Ulla Bisgaard

I use all of those methods too, but my favorite way to preserve will always be fermenting. I ferment Meyer lemons, cabbages, radishes, garlic, ginger, collard greens, onions, green plums, root vegetables, mustard leaves and so much more.
Fermented foods will last 9+ months in the fridge, and if we have leftovers, when we start a new years ferments, they can se canned or freeze dried. We love freeze dried fermented foods. They add so much flavor to soups, and easily rehydrate with no loss of probiotics. They are also essential for anyone with stomach problems, since they help heal up the gut and create a good environment for digestion. Our favorites are Red Kimchi, White Kimchi and Korean white kimchi. Sour kraut and beet kraut, and the fermented Meyer lemons. My favorite creamy salad dressing or dip are made with cashew sour cream, whole fermented Meyer lemon slices with the seeds removed, salt and fresh thyme or parsley. It also goes very well with chicken.

This might also just have been a false seal. Did you wash and pull on the lid after you pressure canned it?
That said, sometimes things just happen. My son made and canned pear pie filling, but must have been rushed and skipped a step or two, because I have tossed three jars so far, that has grown mold.
Also, I clean my food storage pantry once a year, and that includes any jars, that has gotten dirty. While there I also check all the seals on the jars. I usually do this in January or February when there are the least amount of jars in the pantry. That way I know what I have left, that they are all still good and clean, and what I am running low on.
Then I organize my empty jars, check for dirt and chipped jars, so they are ready to be filled again. This saves time and effort later.

Jonathan de Revonah wrote:

Agree 100%. I should've clarified that I was giving "ideals." Mine are stored in my basement w/ RH usually ~40-60%.
I lost some small ones to desiccation. I suppose less-than-ideal storage conditions will cull the ones that require ideal storage conditions..

We leave all of the small sweet potatoes in the ground, this way they sprout early and we don’t need to make slips. Of course the also means that you have to have a permanent bed for sweet potatoes. I have two of them, which I harvest from every other year. This year we have a full bed, and one we harvested last year, but left the smaller sweet potatoes in. We are already getting lots of leaves there. The full bed will be harvested around thanksgiving. We will take and eat the large ones and leave the rest. This method saves me a lot of time and effort. When all the kids stayed with us, we needed two beds of sweet potatoes, but now it’s just us and we usually get at least 200 pounds from a bed, sometimes more. I am happy to have less work to do, now it’s only my husband and I.

I agree with everyone else, but want to add, that sweet potatoes rot, if they get bruised and that can quickly spoil all of them. I store mine in wooden crates. Add some crumbled papers on the bottom and then carefully and gently place the sweet potatoes in there. You can add any that are broken (they don’t go bad from being cut or broken) as long as they haven’t been dropped, tossed or other wise bruised. Check them frequently the first two weeks, to make sure you didn’t miss a bruised sweet potato.

For me permaculture is about embracing a holistic lifestyle, where we build gardens not just for people but for everyone and every thing in the ecosystem. It’s about building something, that will last for generations and continually improves the environment.
I also think that the design often depends on personality.
I love all things  whimsical. I love my metal bench and Narnia lamp post, I love the ceramic figurines I place around the garden. When I think of gardens and permaculture, I don’t just think about food and nature. I think about a place that will nourish not just the body, but also the soul. I see it as a place for exploring and  learning. A place where you can find hidden treasures and forage for food. I deliberately keep the bottom layer, of our food forest, a little wild. Okay, sometimes very wild, but I want a place that stimulates all of the senses. Sound, colors, smell, taste and touch.
I love the smell of mint I get when pruning our boysenberries, the taste of radish seed pods, the sound of birds and wind chimes, the different textures of leaves and plants, and the feeling of different textures of leaves. Butterflies, birds, wild rabbits and squirrels running around without fear. I love exploring in the food forest, and finding hidden treasures like the dill I found growing underneath our peach tree, and the alpine strawberries I found growing underneath a plum tree.
I deliberately aimed for this because of childhood memories of exploring my grandmothers garden, and exploring and foraging in forests as a child.
I have a mason jar, where I toss in expired seeds. Each February I mix them with wildflower seeds and toss them out on the bottom layer of the forest. It’s chaos gardening with a twist. After doing this for 6 years, I have tomatoes, dills, mint, strawberries, radishes,  pumpkins, squash,  borage, calendula, amaranth, chamomile, yarrow, broccoli, lettuce and so many other edible plants. growing wild everywhere. I never know what I will find when exploring. It’s all organized and wild at the same time.
It should look messy and unkempt, but instead it’s beautiful and inspiring. The neighborhood kids love exploring there, though their parent isn’t too happy about me not washing what they pick, before they put it in their mouths. Seeing a toddler with a tangerine in one hand and an apple in the other, going back and forward between them, watching him taste the peels bitterness, before figuring out that the juice and sweetness is inside, that’s true learning through happiness and exploration.
I love that it will keep growing and provide generations with food and knowledge, without much maintenance. The older the gardens and I get, the less I need to do to maintain it all. Finding treasures feels like surprise gifts from Mother Nature.
The food forest garden, are so different from the raised bed garden, which are more structured even though I practice poly culture there. They are also beautiful, but in a completely different way.

Rebekah Harmon wrote:That is so cool Ulla! I hope I can next as cool as yoi when I grow up! 😁 I'm on the path. I dont need to grow everything. But I think its a beautiful goal to progress towards.

I don’t think I need to grow everything, but due to illness I usually get sick if I eat food we bought in the store. It is  one of many reasons we started homesteading. Now it’s so Peter can retire early. My love is burned out, but we need the money he brings in right now. So, that’s why we have worked to hard getting things set up. We need the extra income for him to retire. I have done market research and it looks like there aren’t many who sells freeze dried, or fresh locally grown herbs and spices. I have made my own extracts for years, so those we are also going to sell. It’s a goal we have been working towards for 10 years.
Anyway happy gardening.

The last three years, we gave produced a metric ton of produce each year, raised about 500 pounds of meat and produced 3000 eggs. Last year I passed my first million calories, and since my food forest isn’t at full production yet, the numbers will keep going up.
We live southeast of San Diego in growzone 10b. We grow food all year round. In total I grow about 150 different plants, including fruit, berries, grains, herbs, vegetables, spices, tea and coffee. Since my passion is herbs I grow over 50 different kinds of herbs and spices.
I get your problem with fruit and berries. Most homesteads drown in fruit during the summer months and then have to preserve them. When I planned our forest garden, I focused on the harvest times. The goal is to have fresh fruits/berries all year round. November and December has so far been when I didn’t have fresh fruit, but I planted Sapote last year, that will produce during those 2 months. As for berries, I grow 8 different kinds of strawberries, which gives us strawberries 7 months out of the year. I also grow both Hass and Fuerte Avocados, since each one covers 6 months of the year. This will eventually mean we have fresh avocados all year round.
While we do eat seasonally, I do preserve a lot of food. We bought a freeze dryer 4 years ago and it’s a blessing to have. Here I preserve whole eggs, egg whites and eggs yolks, which makes it easier to use them up, when we don’t get any eggs. We have both chickens and ducks, but both take time off twice a year, instead of the normal once a year. They take time off during our hottest season and then again when the days are short.
Some crops I don’t grow every year, since I usually end up growing way more than we can eat in a year. 2 years ago I for example grew 800 pounds of pumpkins and winter squash.
My focus have always been on nutrition, but also on cost. Now that I only have 1 child living at home, we are transitioning to growing more food for our livestock instead of more food for us. I also grow over 50 different kinds of herbs, teas and spices. Both the medicinal kind, and the culinary kind. I do this, since herbs are extremely expensive and the quality you can buy, just doesn’t have the same quality and freshness as the ones I grow here and freeze dry.
The total value of last years crops were 12 thousand dollars, and I would have gotten more, if I hadn’t lost all of my corn to rodents.
But back to the calories. Avocados contains a lot of oil, and it can be extracted pretty easily. I also get oil from sunflowers and pumpkin seeds. We have bees, so those give us sugar, and I have been experimenting with sugar beets. As for coffee, my coffee trees are thriving, but haven’t bloomed yet, so until then I use chicory and we do buy some coffee. I have planted a cashew tree, since we are both gluten and dairy free due to allergies. We also get pecans from our neighbors large tree.
Citrus are canned as juice or used fresh, their peels are used to make extracts.
My point is also, that in theory we only need to buy salt, but there is a limit to how many vegetables people can eat. I am the only one who mostly eat what we produce, the others still buy beef and pork and convenience items. I do buy bread sometimes, and almond flour. Now that our family has gotten smaller, the plan is to open a farm store, where we can sell and trade.

I would like to track the changes in temperatures and humidity levels throughout the food forest garden. I want to track it long term to see if it’s possible to change a desert environment into a functional subtropical environment. The plan is to pace the sensors in the different micro climates and in the general areas, to prove or disprove my theory, that it should be possible to make those environmental changes using permaculture principles and a layers food forest garden.
So, how do I do this? Are there sensors that can transfer dater into our computer system to track it over the next 5 to 10 years?
Does anyone have any ideas?

February on the homestead
February are usually a quiet month, but not so much this year. Strawberry plugs arrived late, and I struggled with exhumation.
Gawain (one of our former feral cats) has started, what looks like courting me. Once or twice a day, he will bring me a “healthy snack”, which is usually a rat, gopher or rabbit. I am not fond of the gifts, but are accepting them with grace. The reason we got his, was so he could cut down on rats, gophers and wild rabbits.
Arthur the lazy cat, brings them in live, to get my husband to kill them for him. It’s not a popular approach to more cuddles. We have had to pull out the fridge twice, and the couch in the living room, he isn’t winning any popularity with that approach.
In the raised bed garden, we are harvesting 12 pound cabbages. I have about 12 of those, so we are making kraut, and freeze drying a lot. We also blanch and freeze some.
We have harvested about 10 pounds of broccoli and 23 pounds of cauliflower.
We are also harvesting Chinese cabbages and diacon radishes for making kimchi.  Next up I have to preserve my wasabi and mustard.
I also had to do some reserve on freeze dried eggs. All of mine smelled like fish. It turns out, that this happens when the chickens get lots of omega 3. They are still fine to use, but mostly for baking, since you can’t smell or then. This year I am going to split the eggs into whiles and yolks. We already have a lot of freeze dried whole eggs. This enables us to use them for more foods.
We also got about 1/2 of our lemons canned and use the peels for zest and lemon extract.
The month has been hard on me though. I have been very tired, and it turned out I have another blood infection. I am now in the hospital, but will hopefully be send home on Friday. I can’t sleep when I am admitted, so I am, very fired.
Because of this, I am behind of my chores, but that’s okay, the works aren’t going anywhere LOL
I did manage to prune our raspberries and blackberries and pull out a lot of grass.
I will continue this, when I am, feeling better.

As my kids are moving out and I am getting older, I am trying to develop a flexible visual system for planting and harvesting. My memory isn’t very good, so I depend a lot on reminders. We are in the hottest part of California, so we grow food all year round. The goal is to produce at least 90% of the food we need, with enough left to sell at the farmers market, or trade for what we can’t produce.
Currently we have 21 large raised beds and a 3300 square foot food forest garden.
Visual reminders works best for me, due to my memory issues, since I see it constantly. To do this I am using a whiteboard, a binder with my own plant catalog and spreadsheets on my computer.
The whiteboard centers around a round calendar divided into our three growing seasons (cold, warm and hot) and surrounded by the plants. It also has my todo lists and deliveries. When my kids are here, they check the board and usually take care of some of the things on the todo list. Plant names are on magnets, that also works on the metal plant markers I use in the garden, so I don’t forget what I planted.
The binder contains:
a catalog of the plants we grow, but isn’t finished, since I am constantly using different varieties of annuals.
It has a calendar that shows our fruit and berry harvest times. My goal is to have fruit and or berries available fresh year round.  It has a plant catalog of what we grow, but only a short line on when to grow with a few notes. Last it has a list of medicinal uses and plants I want to try in the future and notes on companion planting.
My spreadsheets keeps track of our production, income/savings and expenses. The spreadsheets keep my husband from freaking out when I add more plants.
Right now I really need some input, especially on the whiteboard. What can I do to better organize it? Should I color code pr season, type, in an entirely different way or not at all?
Should I keep my plant catalog as lists of plants or make it bigger to include subspecies,  varieties, notes on use, growing instructions and experiences with it?