Ulla Bisgaard

I love doing this too. Our favorites are soup mixes, sauce and dip mixes and all kinds of baking mixes. Bread in a jar are our family. I use my own freeze dried products, except for yeast. 1 jar holds, flour, eggs, powdered milk sugar and freeze dried sour dough starter or yeast in a package. I also have larger mixes, that are useable for many different things, but the soup mixes, and bread mix are the favorites.

Excel is how I keep up with everything on our homestead.
I started doing it in 2022, and over the years it has just grown like our gardens and production.
We produce a lot of food, and in order to not have something go bad, I need to keep updated logs.

Amy Riley wrote:I grew Roselle Hibiscus here in Tennessee! Use it for tea. This, along with Stevia, does well.

So am I, they grow very well here in Southern California too. I also use some of the calyx for tea and I roast the seeds to add to my coffee, or add unroasted seeds to soups and stews. They taste and feel similar to lentils when added to soups and stews.
So far I have harvested over 16 pounds, and we have more coming. I planted 7 this year, which might be a little much. I am going to use some of the fresh calyx for juice, jam or a fruit sauce. I am so happy I planted them though, and will do it again. Happy gardening.

Megan Palmer wrote:. Red stalked silver beet (chard) might also impart some colour and ought not to adversely affect the flavour?

There are several varieties of rhubarb growing at the community garden with red the entire length of the stalk.

They are widely available at garden centres but if any of your gardening friends are growing the red variety, perhaps they would share a piece of the crown with you?

https://www.kings.co.nz/rhubarb-crimson-sunrise-19l-129631?srsltid=AYCX9vL0qLE00k6iXr5eAIekbXfd6hBmIKRbHZVqRKP5G8mM4pDRVKhv

https://www.palmers.co.nz/products/998137674?srsltid=AYCX9vL4FcpTdpXA4E09NaueaY4-uVEofehPRgOQRVbEFEDjAHN4xCuq

Victoria is the only one, that can handle out heat and the very few cold hours we get

Megan Palmer wrote:It's spring time in the southern hemisphere and it seems that the rhubarb is producing new stalks overnight.

Chopped and cooked them overnight in with finely shredded ginger, Seville orange zest and 25% sugar to weight of rhubarb.

No added water, the rhubarb releases plenty. I strain the excess syrup to use as a cordial.

Water bathed all the jars and they'll remain shelf stable for years.

Have processed three batches already, will give away many of the jars - there's only so much that we can eat ourselves!

I am going to try and do the same, but add some roselle hibiscus as well. The Victoria rhubarb we grow, has almost no color to it.

We have tried a few, and if it’s for soups and things, it doesnt hold the vaccum for very long. What we have found works better, is adding blood absorbing pads to the bag first and put the meat on top.
The pad absorbs the extra moisture, so it doesn’t end up in the vaccum sealer.
I get mine here Lem absorbing pads for vaccum season

I went through several machines before I found out, I just needed to add these. Hope it helps

The Infograph is very interesting, and can probably also be very useful, but the problem is, that it doesn’t show individual plant information including the Latin name.
When I read it through I found a plant called four o’clock which we have growing all over our homestead, so I took a look at it. It turns out the plant has two varieties.  One is Mirabilis jalapa, the ornamental four o’clock which is toxic, but a different variety also exists, as the species Mirabilis expansa (mauka) which are edible.
So if you want to use this infograph. I would find the Latin name of the plant you are interested in growing and research it, before starting to grow it.

Patrik Schumann wrote:Good to see you back Ulla!  We're also in SoCal, on a small inner-urban site, but every square foot possible planted to edibles.  Rain-water 1st, gray- 2nd, conveyed least, mostly perennials, trees, shrubs, vines around outdoor spaces, whatever else we can get going underneath as they're the only ones that get dry season irrigation.  We get a lot of grape, feijoa, pitanga, araça-uçu, guava, loquat, blackberry, pomegranate, mustard greens, arugula, fava beans, mint.  Good thing as we're a greens & beans family.  Squirrels, rats, birds get more than we do.  Everything else takes some effort.  Happy to have succeeded with turmeric, ginger, lemongrass; still working on fennel, onion, leek, garlic, rhubarb, brassicas, blueberry, banana, citrus.  Gophers kill a lot from below, skunks dig up new plantings.  There's never any end, though we reached a real plateau catching all our runoff & becoming self-sufficient in biomass.   Filling every gap that opens, seeding every disturbance, an hour a day, year round.

Hi Patric, good to hear from you. I never left permies, but has focused on the transition of my children moving out to start their new life. I have also, and are still working on my book, that has  the “working title”  The wild side of homesteading, a practical guide to permaculture in warm climates. It contains the planning systems I use to run our homestead. I am about 60% done now. All of the research, illustrations and things like that are done. The draft of first 8 chapters are also done, and and I am working hard on the rest.  The hardest and most time consuming parts, are managing the project as it grow lager.
I even have a method for dealing with gophers and other animals, but it’s a long explanation. For now, use metal gopher bags/cages on the root and stem of the plants you don’t want them to eat, then plant things you don’t mind the eating around the area. Like other animals, gophers will always go for the food, that’s the easiest to get to. I haven’t lost a single plant the last 3 years.

While I now live in Southern California, I grew up in Denmark. Growing up my family was poor, but we still made do. Large amounts of potatoes, carrots, beets, celeriac roots and parsnips and brassicas were grown in the summer, and saved for winter in a large pile of hay. Kale was left outside, since it becomes sweeter after frost, and doesn’t die. Onions, leeks, garlic and storage fruits were preserved in our cellar.
We also went foraging for nettles, dandelions, ferns, pine cones, pine needles, mushrooms, walnuts, chestnuts, rosehips, acorns, crabapples, berries and elderberries. Most of this was preserved with canning and fermenting, but a lot of food was also stored in salt.
The men in our family would go hunting and fishing, which was stored in salt or frozen. In our garden we grew lots of black and red currants, which was also preserved.
After leaving home, I kept this tradition, and while we don’t hunt or fish here in California I still honor the foraging and gardening traditions I grew up with.
A food forest, doesn’t have to be a place where all you do is forage for fresh food every day. Even here on our homestead, I depend on food I have preserved, while I also go and forage in our food forest.
In our food forest, I don’t “just” grow fruits. I grow a lot of herbs and spices plus collard greens, kale, tree collards, onions, wild garlic, pecan nuts, cabbages, artichokes, broccoli and cauliflower. I grow sweet potatoes in large deep and wide beds, where the high heat or frost won’t reach them. We then harvest when we need them, and they keep growing new from the tubers I don’t bring in.  For fruits, grow the ones that won’t go bad after being hit with frost, or grow storage apples and similar ones, for eating fresh or canned.
As for food preservation, make fruit leather, sun dried fruits and tomatoes. Use fermentation to make different kinds of kraut. Things like radishes that doesn’t do well when preserved by freezing or canning, store perfectly when fermented, and will give you the fresh crunch all through winter.

Douglas Alpenstock wrote:

Ulla Bisgaard wrote:The garden is also inspiring my thirst for writing. Creating our wild side gazette, has brought me so much joy. It contains a satirical and funny stories of what I experience on our homestead.

Ulla, this is brilliant stuff. How do I subscribe to the Gazette?

Not yet, but soon. Some of them are going into the book I am writing. I want to do a subscription service for the gazette, but we haven’t gotten that ironed out yet. That said, I will leave you with a few bonus ones and a thank you for liking it.