in my kitchen, around the farm

harvest 2023 edition

I will start this edition of “around the farm, in my kitchen” with a little video for those of you that asked me to do one showing how I get neat packaging when I wrap our meat. It’s so important that meat is wrapped well. It’s the energetic beginning of a meal and a way to honour our nourishment. So, here it is. All broken down and explained.

Now, the big news - harvest 2023 has been completed! Wooooeeeee! I am one relieved and, dare I say, proud gal. So much work goes into this moment of looking around at what’s been done and being able to say, “Whew, okay, we have all the food we need for the next year.” There’s still a few odds and sods that need to be done. There’s the last batch of meat rabbits, a couple of geese, the winter squash needs to come in and next year’s garlic put out. But all in all, we are done.

I thought I might give you all a photographic tour of what our food stores are looking like in our freezers and root cellar with a little explanation around what we’re doing. If I showed you this same type of thing ten years ago things would have looked pretty different. We would have more pork in our freezers. We would have had more chickens, too. We would, thus, have less beef. We adapt what we grow and raise to how we feel and, observably, perform the best.

When I say “perform” I don’t mean competitively, I mean how our bodies meet the day. Are our minds clear? Do we have energy? Are we generally positive and good natured? We make those assessments daily and then adjust our diets accordingly. This, obviously, has the effect of morphing what’s in our freezers and root cellar. Animals that are fed grains, and thus have more PUFAs (polyunsaturated fatty acids) are kept to a minimum in our diets. We do much better on ruminants like beef, wild game, and lamb with the addition of our meat rabbits which we give no kibble or grain to, then we do with pork and birds. That doesn’t mean we don’t eat the grain fed animals, it just means they’re a special little meal dotted in with our ruminant, solely grass fed, animal meat consumption.

I must point out that my yearly defrosting of the freezers and subsequent scouring out didn’t happen this year. Hence, there’s ice where there should not be ice. Oh well, it is what it is for this year. I might get to that yet. I may not. Either way, we’ll be okay. Alright, without further ado, I present to thee, all of our hard work wrapped up in