Running out of winter stores
The trouble with a cold winter is that you use more of everything.
This is why I try not to put all of my eggs in the same basket and also try to plan on surplus.
For winter meals, I tend to freeze a lot of vegetable soup and a significant amount of green beans, to stock up on storage vegetables
like carrots, sweet potatoes, sprouting beans, and butternut squash,
and to use quick hoops to protect lettuce, kale, and brussels sprouts
for fresh eating over much of the winter.
Last year, we had such good luck with the last option that I stored less
of the other types of vegetables, but the negative teens killed most of
our over-wintering plants this year. The result? We had to
eat more of our inside stores, running out of soup in February and
eating up the last butternut this week. We've still got a bit of
everything else left, but are very glad the garden is starting to give
us leafy greens again.
The woodshed also
suffered during this cold winter. We went into the 2013/2014
winter with our shed nearly full, and that was lucky since we went
through firewood like nobody's business. In fact, in January I
estimated we'd run out of firewood by the end of February. But,
luckily, the weather warmed back up to slightly below average (rather
than drastically below average) in February, so we've still got a bit of
wood left even as we start to refill the shed.
In our modern era of
homesteading, if you run out of winter stores, you can buy more.
(Assuming you stocked up on cash the same way you stocked up on wood and
vegetables, of course.) But who wants to eat store-bought
vegetables when you can just tweak your planting to ensure homegrown
goodness? We'll be sure to store just a bit more of everything
this year, and if that means we're still overflowing with vegetables in
April, we'll give some away. Extra firewood will be just that much
drier two winters from now.
Or explore more posts by date or by subject.
About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
Want to be notified when new comments are posted on this page? Click on the RSS button after you add a comment to subscribe to the comment feed, or simply check the box beside "email replies to me" while writing your comment.
- Remove comment
- Remove comment
- Remove comment
- Remove comment