Out With the Old

Another staple in our winter diet is winter squash.  We grow one variety because we are saving seeds, and I don’t have enough room for isolation.  But this squash tastes good enough to satisfy our taste buds for winter squash fixed in any manner.  But even I tire of winter squash come spring.

Sweet Meat winter squash – 2012 crop leftovers destined for the hen house

It keeps so well if properly cured that I still have squash left over from the harvest last fall.  This time of year is really the time to be honest in your pantry stocking.  In June when the garden is just getting started I can’t really bring myself to throw out things we haven’t eaten yet.  Many items languish though until fall, whether it is just because we are tired of a particular vegetable or because some foodstuff is taking up space because it is not being consumed because no one likes it.

Last week I went through our canned goods and dry storage, checked dates and pulled items and jars of *jam or fruit we’ll never eat or use, and a few pickle type things and committed them to the pig bucket.  Sometimes I will make  more in the current year and use my old stock first,  but sometimes we just had too much because of a bumper year and sometimes the food goes to the pigs or chickens because we really will never eat it.  In that case, I make a pact with myself to never waste the time to preserve that item again.  I doubt I will ever can pears again, despite it being a reliable crop for us, no one likes pears here, so this year I bartered my crop for things I didn’t grow and everyone including me is much happier.  Winter pears will be put away for eating fresh and canned pears will not fill my pantry.  That’s just keeping it real and honest, and trying remove some of the guilt of not putting up every single thing in sight.   I am beyond that time in my life when I try to disguise foods in a cake or bread just because I know it will disappear with the trappings of butter, sugar and flour.  Pigs and chickens have this unique attribute of being able to turn those canning extras into bacon and eggs.  Amen to that.

That feeling is in the air, with almost the same fervor as spring cleaning, this is fall cleaning and stocking up.  We are expecting a real rain storm in the next day or so, which really accelerated harvesting of some crops and leaving others.  I found myself spending the entire afternoon harvesting tomatoes before the rain would split them, because despite them having the run of the greenhouse, I haven’t watered them since the first week of August, and rain outside now means split tomatoes inside, they are sweet but mighty thirsty.  By dark thirty I was still in the garden harvesting corn too, it was ready, I wasn’t.  So today, the final batches of salsa, more tomato soup and a wheelbarrow of corn to boot.

Happy Harvest Time!

* a quick note:  low acid home canned vegetables are not safe to feed to animals if they haven’t been cooked after opening due to the danger of botulism.  Treat the vegetables you’re discarding as if you were eating them yourself and cook them first to destroy the botulism spores.