, the blueberries in our berry patch will fruit better.

Canning jam with my 11 year old was a lot of fun. She pushed the pulse button on the food processor to chop (not puree) the blueberries, she measured precisely — remember canning is chemistry — she poured the sugar quickly into the blueberry jam in its rolling boil — and her most favorite, she ladled the ready jam into the funnel on the jar. She got very good at knowing how much to ladle in to get the right headspace. I did all the hot dangerous activities with the hot jars and boiling water. We have a lid lifter — a green plastic stick with a magnet on one end — and this fascinated her to no end. She also enjoyed filling out the pretty labels and wants to be the one who sticks the labels on the jars.

It is much cheaper to entertain children then we give them credit for. And they enjoy being productive and contributing to the family’s well-being.  Canning teaches math, chemistry, language arts, domestic arts, fundamental business principles and how to be self-sufficient.  And it is not as time consuming as you might think, we canned the blueberry jam in about one hour.

This week I took my second class in home preservation. Not the kind of home preservation where you storm into the bank and make them stop all the foreclosures in your neighborhood so that your own property value doesn’t fall into the black abyss of no return.

Rather, the class covered how to can fruits and tomatoes in a hot water bath and the week before was how to can jams/jellies and how to freeze vegetables and fruits. Why take these classes?

1. It may be the end of the world and I’m gonna want some fruit.
2. It is kinda stupid to grow food and throw away what you can’t eat. Like investing in the stock market.
3. You never know what they really put in those cans you buy at the grocery store, especially anything from China.

A long time ago, I canned some strawberry jam. Otherwise, I have mostly frozen my garden produce or stored it. Last summer I tried to make refrigerator pickles that were put in jars, but stored in the fridge. These jars of pickles became fizzing stink bombs, needless to say, no pickles for us.

It is not that hard to make your own jams/jellies and can your own tomatoes and fruits. There is also pectin now for freezer jam and last weekend, I made 5 jars of blueberry freezer jam. It is much cheaper to make your own jam.  Even if you have to buy the fruit. For instance, I needed 5 cups of crushed blueberries, the pectin, and the fancy twist-on-caps freezer jars. I spent 8.69$ to make 15$ worth of jam and next year, I will not need to buy jars again. Hopefully, if the bees ever make a comeback, I will grow enough blueberries again to produce jam. It’s not looking good this year for blueberries here.

Our teacher shared many enlightened stories in case we were mentally impaired. For instance, canning in a hot water bath is never done in the bathroom. The bathtub is not where you work at. What a revelation! We also learned not to use Alzheimer inflicting aluminum pans and instruments when canning tomatoes after we did so in our hands-on classroom. I mean she actually made us use an aluminum pan to make salsa in. I could feel the aluminum robbing my capacity to remember what I was learning as I breathed in the salsa fumes cooking in the pan.

I am going to work on adding to my horde soon. Apricot jam. Blueberry Jam. Peaches. Pears. Tomatoes. Canned to store on a shelf. Hopefully, raspberry jam from my patch, but I’m worried about not seeing a lot of fruit.

Do you ever wonder if there is some kind of mass conspiracy to prevent us from being able to grow our own food? I mean, what is it with the weather? I truly have no idea what will grow in my garden this year because of this freaky weather. And how about GMO seeds- seeds that grow produce that have sterile seeds and cannot grow without being sprayed with cancer inducing pesticides? And what has happened to our bees? No bees, no pollinization, no fruit/vegetables.

When you work your tush off planting non GMO seeds and hoeing and weeding and siccing the chickens on the slugs and snails that are taking over the world and spraying NEEM oil and picking the bugs off by hand and there is not much food produced as a result, there is something going on. Don’t you think?

I figure if the aliens invade, or if they declare Martial Law, or if hyper-inflation brings out the wheelbarrows to haul our dollars in, my family and I can hide in the basement and eat jam out of the jar.

I tried a new recipe for jam the other day. I didn’t want to can any strawberry jam and didn’t want to make alot of it. It is not the big flavor in our house. I will wait for my raspberries to come in and make raspberry jam.

Which reminds me to sign up for the MSU extension food preservation workshops today. It has been a long time since I tried canning. I usually freeze or store. Last year, I tried to can refrigerator pickles (six month life in fridge) and ALL of those failed. Fizzing bubbles in the cans and bad smell. Canning makes me nervous, but I want to tackle it.

This homemade organic strawberry jam is so delicious I have begun inventing excuses to have some. It tastes like jam used to taste when I was a child in the 1970’s. We usually don’t eat jam that has sugar in it, so I lessened the amount of sugar the recipe called for and then further lessened it when I made a second batch. The recipe takes about an hour from start to finish and produces about one cup of strawberry jam that will sit in the fridge for two weeks. This is a good way to use imperfect strawberries. Slice off the imperfections and tops into a container for the chickens and rabbits and slice the good parts into your measuring cup.

From The America’s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook:

4 cups sliced thin strawberries

2 Tablespoons fresh lemon juice (yes, I squeezed a fresh lemon)

3/4 cup sugar (but I reduced this down to less than 1/2)

Put these ingredients in a stainless steel skillet for faster cooking or a pot for slower cooking. On medium heat, stir nearly continuously and keep on a simmer. When strawberries have cooked down to about half their original amount and the concoction looks syrupy and is thickening, take a small spoonful out and put into a bowl that sits on top of ice water in another bowl. If after 30 seconds, the jam doesn’t run when you tip the bowl, the jam is finished. Keep cooking if it is too runny. I cooked my jam much longer than the recipe called for, as I’m not interested in runny jam.

I made a couple of extra batches of this jam out of another bucket of strawberries I just picked for Father’s Day presents.

This is what I picked out of my organic berry patch today. Sarah, 11, helped only until her legs got sore. Berry picking is hard work. This is my second bucket and it is only June 13th. I am predicting I will need to pick at least two more times.

Today, I will wash through them all. The ones with defects, I cut off their tops and the defects and put these in a container. I then slice the remainder of the berry into a 2 cup size bowl and add maybe a 1/4 cup sugar. This will be topping for shortcake and angel food cake, and some of us just eat it out of a dish.

The container of berry tops and bad parts will be shared between the rabbit and the chickens.

A small portion of the rest will go in another container for fresh eating.

Cookie Loves Eating Strawberries

I will freeze the remainder. First, I pull the tops off — not cut them off — then I set them in a single layer on cookie sheets that I’d covered with wax paper. These cookie sheets will be placed in my freezer. In a couple of days, I will then bag the frozen strawberries into freezer plastic bags. Frozen strawberries are used in my house in fruit smoothies, strawberry margaritas and as snacks. All of my kids have always eaten frozen berries as a snack.

My strawberry patch is about 20 feet long by 10 feet wide. It is a raised bed made from recycled railroad ties (recycled in that they were pulled off other people’s yards) and we filled the strawberry side of the bed with sandy soil. My berries are both June-bearing and everbearing and I planted many varieties. I probably have about 150 plants. The spray I generally use for pests is Neem oil or other organic pest sprays and I fertilize my berries using the all natural Spray-n-grow products.

Strawberry and Blue/Black Berry Raised Bed

The strawberry patch is combined with our blueberries and blackberries and it is fenced with also 2′ of chicken wire running along the bottom. Steel hoops were placed over the top and the entire area was covered in a netting that in its former life was used in a pond to keep the leaves out in fall.  The netting has holes large enough to allow the bees in and out, but small enough to keep the birds out. 

We did run a water line out to the patch, the spigot can be seen in the left front corner. I do water my berries once weekly, if it did not rain enough. It is especially important to keep well-watered new strawberry plants their first summer.

Strawberries are very easy to grow. This year, I grew Borage from seed and placed several of these plants in the strawberry patch to help repel pests. But pests have not really been a problem in the berry patch.

I am making strawberry shortcake tonight — with homemade whipped cream!