What's left from 2017's harvest

Rickety garden gate to keep chickens out (only successful during snowstorms), Feb 2018

Rather than publish a garden notes for February--because nothing really happened out there except some last minute, school-closing snow--I thought I'd update on how my stored and preserved garden foods are doing.

At the end of 2017's growing season, I had many things in my pantry, both stored and preserved.  For instance, in storage I had potatoes, garlic, squashes and onions.  Preserved, I had zuccini pickles, dried chard and nasturtium leaves, applesauce and sauerkraut, among others.  Later on, I made green tomato salsa and garlic salt, and very recently some fermented carrots (with bought carrots).  So what's left?

Well, all the stored veg have been eaten up except garlic;  though it's going slowly, I use two cloves pretty much every day no matter what we have for dinner.

My preserves are getting a bit thinner now too, but there's a few left:  most of the applesauce (the stored apples--from the same batch, wild harvested--lasted until the end of December), a little apple jelly, most of the green tomato salsa, most of the garlic salt.  I found a small jar of salted lemons which may be from 2016:  still good though!  And a little bit of sauerkraut left in the fridge made at least six months ago but also still tasty.

We've also drunk all the rhubarb and elderflower wines (finally), and most of 2016's cider, but have several bottles of elderberry/blackberry wine to tide us over till 2017's much larger batch of cider's ready for drinking. 

Now it's March and we're getting close to the "hungry gap;"  I really should have more stored and preserved to tide us over till summer--though at least we have enough to drink!  It's something I'll focus on this coming year, particularly with dried greens like chard, hopefully some more dried peas, a few more squashes and possibly some more fermented vegetables like sauerkraut.