One of the things I have the great fortune to be about 40 minutes from by car is a wonderful little farming community on an island in the Columbia river, Sauvie Island. The farms on Sauvie are the origins of much of our locally-grown produce, and several of the farms have farm stores, open early summer through October, where they sell their produce much, much cheaper than grocery stores do. Staggeringly cheaper. They cater to the home canner, the DIY food preserver, as well as to urban adventurers who just want to grab a jar of local honey and call it a day. At the farm I tend to frequent, October is their boom month; they have a corn maze, a pumpkin patch, hayrides and a petting zoo. It's the whole nine yards.
My friend Breezy and I went a few weeks ago, and I bought pickling cucumbers, green beans, apples, broccoli, and squashes. SO many squashes! The cart was full. Packed. The ultimate price tag? About $65 for an amount of produce that would have cost at least $300 in a grocery store.
As I posted previously, I got the pickles started immediately, making 16 jars of vinegar pickles and giving a shot at my first-ever lactic acid pickles, which turned out beautifully and which I just canned up this weekend:
So, bolstered by my success with lactic-acid fermentation, it was back to the island this Sunday for a morning walk on the beach (gratuitous beach shot):
Followed by a stop at the farm store on the way back, to pick up one of their sauerkraut cabbages, monsters that they sell for 20 cents a pound. I selected one that looked reasonably small and easy to carry.
That cabbage weighs about 21 and a half pounds. That's a WHOLE lot of cabbage! Here it is on my counter, dwarfing the quarts of pickles behind it:
That's not an optical illusion, it really is that big. After dropping it off at home, it was back to a nearby river beach to look for smooth flat stones to put on top of my pickled goods, to keep them below the surface of the brine while fermenting.
Success! I am rich with pickle stones. I will share more about how the sauerkraut goes as I get on with it.
Now, here's the thing. I'm trying to feed five people on a pretty limited budget. I'm a full-time student now, and I picked up an extra teenager along the way, so I'm broke AND I have very little free time. Looking at my blog, it would be easy to get the impression that I have endless free time and money for this wild Susie Homemaker stuff, but I don't. This stuff I do, the canning and cooking, is stuff that can't take up a lot of my time, because I have homework and kids and friends and occasionally even paying customers who buy stuff from my foundering bead business that I no longer have time to tend to. So if you're reading this and you're thinking "Whatever, lady, are you F'in' serious? Who has time for that?" I don't want you to feel discouraged because you don't live near a farm and have no interest in pickling things. It's one way for me to stretch my budget, but maybe you don't even LIKE pickles.
Furthermore, not everybody has a car with which to drive to nearby farms. But, I wanted to talk about the farm, because a lot of people DO live within an hour of local farms, and don't even realize it. And if you do, and especially if you can find a friend or two to carpool with, you can go one morning a month during the season and stock up on fresh, local vegetables for a fraction of what you would pay in a grocery store. The farms near me take EBT. If you can reach them, it is an opportunity to really stretch your food budget, and if you have a freezer or learn basic canning techniques, you can stretch it year-round.
A footnote: after Halloween, most of the farms will close for the season. Many of them, at this point, put all of their unsold squashes out in piles on the side of the road, free for all takers. Hard-shelled winter squash will keep for months, through the whole winter in most cases.
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