12 Things Farm Kitchens Put Up Before the First Frost (Do It This Week)

12 Things Farm Kitchens Put Up Before the First Frost (Do It This Week) Whatever is sitting in your garden or at the last farm stand on your road is about as cheap as food gets all year. In most of this country the first hard frost lands between the middle of October and the middle of November, and after that night every one of those things comes off a truck and costs money until May. A farm family did not have more food than you do. They had a better October. These are twelve things farm kitchens put up before the frost, and how to do each one so it is still worth eating in February. The tomatoes you should never leave on the vine, and the safety rule that changed about them. The one vegetable that does not need blanching. Why winter squash rots in a cellar. Why your carrots taste bitter, and what is actually doing it. The blanching mistake that is worse than not blanching at all. And number one is free, you are almost certainly pouring it down the drain, and it is what made everything on a farm table taste the way it did. Nothing here needs a gadget, a pressure canner, or anything you cannot do this weekend. WHAT I MENTION → Tomatoes from dead or frost killed vines can have a pH above four point six, which means they are no longer an acid food. The National Center for Home Food Preservation says canned tomatoes need two tablespoons of bottled lemon juice or half a teaspoon of citric acid per quart, or one tablespoon or a quarter teaspoon per pint. → Blanching inactivates the enzymes that keep ripening a vegetable after it is picked. Under blanching is worse than no blanching at all, because a little heat speeds those enzymes up instead of stopping them. → Sweet peppers are one of the few vegetables that freeze without blanching. → Winter squash wants fifty to sixty degrees and about sixty percent humidity, while potatoes and most root vegetables want thirty two to forty and damp. They do not belong in the same room. → Apples give off ethylene gas. Postharvest researchers at the University of California found that as little as half a part per million of it makes a carrot develop a noticeable bitter taste within two weeks, because the carrot produces a bitter compound called isocoumarin to defend itself. Apples belong in their own corner, away from the root vegetables. → Onions and potatoes are both cured for one to three weeks after harvest, until the skins are papery and the necks are tight. Onions keep in a mesh bag or a braid with air moving around them. → A cured butternut or Hubbard squash with the stem still on keeps for months. An acorn squash does not, so those get eaten first. Any squash with the stem broken off keeps poorly. → Green under a potato skin does not cook out. It is the potato producing a bitter defensive compound after exposure to light, and any green patch gets cut well away. → Vegetables are low acid foods. Beans, corn, carrots and squash are pressure canner foods and never water bath foods. Tomatoes are the exception, and only with added acid. SOURCES → National Center for Home Food Preservation, University of Georgia, on blanching vegetables and on tomato acidification → United States Department of Agriculture, Complete Guide to Home Canning → University of California Postharvest Technology Center, on ethylene and bitterness in carrots → University of Missouri Extension and University of Alaska Fairbanks Cooperative Extension, on root cellar storage → Michigan State University Extension and Washington State University Extension, on curing and storing squash, onions and potatoes Tell me in the comments what your family put up in the fall, and whether it was a cellar, a freezer, or a row of jars on a shelf. And tell me what part of the country you are writing from. I read every one. Nothing here is lost. Just untaught. #harvest #farmhouse #oldways #rootcellar #foodpreservation