October 10, 2009 - More Food for the Simple Life

First photo is the greenhouse as of the beginning of October, a month and a half after planting. We eat large salads at lunch and big helpings of cooked kale, collard greens, swiss chard, spinach and beet greens from this little hoophouse every day. We're completely amazed at how well things grow in here. The green 50 gallon drums are filled with water to store heat and add humidity.

We headed out one day on a wild foods foraging trip. We gathered about 1/4 bushel of wild berries (Hawthorn, Rose hips and Sumac berries) to be dried for winter teas. All three are high in vitamin C, and Hawthorn is a cardio tonic, good for moderating blood pressure and increasing vascular circulation.

The second photo shows the half bushel of Gambel Oak acorns that we gathered (took about 2 hours). We roasted these in the wood cookstove oven for 30 to 40 minutes, then pounded them with a wooden pole in a large canning pot to crack the shells, then rubbed them over a 1/2" mesh metal screen (hardware cloth) to separate many of the shells from the nut meats, hand shelled them (we're halfway done after spending quite a few hours at this), and will grind them into flour to use them in sourdough whole wheat pancakes this winter. Jeanne thinks we still need to leach the tannins out in boiling water, but in my opinion they aren't bitter at all, being a white oak, not a high-tannin red oak.

Third photo shows the seven bags of wild roadside apples (stored in the yurt root cellar) gathered so far this year (we may go out one more time, just because). We use them whole, slice them and dry them, can some as applesauce, and will grind and press the rest into cider for drinking and to age into cider vinegar.

Fourth picture shows tomato slices drying on racks in the new sauna. We found that the clay in the earthen walls holds moisture so well that drying things in here is slow, so we reverted to using our solar dehydrator, as well as a large screened rack covered with a recycled glass door (best option for drying tomatoes and fruit). Our main garden didn't produce well this year, so we ended up buying 100 lbs of tomato seconds from an organic farm in Paonia. We spent days slicing and drying them, cooking them down and canning them as tomato paste, as whole tomatoes, and Jeanne made a bunch of canned salsa.