I'm glad you asked, I needed something to yak about.
Winter weather has been keeping us indoors a bit more here on the homestead, although that doesn't mean that nothing is going on. My dear kitchen witch has been busy putting together gifts for the Solstice(Christmas) holiday. What's on the table, you ask? You sound just like everyone getting the goody bags 馃ぃ
On the table is a variety of hot sauces, lotion bars, herb tea, herb baths, pepper flake, a dash of saffron, and assorted other home grown goods. We ordered the bottles, bags, tea diffusers and labels, but all the contents were grown and harvested locally, with over 80% from right here.
The peppers are really the only thing in the gifts that we bought this year, and there was just such an abundance that we(she) couldn't help ourselves(herself). As a result, we had quite a bit of extra hot sauce, and all these will be going to market this winter. The small jars are a natural antibiotic ointment, the brown bottles will be filled with master tonic, also known in many places as fire cider. Fire cider is a more appropriate name; it is apple cider vinegar infused with hot peppers, garlic, onion, horseradish, ginger, and burdock root. It's hotter than the hot sauce, but will settle your stomach, clear your sinuses, and keep you warm on a cold day.
Below is what it looked like while things were being put together, in one of the cleaner moments. It was a regular Santa's workshop for the whole day, if Santa's workshop only made gifts for places like Crabtree & Evelyn, if Crabtree & Evelyn had only sold organic things.
The natural abundance continues this year, and I found a few volunteer radishes. These self seeded from the hairy radishes I showed you way back in this post here. There are only a handful of them, but any surprise winter radishes are welcome.
Into our more feral harvests, the wild roses had an absolutely epic year this year, and I would estimate we have 10 lbs. of easily accessible rose hips to harvest. I'll consider myself very lucky if I get even half that much.
We call these roses dog roses around here. They are the ones with little white flowers and the clusters of small rose hips like this. We also have a small amount of apothecary roses, which get the larger pink flowers and large single rose hips. We still haven't seen enough of those ones for harvest, though we take flower petals from them. Apothecary roses are extremely fragrant.
To harvest these treats from their prickly producers, I grab a few of the berries and then cut off the whole bunch at the base. The individual bunches are not usually thorny. I still got pricked quite a bit, and it took about an hour to fill this colander. Rose hips are very high in vitamin C, which make them a perfect snack to help fend off winter colds(the 'RONA!) and other opportunistic germs.
We have other things still growing, as well, but I haven't taken any pictures. Most of our brassicas are still at least alive. The broccoli and kale are still producing regularly, the Brussels sprouts are sprouting, and we got our first ever cauliflower this year, which continues to come in slowly. The calendula has also been doing great well into the fall, but has finally shown some signs of dying back after a week of nights in the 20's.
I've also been working quite a bit on the new rocket stove build, which you'll get to see in my next post in that series. For those of you paying attention, you may have noticed that I've started posting into different communities, instead of just to my blog. I'm working on a rhyme and reason as to what goes where. So far, aside from the farming/preserving side of homesteading, there doesn't seem to be any communities really featuring my kind of content here on the HIVE. I'll see how it pans out over time... all part of the learning curve/growing pains. One of these days perhaps I'll hop into one of those Discord channels the kids are always talking about and learn a bit more about the etiquette around here.
Until that day, I'll keep tip-toeing through the tulips, creeping around the edges of cross-posting, and hoping that someone out there is getting a little something out of it. Be well and be warm, hope to see you all back again!