Harvesting, Preserving, and Putting Up
Dried lavender, sage, & mint
The last few days before the frost, my girls and I were busy gathering food to save before the first real freezing cold came to middle Tennessee. We grew so many things this year that we can enjoy all fall and winter long, like yellow and red onions, garlic, fingerling potatoes, and purple potatoes.
I would love to do even more of this, but each year it’s baby steps. I have to remember back to the day when I didn’t know how to grow any of these veggies or herbs or flowers, much less preserve them or save the seeds for the future.
Here are some things we’ve harvested/dried/put up lately:
Lavender (grown from seed last year and finally enough to harvest)
Sage
Mint (for tea)
Calendula flowers (to dry for making calendula salve)
Marigold seeds & petals (to dry for seed and also to try making some marigold cardamom butter)
Cherry tomatoes galore from the greenhouse (to roast and then freeze for making tomato soup)
Seeds from a Long Island Cheese pumpkin that our neighbors gave us (this pumpkin made incredibly creamy soup and had lots of flesh, so we’re going to use these seeds to grow them ourselves next year)
There are already jars of calendula oil all over the house from the spring flowers that I dried and steeped in extra virgin olive oil for months for my homemade calendula salve.
I cannot believe how many seeds come from one single marigold flower. Probably 100-150 in one single head! God really created nature to reproduce. It’s a beautiful thing to see firsthand.
I’ll miss the heavenly scent on my hands after harvesting calendula flowers
Lavender being harvested - oh the smell!
All of the dried herbs and flowers are stored in sealed glass jars after they’re thoroughly dried. I store dried seeds in ziplock bags clearly labeled so I’m ready to start them in seed trays in the early spring.
From our bee colony up on the hill, we only took about half of the frames, the ones that were partially filled with honey. The full frames we left for the bees to feed them all winter. This past summer, we converted to “horizontal” or “top bar” hives rather than the vertical ones you typically see. Check our “Bees” highlight on our Kindred Farm Instagram for lots of video footage and fun facts about raising bees, including some video of when we extracted honey from this frame!
Last night I drizzled some on toasted sourdough with butter. It’s so light and golden in color compared to our honey harvested in the spring which was a rich amber! My girls have eaten spoonfuls of it when their throats felt scratchy or they had sneezes, and it’s like nature’s pure medicine. The color is determined by the pollen that the bees collect. It’s incredible to know that the honey we’re eating now as both food and medicine is directly affected by the flowers we planted way back in April for the pollinators to enjoy all season long.
With harvesting, preserving, and putting up, we REMEMBER. In the the cold, dark days of late fall and winter, jars of green and gold remind us that while it may not look like it outside, there’s still life humming beneath the surface. But for now, inside this warm farmhouse, we hope. We wait. We savor.
