Basements are a boon for those homeowners lucky enough to have one. They are cooler, expansive, and offer a lot of opportunities for extra living space or storage.
21.07.2023 - 22:23 / awaytogarden.com
REACHING INTO THE NET BAG of onions in my barn this morning, I got a little wakeup call—from a few onions that were themselves waking up. Uh-oh. A quick check of the garlic revealed a couple of restless heads as well. An extra-warm winter has meant an extra-warm storage space, so it’s time to intervene before all is lost. I’m peeling and freezing whole garlic cloves and chopped onions today to get me the rest of the way into the next harvest. It’s simple:
I slice or chop onions and put them in freezer bags or—to avoid plastic—freezer jars. Freezing the amount you typically use for a recipe in one container rather than a giant portion is easier when it comes time to use the produce.
With the onion pieces and with whole, peeled cloves of garlic, I toss them lightly in a very small amount of olive oil first, hoping to reduce any freezer burn. By freezing about half my cloves each year I never buy garlic but have my own all 12 months. There are several tactics for doing this.
Read my popular post on how to grow and store a year of garlic.Freezing a portion of your harvest can and should be done at the time the crops are dug and cured, of course—and they’ll be firmer and fresher then (though garlic can be harder to peel when it’s at its peak concentration of oils). But if some of what you have on hand right now isn’t keeping well, hurry and rescue it by freezing—or making a big batch of stock or soup or something else. With the onions, the choice of rescue-remedy recipe is a no-brainer (and freezes beautifully itself):
Making onion soup, David Lebovitz-styleOne more thing: Be sure to check on other foodstuffs—stored vegetables such as potatoes, winter squash–and overwintering ornamental plants in the garage, basement,
Basements are a boon for those homeowners lucky enough to have one. They are cooler, expansive, and offer a lot of opportunities for extra living space or storage.
If you want to Grow Unlimited Supply of Onions in Big Plastic Bottles at Home then we will tell you how with some onion sprouts you already have at your home!
Whether you like to use your homegrown green beans in a good old-fashioned green bean casserole or in modern stir-fries, learning how to freeze green beans for later use is important, especially when the garden is producing them like crazy. Thankfully, freezing green beans from the garden is an easy process, but there are some essential steps to follow for success. In this article, I offer simple step-by-step instructions so you can enjoy the fruits of your garden for many months to come.
You may have already noticed that rice prices are higher than normal, which is largely due to the impacts of the war in Ukraine and erratic weather for the leading global suppliers of the grain. Now, India, the world’s largest exporter of rice, just banned nearly half of its overall shipments in order to reduce its domestic prices following heavy rains, which impacted the rice harvest. You might be asking, “What does this mean for me?”—we’ve got you covered. The good news is, if you’re worried about how the ongoing global rice shortage could impact your plate, you’re not alone, but you don’t need to panic.
When most of us have a hankering for nuts, we tend to look no further than the pantry. It’s totally normal for nuts to be stored in the dark corners of our cupboards, with many taking residence there for what can turn into many months (especially if you shop in bulk). But did you know the pantry is actually not the best place to house nuts and seeds?
Autumn has descended on us, and with that, brings pumpkins, leaves, sweaters, and best of all, apples! While not the easiest to grow in our heat and humidity, the Carolinas do produce a significant number of commercial apples. With the season only lasting a few months, I am often asked how to best keep or store apples at home.
You can win one of two, three-book sets that I’ve purchased to share as prizes—no, not my old food-splattered copies, above, but new ones. Promise! All you have to do to have a chance in the truly random drawing (I’ll use the tool at random [dot] org to pick a winner) is comment below, and be a subscriber to my email newsletter. All the details are at the end of this post.Your comment should simply tell us what you like to put up for later from your garden or the farmer’s market—and it can be as simple as a sentence or include a recipe or a link to one; up to you.Tips and Tricks:Immediate ideas and tips on coping with the harvest can be had from these articles:What’s in My Freezer at Harvest Time: a Roundup of Ideas Making Pesto: Garlicky Green Ice Cubes Growing and Storing a Year of Parsley (good for many other green herbs, too) Dan Koshansky’s Hand-Me-Down Refrigerator Pickles Vegetable Curry-in-a-Hurry ‘Love Apple
Curly-leaf parsley is great for edging borders, and for planting as a “ruff” around the feet of bigger plants in pots, where it will be beautiful all season, even after substantial frost. But if you want to cook, go ‘Gigante,’ or ‘Giant of Italy.’ Flat-leaf parsley has more parsley flavor, to my taste.All parsley is extremely high in nutrients, particularly Vitamin C, folates and Potassium, as well as beta carotene. In fact, a quarter-cup of raw chopped parsley has about as much C as a quarter-cup of orange juice and double the folates (more that one and a half times those, even, of raw spinach). I include raw leaflets in salads, greatly boosting the nutritional value of
Let this excerpt from my recent book, “And I Shall Have Some Peace There,” tell the rest of the story of what happened next as I drove faster and faster north toward my weekend home, the place I now live fulltime, a story of finding some measure of peace and comfort even in unspeakably uncomfortable times:Postscript:BLOODLETTING HAS ALWAYS BEEN n one of Jack’s trademarks. It was many years, at least the first seven or eight together, before he stopped attacking me and drawing blood, seemingly for no reason other than to show who was boss.Then, after a middle-of-the-night injury one year ago this month inflicted by some prey he thought he’d subdued but hadn’t quite—the first nick of his long, violent hunting career—Jack had to stay inside for a month while a shredded paw healed after surgery. It was the first time he’d ever spent more than a few hours in the house, a bit uncomfortable for both of us.At first.Then he cau
In March, I outlined tactics–such as making sure things are well-watered before a dip in temperatures–and offered links to detailed frost-minimizing strategies in this story that would be a helpful read if you’re gardening in a blue zone as I am on the current National Weather Service map.This weekend, I pulled out all the stops (and empty pots, tomato cages, bed linens, garden carts, you name it…) like in the slideshow below, and got help to wheel my big potted Japanese maples–whose leaves are very sensitive to frost–back into the barn, where I overwinter them, but had set them free a week ago. Oops.(Click on the first thumbnail to start the slideshow, then toggle from side to slide with the arrow keys on your computer, or using the arrows next to each caption.)Always be sure to remove covers before the sun hits the plants the next day, even if another night of frost or freeze is forecast. Which means out I go before supper to re-cover everything and hope aga
Yes, the potato has gone truly global; the intricate story of its journey through the centuries is probably best told by the International Potato Center.China, and now India, are the biggest producers of potatoes today–once the claim of Europe, North America and the former Soviet Union–though I am hard-pressed to think of a Chinese dish featuring them.storing potatoesI COULDN’T SAY IT BETTER THAN the Farm Security Administration did to farmers and would-be farmers in the 1942 slides I b
I’ve never grown multiplier onions before, an oldtime favorite I pre-ordered in March from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, which offers them for fall arrival. I haven’t found much consistent information about growing the so-called potato onions, particularly in the North, except for Southern Exposure’s fact sheet, which says to save half the bulbs for springtime planting in case the winter’s too hard for them. Sounds a little ominous, but here I go.In my cold area, I’m meant to give them up to 5 inches of soil on top of their pointed ends (only 1 inch or 2 in warmer zones), then scrape some of it away come spring, as they prefer to be closer to the surface in the growing season. As with garlic, shallots and other alliums, the bulbs want fertile, well-drained soil and a sunny location to be happiest.I’d welcome any insights or war stories if you’ve grown multiplier onions, which are also sol