Tag: Gardening

Pressure canning pumpkin soup

I have no adequate storage for my pumpkins, so I started pressure canning some

Our barn only has 2°C at the moment which is not ideal to store pumpkin. As I understand from searching in the internet they should be stored by room temperature. I have a lot of pumpkin from the garden and it would be a waste to let them go bad. I have already cooked some in the oven, pureed them and froze the puree portioned for pumpkin pie and pumpkin pancakes. I do not like just putting everything in the freezer. It uses power and if there would be a black out everything in the freezer could turn bad. And since we are going to travel for a longer period of time and I can not take the freezer with me, I am trying to can some of the pumpkin.

I am starting with using pumpkin for soup. This way I will have some convenience food and I can use some other vegetables from the garden. I cut up 2 pumpkins (selecting some seed for sowing next year), some onions, a bit of garlic (the garlic is very strong in taste), carrots and some root celery. This was topped of with freshly cooked bone broth from chicken carcases from chicken we had bought and took the meat of to pressure can. I filled 5 big jars and 5 small jars, to fill up the canner as much as it can take.

The pressure canner guide says to pre cook the pumpkin for 2 minutes. I did not do that and I do hope this will not get me into trouble. The pumpkin has the longest pressure canning time of all of the ingredients, so that is the time I went by.

Shortly after canning the soup we tried some. The taste is not quite as I wanted it, but to use up as much pumpkin as possible I left out the leek and turnip. These obviously change the taste. When I find the time I might do another round of soup and at the leek and turnip. I am going to pressure can the pumpkin by it self and do it by the book this time. This way I have pumpkin for puree to make pumpkin pie and pumpkin pancakes while we are travelling.

For the pumpkins which I do not manage to process before we leave, I will store these underneath the seating area in our caravan and hope they will stay good until I manage to use them up freshly.

Maybe you have noticed some toy’s in the background of my pictures. Well I do have our children around at all times and of course pay attention nothing happens while I am cooking/ pressure canning.

Sowing old grain varieties

Flower has become more and more expensive, so I want to make my own grown from seed

I mostly use spelt flower, but I am also interested in einkorn flower, rye flower and oats. I absolutely wanted to use old varieties believing that these have better nutrients and believing these have fewer problems with pests. It turned out to be very difficult to find seed to buy. I had found seed from different old varieties, but that was from a company in Switzerland and they do not deliver to Germany. That was a shame, since they offered a useful amount of seed. Finally I found a company in Germany which offer al sorts of things for school and kid’s. They have a set of seeds with information cards for the school garden with Einkorn, Emmer, Rye, Spelt, Wheat and Oats. The only thing is that there are only 10 grams of one variety in a packet. That is for 1 – 3 m^2 depending on the variety. So I won’t be milling any grain next year, but harvesting seed. Maybe in 2 years I will harvest enough to mill some grains to flower.

Most of the grains can / should be sown in fall, only the oats need to be sown in the spring.

I took the effort of sowing this little amount of seed by the book. Making nice and need rows and taking the recommended distances in account. If I want to sow bigger patches of grain next year I will have to find another way of doing this. I put only a thin layer of straw over the soil. The soil is improving compared to what it was in spring, but far from how I would like it to be. Luckily the grains are not so demanding when it comes to the soil. I did find some life in the soil, earthworms and other insects.

I did wanted to ad a picture of the grains that had already come up, but when we got back from our holiday the frost knocked the plantlets over.