Learning self-sufficiency
Each year, we get fresh mountain huckleberries from McCall, Idaho. They are fantastic fresh, in pies or tarts, or made into jam or syrup. We really enjoy them, and like to stretch them out over the course of the year.
This is our recipe for huckleberry jam.
When laid, an egg is coated with a protective coating called “bloom” which dries on the shell and seals it. The bloom helps protect the egg and keep it fresh by blocking gasses and bacteria from passing through the porous egg shell. Eggs also get other material on them from the hen’s feet, or the bedding they’re laid in. Commercial eggs are washed so as to remove anything on the shell, including the bloom. This is another reason for the difference in freshness between commercially produced eggs and home produced eggs.
This is an excellent book. We’ve read a number of similar books, and this is our favorite.
The Backyard Homestead has great overviews on gardening, raising animals, landscaping with plants, maintaining fruit trees, keeping bees, homebrewing, cheese making, and more. While each of these topics is broad enough that you should have other guides or references if you want to undertake them, this book helps show how each of these areas fit into a backyard setup.
We’ve been dehydrating Walla Walla Sweets like mad this year, keeping the dehydrator going ’round the clock. This is actually the first time we’ve used our dehydrator, so we spent some time looking for information about drying onions with a high water content like Walla Walla Sweets and didn’t find much. While this information is fairly simple, it doesn’t appear to be out there anywhere else. Please let us know if you find this helpful.
We received a large quantity of organic Walla Walla Sweet onions and needed to find creative ways to put them up, as they have a very short shelf life. We’ve been drying a ton of them, and pickled some, but I wanted to try an onion jam. I came up with this and really love it.