Filling up the homestead Pantry, for the year ahead means the year is spent living seasonally.
Food can be gathered and created in many ways.
In late Autumn the kitchen becomes the cozy hub for all sorts of creations. The canner resides
on the stove top and the table can be found with bubbling jars of wonderful produce cooling down.
I'm thinking about making Lilypilly tarts with these foraged Lily pillies. I want to
experiment and create my own Lillypilly jelly recipe using tangelos, I think it could work,
they're both in season so I might as well have a play.
Filling the pantry with produce from the vegetable garden has been ongoing now for months.
Much of the summer growing space has now transitioned into winter growing crops.
Turnips are one of our main winter crops,
to ensure we have a continuous supply of turnips throughout the winter I have seeds starting in
the seed trays, seedlings in the ground, as well as the turnips that I'm harvesting now.
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Turnips are a fast growing crop and they're delicious roasted in some herbs butter and salt.
Every year I spend some time turning onions into my onion marmalade,
this is my onion marmalade recipe that I've shown you before, it requires a lot of tears,
frying, slow cooking and finally canning and it's worth all of the effort. When a
jar is poured into the tart base and cooked in the oven, it's a gourmet, fast meal in a jar [Music]
It would have to be one of my most favorite things to can!
[Music] Lilypillies are not something you want to taste until they've been turned into their
final product, when they've been mashed up, had the seeds strained out and they're
cooked to perfection, then they taste like angels have blessed them. They're so sweet,
delicious and beautiful. Before that, they taste like the devil spawn them himself,
so be patient when you're cooking with them because they are also worth the wait.
[Music] We had a small pumpkin harvest again this year. I need to find a sunnier location
to grow next year's pumpkins if I want to have a bigger crop,
this is something I will have to work on over the winter. Creating a pumpkin patch
with raised growing beds, where they get plenty of sun, access to daily water and
that are also out of reach from the animals, both the dogs and the chickens and ducks.
While my style of homesteading is very much seasonal living,
I'm also glancing back at the seasons that have created The Bounty or not
so Bountiful Harvest and planning to create the future seasons full pantry.
A house is finally being built in The Paddock next door, there are builders on the roof,
so I'm cutting up some net fabric to make Cafe curtains, for privacy for the kitchen window.
Life is about finding solutions to challenges.
I'm really happy with how my Lilypilly jelly turned out and it didn't cost me any money, apart
from the sugar everything else was from the garden or foraged and the Lillypilly Tarts look so good.
I prefer to have no curtains in the kitchen and to be able to look out at the food growing outside
and to see the sky as well however I can easily slide them open when I'm cooking, if I want to.
They give me the Privacy that I need in this chapter.
I'm growing chilies in Winter, instead of pulling up the chili plants in the Autumn,
I thought I'd put some plastic around the base to protect them from the frosts and to see if
I could get them to grow through to the next summer. We've had a few frosts so far and I'm
still successfully harvesting and preserving chilies and I couldn't be happier [Music]
Pear nectar is a drink that I like to have on my pantry shelves. I usually water bath Can it, but
today I'm going to water bath can half of my jars and pressure can the other half of the
jars to see the difference in both look and taste. Pressure canning is actually easier,
that's how I find it anyway and you can fit twice as many jars in the canner at once,
so you're doubling up the amount you're processing. So if pressure canning works out
all right, this will be how I will be pressure canning the pear nectar in future years....
and while overseeing the canning process I can deburr my candle making racks for making
the hand-dipped, beeswax birthday candles, which I did show you in a video the other day.
It's good to have a project to do while you're canning,
so you're getting twice as many things done
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the water bath canned pear nectar separates differently to the pressure canned pear nectar
however they both taste the same after a few weeks on the shelf, once you give the jars a shake up,
so I'll be pressure canning my pear nectar in the future years because then I'll be
getting more done at once and I'll be able to make up bigger batches.
Whether water bath canning or Pressure canning, I love getting the food out of the pressure canner,
it always smells so good and it's exciting to see if the jars have sealed properly, which they have!
My Chilies are dehydrated and while it wasn't a great year for pumpkin, it was a sensational
year for growing Chilli and that's how it is with gardening and growing your own food,
some years you may have a really good crop of something and it will last you two extra years
and then you may have a year where you don't grow as much, that's why growing a variety of
food makes sense and mono cropping just doesn't make sense because if you have a mono crop and
you lose the crop or it doesn't work out that year, then you don't have anything.
[Music]
While I was busy filling the pantry, late Autumn transitioned into Winter and
I found myself up in the hills, visiting my friend John.
He lives off grid, in the bush and has a regenerative farm, he grows all sorts
of foods with no chemicals and like at Moat Cottage, his animals contribute to the health
and well-being of the soil and he uses plenty of mushroom compost, that he collects each week.
I was hoping to find some turkey tail mushrooms on my visit today, however the only turkey
tails we've found were these magnificent creatures, which have me wondering....'
how much work would be involved in processing turkey for Christmas dinner?' I can't imagine
it would be harder than Muscovy duck and I've done plenty of chickens too, so maybe I'll just have to
think about it [Music] When focusing on filling up the pantry you see food everywhere you go.