Harvest Season: Making Use of Every Last Bit

Industry, perseverance, and frugality make fortune yield.
--Benjamin Franklin

If I say the phrase "harvest season" what comes to mind? I think about bringing in corn, pumpkins, squashes, and apples.

In our summer garden, we eat our favorites, the best of the best. In our harvest season garden, I'm bringing in all of the odds and ends and some foods that don't look as great as their summer versions (celery is one of those veggies). So harvest season for me is all about bringing in the last of the edible veggies.

I've been working diligently at harvesting everything edible from our garden. Every day, I go out there to see what needs to be picked that day before it will no longer be a desirable food.

I told you about the carrot leaf pesto I made last week and the week before. This past Saturday, I picked every nasturtium leaf bigger than a dime to make a third batch of pesto. I filled out the quantity with parsley and watercress. The resulting nasturtium-watercress-parsely pesto is delicious. One of my favorite ways to use pesto is on macaroni pasta with a little diced tomato and Parmesan cheese blended in. When this current batch of pesto is gone, I'll make radish leaf and watercress pesto using veggies from the fall container garden.

I also told you about the crabapple sauce I made last week. I used a cup of it in the applesauce-raisin bar cookies that I baked over the weekend. Crabapple sauce can have a sharp flavor on its own. But in the cookies it was delicious. To eat this sauce as is, I blend it 50/50 with plain applesauce to mellow the flavor. I still have about 1/3 of the crabapples left to harvest. I plan on making cider with these apples.

One daughter had some time one day to help me harvest greens to chop and freeze. We harvested Swiss chard, sorrel, Brussel sprout leaves, and parsley on that day. You can cut about half of the Brussel sprout leaves at this point in the season without compromising the growth of the sprouts. We sliced them thin and froze in a large bag. The texture of Brussel sprout leaves is a lot like kale, but a bit thicker. The Swiss chard will be the first of the garden greens to die out from the cold, wet weather. So, I've been making an effort to pick those regularly for meals, as well and the large bag that we froze. Sorrel has a lemony taste but a texture much like Swiss chard. So we chopped and froze the sorrel and bagged with with the chard. The two together should go well in quiches, frittatas, and soups. Parsley will do well for several more weeks. But as we have so much of it, we're working at harvesting it for the freezer on a regular basis. Frozen parsley can be added to sauces, soups, stews, vegetable medleys, and winter pesto.

I harvested a third batch of unripe figs on Saturday to preserve in a light syrup flavored with cloves and lemon juice. So far I've canned about 16 jars of sweet green figs to enjoy throughout winter. When we finish a jar of the figs, I use the syrup to flavor and sweeten hot tea or pour over pancakes.

Yesterday I cut all of the long stems of rosemary to dry on the counter this week. Rosemary is a nice flavor addition to potatoes and various Mediterranean dishes. Later this week I'll harvest more thyme for winter cooking. Thyme is my favorite herb to use with beef dishes.

I picked the last remaining small green tomatoes today. I  chopped them fine and froze to add to chocolate spice muffins (Green Tomatoes in Hiding) when I bake again soon. It's time to pull the tomato plants up and pile them on the compost heap.

I also began harvesting the celery plants today. I pulled up about half of the plants, chopped, and froze the stems and leaves in a large bag to use in winter soups and sauces. I also harvested the last of the cucumbers and summer squash plus some green beans this morning. And I picked what are probably the last of the overbearing raspberries. One more cold night like last night and the raspberries are gone.

I will need to harvest the Brussel sprouts, the remaining Brussel sprout leaves, the remaining green beans, the rest of the Swiss chard, celery, and parsley, the last third of the crabapples, and perhaps one more batch of green unripe figs.

When your harvest is carrot greens or nasturtium leaves or unripe figs, you have to be creative in how you cook those foods and diligent at using them up. My lunches and dinners have featured a lot of oddball pestos, crabapple-apple sauce, the top leafy parts of celery stalks, and preserved unripe figs. You do what you've got to do.

It's been a lot of work. I mentioned to my husband that I could probably harvest every edible thing we grow if I had an assistant. But alas, all of my potential assistants have their own jobs. So, I'm doing my best to harvest what I can.

Owning Your Frugal Knowledge for Life

Today was crabapple sauce day. I made 13 pints of crabapple sauce for the freezer.

In the comments from yesterday's post, Tina reminded me of a thought I've had over the years: Once you learn a frugal skill, you own that knowledge for life. And if you learned that skill early in life, you own the knowledge for a long time, which means you save yourself a lot of money instead of a little. An example, if you taught yourself how to change the oil in your car when you were a teen, you can save thousands and thousands of dollars on home oil changes over your lifetime. 

Even if you're living on easy street for a while, if the tide turns for you later on, you can revert back to your learned frugal skills. Frugal skills and knowledge remain with us throughout our lives. We own the mental access to that information.

As Tina mentioned yesterday, returning to some of her frugal skills learned in her younger days is allowing her to choose her career at this later time.  She's not locked into a job that she doesn't enjoy. 

my Foley food mill for making applesauce

As with other types of skills, we build on our frugal skills with useful tools or seeking out better ways to do things. And mastering one frugal skill often leads to the mastery of adjacent frugal skills.

a cup of sour milk that no one would drink was used in a batch of pancakes this morning

homemade pancake syrup -- brown sugar, water, salt

Sometimes it isn't a skill but a tip that you learn and incorporate into your life that is money-saving. Once you've learned that tip, you own that knowledge and can refer back to it over and over.

I believe that many of these basic frugal skills and knowledge should be taught in school again. While you can learn them on the fly as needed, it's a whole lot simpler to learn them when you're young and not in the throes of a spoiling milk emergency. After all, life's emergencies often don't come with a warning.

Covid, the lockdowns, the shortages were evidence that many of us weren't really prepared. Imagine how much less stressful that period would have been all around if everyone had gone into the pandemic with some basic frugal life skills, like cooking at home. Having survived 2020, are we as a society better equipped to handle a future emergency? Did many people learn some useful skills for thriving in adverse situations? I hope so. Learning how to bake bread is like learning to ride a bike. It all comes back to you when you try again.

 

(Tina, I hope it's okay with you that I referenced your comment in this post.)