It's harvest season - what are you buying for the winter?

In the midst of bringing in my own garden, it's also the time of year when produce is cheap and plentiful in stores and at farmer's markets.

I'm eyeing deer apples at $15 for a 50 lb bag - yes, I eat deer apples. Apple sauce, apple pie filling, dried apples ...
I bought a 10 lb bag of onions which ought to last at least a month. It's too hot in our basement to buy more than that.
I want to go down to the city and get the flyer special of butternut and buttercup squash and Thanksgiving turkey. My squash did poorly this year so I want some for the pantry. Turkey is the cheapest I have seen meat in months so I will buy one for the freezer, too.  I may buy carrots as well.


What's on your fall buying list? What do you do to store it?

Buy deer apples? With, like, actual cash? In my part of the world people are begging someone to come and get their free crabapples. Check Kijiji/Craigslist and save your cash. My 2c.

I wish deals like that happened here, they don't, things don't drop in price whatever the time of year is, well not to "cheap" prices, they come down from new season prices but not to bulk discount rates.  However people do try to give away apples, plums etc you will have to pay a small amount for but apples can be gotten free.
The only thing I can think of is probably like your deer apples, but they are horse carrots...

Deer Apples! Thank you - I know them as crab apples. Knowing what they’re called in North America is a great help. I grew up eating my Dad’s crab apple jelly. I would love to source some and make a batch myself. Thank you Catie and Douglas.

We are lucky here with apples.  Our food forest is just coming on line and we have had a couple bushels of apples.  My dads food forest is older and produces apples by the truck load.  It is interesting to see the different areas and what they have right now.  We stock up on wheat from a local organic grower.  We stock up on cider from a local guy that has a really nice press and makes really good cider.  We hope to get our cider press up and running next year.  We also usually stock up on hay, but this year we made enough by hand to fill the whole hay mow. The monarchs flew south this week, so we plan on making hay from all the mature clover in the food forest next week.  I think we are ready for a cold hard winter.

Haha, no, crabapples are called crabapples in North America. I'm North American and I've never heard the phrase "deer apples" before, but I'm guessing it means apples that the grower thinks are not worth eating or selling to humans. Crabapples are specifically small.

Storing things up for winter has great importance where I live in the Indian Himalayas because the roads into our region from outside close due to snow on the high passes for about 4 months, and then usually it's impossible to buy fresh produce.So I avidly store food for winter: mostly drying because it's dead easy in this desert climate, but also some canning, pickling, and some live storage. Last winter the local government subsidized a regular cargo flight so some fresh produce actually did remain available for most of the winter, though there were gaps. Also when the road reopened there were covid restrictions so the trucks couldn't get through promptly, or I couldn't get to the market, so my stored stuff turned out to be very valuable again.

My fruit trees are still small so I bought fruit back in August and made jam.

I've been harvesting tomatoes and making puree and freezing it until I had enough to can, but I also dry my tomatoes so I don't have enough for all the puree I want to make. I canned a mix of my own tomatoes and locally bought ones.

I'll buy a kg of garlic and make garlic confit, and I'll buy a kg of lemons to make Moroccan salted lemons and other lemon pickles.

Mushrooms, even just plain button mushrooms, have become extremely irregularly available here, not only in winter when they won't be at all available, so last year I bought a small case and dried them. Dried button mushrooms are delicious!  

I'll buy and dry several kilos each of other vegetables, for variety in winter: brinjal (eggplant/aubergine), bitter gourd, maybe a little bit of green pepper. I already bought and dried broccoli because it's my favorite, and I didn't have enough in the garden to dry for the year. I haven't used up last year's cauliflower so this year I didn't do any and dried more broccoli instead. I didn't use up last year's green peas, even though I only had a little and they were good, but anyway I've missed the season. I've also missed the season for green beans, even though last year I finally cracked how to dry them well (cut them in short pieces, like under one inch).

I won't be buying any starchy vegetables because I grew way too much winter squash this year.

"Deer apples" are not typically crab apples where I live.  They're full sized or undersized apples that don't grade high enough to sell to people.  One year I got 7 bushels of Honeycrisp deer apples.  The only problem was some scab.  The applesauce didn't mind at all

Peppers didn't grow well for me so I bought some of them to chop and freeze.  Normally the only things I get to buy when they're cheap this time of year is canning ingredients to go along with my tomatoes.  I could use my own onions, carrots and jalapenos but it's cheaper to buy organic and store my own produce for the winter.

Mike Haasl wrote:"Deer apples" are not typically crab apples where I live.  They're full sized or undersized apples that don't grade high enough to sell to people.

Ah! I misunderstood. Thanks for clarifying!

Yup, deer apples are scabby or oddly sized local apples without the shiny coating of wax meant for feeding the deer. You can get even cheaper ones, but they are often bruised windfall apples. I am just a bit north of apple growing area - if I happen to be south and pass by a roadside stand I might pick up a bushel of eating apples too.

It's funny, I haven't seen anyone with a crab apple tree that produces anything bigger than a cherry pit sized fruit. I also love crab apples and grew up eating them from the tree. I ran drove probably 25 km looking for crab apples last fall on old fencelines, nothing posted on Kijiji/Facebook.

I haven't seen anyone with a crab apple tree that produces anything bigger than a cherry pit sized fruit

Hmmm. Our biggest are golf ball size. I'll check the trees & see if there are still some left to gather some seeds for y'all. Will report back here if there is.

I have crab apples the same size as a smallish supermarket apple. A lot of work has been done to develop hardy varieties for cold climates. Typically they are grafted onto a very hardy root stock.

Deer apples is a new phrase for me, too.

I don't get good deals on produce here in the fall, either. Farmers markets and fruit stands are always more expensive than the grocery store. I'm fine with that, since they're real people trying to support themselves. But I don't stock up on fresh produce. There's a fruit stand here that stays open all winter and I buy carrots, beets, apples, cabbage as needed. I can forage huge amounts of cooking apples, but not tasty eating apples. And I don't have success growing the other things, so can't store my own. When the fruit stand starts running out of stuff in late winter, I might buy a bit extra to last until stuff in my cold frame starts up.

I am thinking I'll restock my dry goods early, since the prairies had such terrible drought. Some stuff is supposed to get expensive.

Mushrooms suddenly showed up in the local greengrocers, so I bought half a case and am drying them. The mushrooms are dry enough to pile together on fewer trays after less than 24 hours.  

The green tomatoes I brought in 10 days ago before the first frost are slowly ripening and I'm still putting a tray or two out to dry each day. It was cloudy/rainy weather recently and also a flock of sparrows was interfering with the things drying on the roof, so I moved the half-dry ones indoors in a south-facing window with a fan blowing over them.

I ended up buying it all - now looking at buying a second bag of apples. About 1/6th were not good, but the rest ended up canned and put away, or eaten. The deer apples I bought were windfall apples. Macintosh apples that are RIPE and taste and smell like the apples at my grandparents farm when I was a kid. I don't normally enjoy raw apples, but ate 1-3 per day for a while, until they were all eaten or canned. I would have paid $15 just for the eating apples I pulled from the big bag!  Apple pie for Thanksgiving was very good and I am thinking of making more apple jam as Christmas gifts this year.

My grandmother calls this time of year 'bringing in for the winter'. She can still recite the grocery list for the fall from when she was a child, on a farm in a family of 12 children.  The number of 50 lb bags of flour and sugar and oats, pork preserved in barrels of salt, etc. When my mom was a child, they still kept an extensive root cellar. My dad thinks of late fall as the harvest season, the whole extended family getting together to kill pigs and render lard and make sausage and smoke it, drying peppers and fruit in the rafters of the attic, fermenting sauerkraut and pickles. Both my grandmother and my father grew up without refrigeration.  

Other things I have bought for the winter is extra dog food and other extra supplies of stuff I buy in the city - messy roads make it sometimes perilous driving to the city in the winter and prices at the local store are often 25-300% higher than 45 min away.  Another bag of rice, more canned goods, more lentils and beans, oil, coffee, cocoa, etc. We always go into winter with a full pantry.

Crab apples that get no larger than cherry pit sized are probably ornamental crabapples. They can be used to make apple jelly or pectin, but it would be tough to use them for apple butter or baking.

Wild crabapples are much larger, an inch or more across. They can be used for apple butter, jelly, applesauce, or pectin, but would still be difficult for baking.

I have both tree types in my yard. I rarely use the ornamental, though occasionally I'll use it to top up some apple jelly I'm about to cook down in the stove. The wild crabapples are often used for jelly in their own right.

Yesterday I bought a kilo of lemons for (Moroccan?) salted lemons. Here's my adjusted recipe after making them annually for 5 years.

Look through the lemons and reserve about half or a little less, with perfect unblemished skins. Squeeze the juice from the rest, ie more than half of the lemons. (I guess that lemons that have a higher ratio of juice or skin would be different, but for Indian "lemons" which are of the shape and size of American "limes" this works).

Cut the unblemished lemons into pieces and remove as many seeds as you can easily get out. Moroccan recipes say to only slash the lemons almost all the way through into quarters, but leave them round. I prefer to cut them in small pieces that you could call "bite sized" though I'm not gonna stick a whole piece in my mouth. This is a good size for me to pull out one or two to use.

Push the lemon pieces into a glass jar, alternating with a total of about 1/4 cup salt for a kilo of lemons. Pour the juice in.

Cover with a plastic lid (because normal coated metal lids will rust through) and stand on a plate on a shelf in a warm kitchen. The salt may take a couple of days to fully dissolve (as in my photo from immediately after I packed them).

After a few days the lemons soften and shrink, and you can squash them into a smaller jar. I'm going to move them from this liter jar into two 400ml jam jars, and add chillis and garlic to one jar, and keep the other plain. After about a week, put them in the fridge. You can also keep them on the shelf but I find they keep nicer in the fridge or cool room. You can also cover with a layer of oil, which I haven't tried before but I think I will this year, to prevent the juice from evaporating and the top lemons from turning grey.

Salted lemons have a wonderful lemon scent and something umami about them, and the skins are the best part. They are used in North African cooking and tagines, but I like to mince them and mix into butter with minced parsley or other greens. Or I mince them and add to cooking greens. Or puree them in salad dressing: great!

I just put in my winter order for bulk dry goods. I usually order twice a year so I'm fully stocked on some stuff, partially stocked on others.

I got 25lbs each of amaranth, buckwheat, and flaxseed. I got 55lbs of chickpeas. I restocked all my dried fruit, getting a pound of each kind. Until I get my solar dehydrator built, I'm stuck buying. I also got a case of canned organic coconut cream.

Catie George wrote:Yup, deer apples are scabby or oddly sized local apples without the shiny coating of wax meant for feeding the deer. You can get even cheaper ones, but they are often bruised windfall apples. I am just a bit north of apple growing area - if I happen to be south and pass by a roadside stand I might pick up a bushel of eating apples too.

It's funny, I haven't seen anyone with a crab apple tree that produces anything bigger than a cherry pit sized fruit. I also love crab apples and grew up eating them from the tree. I ran drove probably 25 km looking for crab apples last fall on old fencelines, nothing posted on Kijiji/Facebook.

It was a pretty pathetic year for apples for us, although what few orchards we have in the region reported at least a fair crop.  But I was too slow on the draw and all of the local orchards were sold out by closing time a few weeks back.  The reason I can tell it was a lean year for most is that we usually get many calls from people wanting us to clean up their yard of fallen apples that we can use for the animals....but we got none this year.  Even other friends who would have requested our cider press for a weekend commented that they had not been able to find apples at their usual haunts.  Fortunately, the situation had me sleuthing out some new producers in the region that I had not known about so it will be good to visit these new orchards next year.

With regard to crab apples, we have two trees of a 'chestnut crab' type that actually yield well, have good resistance to fireblight, and yield fruits a bit larger than a golf ball.  These are excellent for eating, baking/preserving, and store reasonably well also.  We got some this year but not nearly as many as typical years.  Unusually high yielding this year were apricots.....two different trees with quite different schedules for fruit set and size.

With nights in the teens approaching this week, it's probably time to cut the brussel sprouts at the base and hang them in the garage, picking the best for a few meals ahead.  Same for much of the kale.  The nice extended fall had to end sometime!.....

Jan White wrote:I just put in my winter order for bulk dry goods. I usually order twice a year so I'm fully stocked on some stuff, partially stocked on others.

I got 25lbs each of amaranth, buckwheat, and flaxseed. I got 55lbs of chickpeas. I restocked all my dried fruit, getting a pound of each kind. Until I get my solar dehydrator built, I'm stuck buying. I also got a case of canned organic coconut cream.

Hi Jan,

Where do you order your dry goods from?

I live in Alberta, but I'll be in BC soon.

Thanks,

Lana

I've been ordering from www.omfoods.com lately.  One thing I don't like about their products is they often have something like lentils, that we grow masses of in Canada, being sourced from other countries. I've never had a complaint about quality, though. I bought some dried figs last order that are by far the best I've ever had. And you can see by my fig habit, that I'm not exactly a saint about buying local myself 😁

I haven't ordered so much from them lately, but I sometimes get dried fruit from www.realrawfood.com
They have a lot of imported stuff, too, but they also source quite a bit of fruit from the Okanagan, where they're located. They have a lot more exotic ingredients, not basic staples - not for most people anyway.

Oh, and there's also wolfgangsgrainandflour.ca

They have products in most of the stores around here, but you can also order online.

For Lana and anyone else who's interested, I just discovered www.fieldstoneorganics.ca in the North Okanagan.

They source all their grain and pulses from Western Canada, and they're all organic.  I get the impression they work preferentially with small, local farmers, before looking to the larger producers on the prairies, which I like.

I bought a Misfits Produce Box that was suggested in the Alternatives to Amazon thread.

I spent abt $29.00 and got 25 lbs of food, of course, that also included the weight of the cold pack and shipping supplies.

Their minimum order was $30.00 though they gave me a discount code to use.

For the price of the box, I ordered green seedless grapes, grapefruits, Haas avocados, baby broccoli, brussels sprouts, cauliflower, celery, acorn squash, sweet potatoes, green cabbage, yellow onions, and a free organic mayo.

Sadly, they were out of avocados.

I've put the brussels sprouts, broccoli, some of the cauliflower, and celery in the freezer.

I have always dehydrated celery leaves though this time I tried dehydrating the celery.

I can't believe the celery dehydrated from several cups to several teaspoons.

I have not tried dehydrated celery to see if I like it.

If I don't grow enough winter squash I will pick up a bushel or 2 of them from a local farm stand.  The butternut squash keep all winter here in our cool basement.  At this point we are growing all our veggies and most of the fruit we eat in a year so I don't much of this anymore.  I do still get cherries in the the summer to preserve from a local farm.

I also get 4 to 5 pastured raised turkeys from a local farm.  One gets cooked for Thanksgiving and the others are quartered and put in the freezer.  We also get chicken and Pork from this farm in other parts of the year.  

One of my regional seed companies tends to have a sale on seeds in the fall so I stock up and save 40%.

I also hit the online Black Friday weekend sales and stock up on pantry staples like nuts, chocolate, vinegar, coffee, tea, and other pantry staples I find a good deal on.  I also stock up on the supplements that I take.  I can easily save 15% to 30% that weekend on the brands I normally buy and have it all delivered to my door.

I also stock up on my preferred OTC meds and replace expired stuff in my first aid kit in the fall.   I saves us from having to go out and get it when we are not feeling well.