Storing Our Daily Food

Summer (or what passed for it) is winding down; there’s a crispness in the air, the first local frost warnings have been issued and regional Fall Fairs are popping up around us. It’s also that time of year when it’s hard to keep up with all that our garden is producing: potatoes, carrots, beets, chard, Brussels sprouts, cauliflowers, rutabagas, onions, cabbages... you name it.

Of course there’s no way we can eat all this bounty as it suddenly becomes available, it’s just too darn much. We’ll have to find a way to store it for the winter, but the fridge is already full… Sure, we’ll cook & freeze some of it, but not everything can be stored this way. Besides, the freezer is getting full, too.

Many homesteads all over rural Canada had (have) a root cellar or cold storage room. They’re small rooms that can be kept at just above freezing by controlled venting to the outside, while warmth from the house or thick earth berms prevent it from getting too cold. No power required…
Since our straw bale insulated garage usually doesn’t get colder than around –6C in even the coldest of winter, we figured it would be a good place to build our own cold storage room there. So we built one, well-insulated to keep the warmth in (sorry, no straw bales this time – just left-over fiber glass batts). A 60 Watt light bulb can be switched on for some additional heat in case the temperature dips too low.

Our cold room is pretty much done now, awaiting its shelving. It’s a bit of an experiment, we’ll have to see how it goes. But if it works, we’ll be eating the fruit (okay: veggies) of our labour until spring!

Our Daily Food

To continue this blog’s food-themed focus: today we had our first full home-grown organic supper! Beets, chard, lettuce, carrots, potatoes, zucchini… Sure, we’ve been eating plenty of veggies from our garden for weeks now (despite this crappy summer), but this time everything on our plate came from there! No pesticides, nothing genetically altered, no chemical fertilizers – just Mother Earth doing her thing (okay, with lots of help from Jacomyn).

Not only is this food very healthy and extremely flavourful, there’s also something intensely satisfying about growing and eating your own food. We’ve become so alienated from our food sources, we often don’t know where it comes from, who grew it and how it was grown. The food and fertilizing industries are colossal entities, only designed to make profits for their share holders – at any cost.

We’re lucky here in Nolalu where we have plenty of space and good enough soil to grow our own. Friends and neighbours around us provide us with organic eggs, chicken meat, beef, pork and even more veggies & fruit than we can ever dream of growing ourselves.
All we need now is a way to store all this yummy goodness for when winter comes…

A Greenhouse For –40C Winters…?

Our North Ontario winters are crazy long & cold. If you want to do any serious vegetable gardening, you’ll need some sort of greenhouse to beat the short growing season – or it will beat you. Add to this free trade and low oil prices, and it’s no wonder that most of our produce here is trucked in from vast distances, losing much of its freshness and nutrients in the process.

Some people are getting a little nervous about that. For with oil prices steadily climbing, so has the price of that trucked-in produce. And with energy and environmental crises breathing down our neck, they are beginning to wonder what may happen if those crises will make it impossible to get our food here. How will we feed ourselves then?

Enter Nolalu resident Leo Hunnako. Leo’s got a Big Idea: to build a greenhouse for North Ontario’s mind-numbing cold winters. Yep: winters. You know, our long plug-your-car-in, square-tire winters. That’s when Leo’s greenhouse will be happily producing fresh organic veggies. Solar powered, almost all year round. Mind you, this is not your (grand) daddy’s greenhouse. This one’s super-insulated and sheltered from the biting winds. Lots of thermal mass will retain the sun’s warmth that pours in during our short but sunny winter days. Solar hot water collectors will store even more solar heat that gets piped through a sand-filled wall and underneath the veggie beds. Insulated double pane windows will be covered up with more insulation material at night to keep the warmth in.

It’s scheduled to be operational by early October, the first of its kind. The idea is that with Leo’s help (and after extensive testing) many more will follow. We can’t wait to see how it will perform.
Our survival may depend on it.
Leo Hunnako can be reached at leoh @ tbaytel.net (first remove the spaces in the email address - spam protection)