Food For Winter

A few years ago, I went to a talk about the old British festival of Samhain.  One of the things said has always stuck with me.

“For the ancients, if they didn’t have all their winter food by now and have it stored or preserved correctly, there was a good chance that they’d die by spring.”

In our modern society, we don’t think of Winter as being this potentially dangerous.  I decided then that I would try it.  I wanted to be able to not buy food over winter.  It didn’t happen for a number of reasons but the main one is that our modern houses are just not designed to store that much food. 

The standard suburban pantry is so small that you couldn’t fit a months worth of supplies in it for the average family, never mind 3 or 4 months worth.  Our mentality doesn’t fit it anymore either, we get paid weekly or fortnightly and do our grocery shopping each week, getting enough for the week, with maybe a little extra.  Or we rotate and buy different things each week but so that we’re spreading the load for things that we only need to buy on a monthly basis.

I also looked at the preserves I made.  Jams and pickles covered most of it.  They were things that you add to food, not really food itself.  There was no way we’d survive on quince jam and mustard pickles.  Oops sorry, I forgot the 10 litres of tomato sauce and another 6 litres of plum sauce.  The 20 bottles of mead might make it seem more interesting for the first week or so, if we remembered it.  I really needed to rethink what I grew, how much I grew and how it was preserved.

The jars of apricots from our very prolific trees didn’t last very long.  My oldest daughter went through them as snacks.  I had heaps of runner beans in the freezer but no one really liked them much and I seemed to be the only person who would eat them.  Our carrots and peas were pretty much eaten straight away - they never made it to the freezer for more than a month.  Even the broccoli didn’t last that long.  I never had much luck growing potatoes, I’d get enough for about 5 meals and after that they were just the little tiny ones that weren’t worth the effort.

I sat down and made a list of what we actually eat regularly and what I buy in the groceries.  This was a far better starting place.  Much of it I could grow and in some cases already did, but perhaps I needed to think about the quantities that I grew.  How many 10kg bags of potatoes do I buy in a year?  How many potatoes do you normally get from each plant?  Perhaps I should also look at successive sowing of my veges, so that all of my broccoli wasn’t ready within two weeks, although, I could still blanch and freeze the excess.

I’m thinking that the one purchase I really should make is a decent dehydrator.  Usually I use my oven, but as some things (like quince paste) can take three days, it’s rather impractical when I have dinners to make for my family as well.

Now that we’re out on the lifestyle block, meat is something that I can grow for myself, although it is a long-term thing and I need to have a bit more variety I think.  We’ll all get sick of only beef for dinner after a couple of weeks.  One pig at a time doesn’t really last that long either.

We’ve not long bought a really big chest freezer.  I was looking at our tiny (maybe 200l) one and thinking that there is no way we’d fit an entire cattle beast in it, never mind the usual veges that I freeze, so we splashed out and bought a 700 litre freezer.  It’s huge.  I think that I could fit not only a whole cow, but also a couple of pigs in there too.

That left breakfast cereals, bread, milk, cheese, margarine, juice, salt, sugar, coffee.  I can’t see getting away from buying salt, sugar or coffee.  While I understand the process of making salt from sea water, I don’t trust our sea water to not be polluted.  I stopped buying juice when I started making cordials.  The dairy products are one that I’m hoping for a little later down the track.  I have hand-raised a jersey fresian heifer and I hope to make her a house cow when she’s old enough.  I had hoped to do this with Patsy and Eddie, my dexter girls, but they’re just not tame enough for that.  I can and have made bread before, but it is a lot of work and my family prefers the store bought stuff.  Maybe that will change in time.  I’m also gluten intolerant, so making bread for me is a challenge - most gluten-free bread either tastes lousy or needs to be toasted.  I’m not touching breakfast cereals at the moment.  To make a muesli requires me to buy a lot of ingredients that I don’t grow and I’m the only one who eats a muesli (even if it’s a gluten free one).

There will always be some tweaking, I’m sure.  We’ve more than doubled the size of our vege gardens, so we’ll see how we go and alter to fit next year.

You may wonder why I'm writing about Winter when Summer has only just arrived, but if I left it until Winter, it would be too late.  The work needs to be done now.