We started with growing a four-season garden before passive solar greenhouses for year-round growing became popular. Instead, we converted part of an old garage into a food production place and experimented with growing food year-round. Here is an honest 8 years of year-round growing in zone 3 ...
Four Season Greenhouse/Growing Room Review
8 years have passed since we started our adventure of building a four-season greenhouse/growing room at the back of our garage, and it's time for an honest review. If you are new here, welcome! Northern Homestead is in Alberta Canada, growing zone 3, 51 latitude parallel north. The ...
How To Grow and Use Ground Cherries (With Recipe)
How to grow and use ground cherries is an older popular blog article that is time to refresh. We included our favorite ground cherry piroshki recipe. Try it and let us know how you like it. Ground cherries, also known as cape gooseberries, are little orange fruits resembling tomatillos, ...
The New Country Garden
Last year in November we purchased a 2-acre country property. We have not shared much about it yet for several reasons but wanted to update you on it over the winter months. Today we start with the new country garden update. Growing a garden away from home is not new to us. We have grown a ...
End of Season Garden Update 2022
We are looking back with gratitude to yet another productive gardening season this Thanksgiving weekend. It also happens to be our 15th anniversary of living in Canada. The beautiful fall weather we are enjoying reminds me of our first fall here. Back then we did not know how rare the warm Octobers ...
Fermented Tomatoes
Fermented tomatoes are a real treat. They are sweet and sour and pop in your mouth with a refreshing explosion. Yum! The only problem is to get them to that stage. I have made fermented tomatoes for years, but to be honest, it was always hit-and-miss. One time they would turn out ...
A Dozen Ways to Preserve Carrots
After sharing our bountiful harvest last week, the question arose about how to preserve carrots. That's a good question. Here are a dozen ways to preserve carrots. Most of them we are using or have used in the past. Storing carrots in the cellar Carrots are a root crop that stores very well ...
Sowing Carrots in Cornstarch Experiment
Have you heard of sowing carrots in cornstarch? It is said to be a way of planting lots of carrots quickly and easily for great germination no thinning needed and preventing seed waste. Wow, that's a lot to ask from a planting method, especially if it comes to something as finicky as ...
Freezing Raw Tomato Sauce
Preserving tomatoes for winter has two reasons. For one we want to enjoy the summer bounty year-round, but also there are often way more tomatoes in the middle of summer than we can eat, so preserving is the best way to use up the harvest. We already covered the easiest way to preserve ...
Sour Cherry Jam Recipe Without Pectin
This delicious sour cherry jam recipe without pectin comes from my long-time best friend. We both grew up on the same narrow street in a small town. Even though we have moved to different towns, countries, and continents, our friendship never got lost. Friendship like ours is seldom, and it is ...
