One bad apple…

Food is perishable, and requires us to be on our toes to stop the march of the food right back to the earth that gave it to us.  Canning, freezing, and dehydrating are all ways to halt the natural decay process, but also can leave our food in an altered state.  Canning subjects our foodstuffs to high temperatures, so it isn’t really optimum to eat all canned food.  Freezing is good,  preserving the taste and color of vegetables and fruits, but the shelf life is short, especially for vegetables, and freezing requires expensive electricity.  Dehydrating is also good, but a storehouse of dehydrated foods is a stretch for most households.  The other option is to buy fresh from the store each week.  We use a combination of all of the above.  Right now we’ve been enjoying citrus from the store, and eating a combination of just harvested food, stored raw food, canned food, and frozen food.  It gives us a variety of textures and some convenience, and with our recent greenhouse collapse, all my canned and frozen vegetables have been a lifesaver. 

Gardening and managing our food stores all blends together for me, I look for keeping qualities, flavor, and ease of storage, always with the next season in mind.  Asking myself questions, “Do we like to eat this?”  “Will I replant this variety that was so beautiful in the garden, but doesn’t keep for squat?” 

The last of Costoluto Genovese.  These have definitely seen better days, but are still edible.  With each passing year of eating seasonally, we realize we only want to extend the seasons a little on each end, with a variety of food overlap.  In our farmstead and food provision efforts we do not want to duplicate what is available at the store.  We want seasonal.  Our goal is not to have the earliest and the latest tomato or corn, or salad greens, but to find a balance.  Apparently we have eaten our fill of fresh tomatoes or these loners would be gone.  And to tell the truth, when I made lasagna last week and I opened a jar of roasted tomatoes for the sauce, the aroma transported me back to September when we roasted those tomatoes much more than what I am thinking these 5 tomatoes will be able to muster.  Eating seasonally for us means eating from our precious stocks of food that we so carefully nurtured through their whole growing and harvesting time, which may mean as little as 30 days for greens, to as long as two years for a beef or celery seed. 

To continue that “nurturing” means I have to be the produce manager of my “store.”  Continually monitoring food for spoilage, and also trying to ascertain why spoilage is occurring.  You need to expect some loss, jars may have a poor seal, freezer bags leak air – causing freezer burn, and food that is kept in cool storage succumbs to normal deterioration.  If you see more than occasional spoilage or container failure, you need to be more vigilant.  Sometimes it can be as simple as a child dropping or rough handling freezer bags, or it may be poor canning practices.  Freezing of canned food in its storage area can also cause the seals to fail due to expansion.

I have several of squash spoiling like this.  These winter squash have very dense flesh, so spoiled spots can be cut away, still leaving plenty of squash. 

 

Cutting this open, revealed to me that the seed cavity wasn’t as full as the other squash we have eaten so far this year.  So lack of strong pollination is probably what is causing this to spoil.  You know that old survival of the fittest thing… 

I try to save seed from plants, or fruits that are the best, and that doesn’t just mean the biggest, which is really the only trait available at harvest time.  This squash passed the taste test, but failed the keeping and seed quality test.  So I will not save these seeds. 
And, we will eat the next squash that are exhibiting this problem soon to avoid anymore spoilage.  

Cutting away the bad part on the stem end reveals, still a goodly amount of great squash.  None of the seeds and spoiling pulp will go to waste,  I gave this to the milk cow as a treat and nutritional boost.  But the seeds while not the best for replanting, would have been great roasted for humans too!  But, I felt better giving it to Della, since she gives us so much, including the fertilizer to grow these wonderful squash. 
Our winter squash is one of our staples, we use every part of the fruit in some way, even the cooked skins are relished by our dogs. 

Keeping our fruit room organized is an ongoing project too.  As jars are emptied they are washed, and stored upside down in their respective shelves.  They stay reasonably clean this way and patiently await next season when they will be filled again.  By keeping my jar sizes and and type (wm or nm) together I can easily find what I need when it is time to start canning again.

As good as it feels to fill up the shelves, it feels good to empty them too.  An ongoing secure feeling that we can continue to provide for ourselves is what homesteading means to us.