Food Preservation Guest Crystal from Whole Fed Homestead - Ep26

Today's episode is a conversation with Crystal from Whole Fed Homestead. Join us as we talk about food preservation, long-term power outages, using a car as a solar dehydrator, her new book Freeze Fresh, and so much more.

You can find Crystal:
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https://www.instagram.com/wholefedhomestead/

Her book Freeze Fresh can be found in bookstores and online wherever books are sold.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to this prepared life and thank you so much for listening. Helping your host. The goal here is for you to find education, encouragement, and support in all things homestead prepper. I am so excited to share that something I've been working on for many months is now open. This prepared life started as a way to share my journey and my knowledge. I love this podcast and I love Instagram, but sometimes it is hard to go deep and really get into a topic in those formats. That is where this prepared life community formed from. This prepared life community is a place to go deep in information and learning skills, and most of all, it is a place to connect with other like-minded women. In the community, you will find a new topic each month on a homesteading or prepping topic. All past content is always available. You'll find exclusive posts, videos, and how-tos, recipes, a private chat forum, and more. VIP members get additional perks like a monthly Zoom call and behind the scenes videos. You can find more information at www.thispreparedlife.com backslash community. Today's episode I am so excited about. My absolute favorite podcast episodes are guest episodes, and today we have Crystal from Whole Fed Homestead. I've followed Crystal on Instagram for a few years and I absolutely find her to be a wealth of knowledge. She has this calm demeanor and soothing voice that makes listening to her stories relaxing but fun. Welcome, Crystal. Thank you so much for joining me today.

SPEAKER_00 1:28

Well, thank you for having me and thank you for your kind words.

SPEAKER_01 1:32

I do seriously enjoy your stories. I find that like as I'm listening to them, I'm just like, oh, Crystal is so calm. And you're talking about very interesting stuff, and I am like fully engaged in what you are showing and sharing, but it is just like relaxing to listen to you speak. Well, I appreciate that. Why don't you start by just telling us a little bit about yourself, anything you want to share about your family or your homestead?

SPEAKER_00 2:05

Yeah, well, I like you said, I'm I'm the person behind Whole Fed Homestead, and I have a website and social media channels where I like to share basically what we're doing, and I like to teach people the lost arts of homesteading and gardening, especially preserving food. I think more than anything, I love preserving food. I love talking about preserving food and teaching people about it. I think all my life I've had a spark in me to grow and preserve food. One of my earliest memories that I can remember is when I was just a little girl, sitting in the dirt in my grandma's garden, unwrapping and eating ground cherry after ground cherry while she weeded. And she had a huge garden and taught my dad to garden, and of course, he taught me. And now I live on a 19-acre homestead in Wisconsin with my fella Carl, where we try to, I would say reasonably without burning out or driving ourselves crazy, try to grow as much of our own food as we can. We have a pretty short growing season, so um, we're zone four, so we pack a lot of gardening into the warm months and preserve all we can and ride out the winter. Zone four. Um, what does your growing season look like in a zone four? Um, you know, I would say from I can say from June to about November, we grow almost every single vegetable and most of the fruit that we eat. But outside of and for for fresh. Outside of that, though, there's really not too much growing here during those months, those other months. So we get a lot of snow in the winter, in the winter we're just um, you know, completely buried, and it is drab and gray and uh, you know, a little bit miserable, but um our our wonderful spring and summer and fall kind of makes makes up for that, I guess.

SPEAKER_01 3:52

We are zone 6A here, but last year and neighbors tell me that this is pretty common, we got a killing frost August 31st. So I was like devastated. Yeah, that's I thought I had another month, maybe month and a half left, and I was like, oh my goodness, this short season gardening is a whole new ball game. Whole new ball game. It is, it's it's kind of intense. Yeah. You mentioned gardening with your grandma and your dad and learning skills as a child. Can you tell us a little bit about when did you start homesteading and what does that journey look like for you?

SPEAKER_00 4:31

Yeah, I grew up, I like to say I grew up living close to the land. My my parents didn't call themselves homesteaders. I I don't think that word was trendy back in the 80s like it was now, but my dad raised honeybees and meat rabbits, and we did a lot of hunting and fishing and foraging, a lot of mushroom and berry foraging, and of course had a garden, which I am just I am so incredibly grateful for that. I grew up, you know, climbing trees and splashing around in mud puddles kind of before technology took off. I had a hefty dose of nature in my childhood, and I think that really shaped me. That or it I don't necessarily believe in past lives, but if I did have one, I was definitely a homesteader in the 1800s. I had a wood-burning oven and a butter churn, I'm just sure of it. I I feel this, I feel the lifestyle really deeply. Like I can't imagine living any other way, you know, and I feel a really undeniable connection to the ways that things used to be done, like a slower, more old-fashioned kind of life. And and not that I don't live a very modern lifestyle currently, because I absolutely do, but I like to keep at least one toe, I say, dipped into the old ways of doing things. Really, though, I've been deep into homesteading for a bit over 10 years now, you know, kind of like as an adult on my own, as my own lifestyle choice for um a little over a decade.

SPEAKER_01 5:52

What are your homestead goals you shared with food production and preserving? Tell us a little bit more about, you know, what your goals are, how you plan that, make your decisions, that kind of thing.

SPEAKER_00 6:04

Yeah, we we've been in our current homestead, which which we call our forever homestead for about 10 years now. And we definitely started with planting things. Like we got an orchard established right away, and our garden spaces established right away, and had to do a lot of shaping of our property because it it did not have pretty much anything. It has no fencing, no infrastructure, no outbuildings. So we've had to really build everything from the ground up. And I feel at this point, like we have kind of conquered that. Like all of our orchard and gardening spaces are well on their way and established and doing really good. Our next goal is to focus on animals. I mean, we have chickens and we have honey bees sometimes. Sometimes have honeybees if they if they haven't died. We do we always have chickens. But I would love to have some large animals. It's just such a huge leap, and it's kind of a scary leap. Like doing the gardening and the growing part with fruits and vegetables is a lot less intimidating, I think. It feels like a huge jump to go into animals. It's such a time commitment, it's such an investment for us because we have to put up fencing and um housing and figure out water and figure out feed storage and all of that, but we're starting to kind of get into that. And I would love to have sheep, I think more than anything. I really want sheep for meat and for milk. Um, big time dreams, maybe a milk cow, probably some pigs and and beef cows, you know, kind of the the big homesteading bundle, I guess I would say.

SPEAKER_01 7:35

What advice would you share with someone who is just starting out? You talk, you know, you talked about you jumping into your land 10 years ago, and it was just this bare space.

SPEAKER_00 7:46

Yeah, we uh, you know, we did a lot of I think this is probably true for everybody, that you just have a lot of trial and error, and some things you learn the hard way, and and sometimes you make bad investments in different plants or animals or um whatnot. But I think starting small is a good place. You don't have to do everything all at once, and in fact, if you are biting off more than you can chew, usually that does lead to losses, sometimes some pretty devastating losses, whether it's crop failure because you didn't have the time and attention it needed, or even worse than that, losing an animal because you weren't prepared or didn't have the right housing or the right knowledge or you didn't have a vet, you know, in the area that you knew, or whatever it may be of all the million of things that can go wrong. So I would say, and and this is very much my personality too. I'm uh I tend to be kind of a cautious person. I like to do a lot of research before I step into something. So my advice naturally is take it one thing at a time. Don't think you have to do everything all at once.

SPEAKER_01 8:51

Would you share with us one of your maybe most memorable learning experiences slash mistakes?

SPEAKER_00 9:00

Oh yes, the the thing that popped into my head immediately. This was probably uh probably our second year here. We we had ducks, we jumped into ducks because I had a friend that had some ducks she was getting rid of, and I was like, yes, I would love to take some ducks and start with those. And we had a mama duck, a beautiful mama duck, and a and a pen and like a coop that was lined with chicken wire, which I have since learned. Chicken wire keeps chicken in chickens in, chicken wire does not keep predators out. And she had a beautiful clutch of like it was something like 12 ducklings, and they were probably five weeks old, they were just beautiful teenagers, and in the middle of the night a weasel came in and um and got them all. It was just horrific and terrible, and also a very important lesson learned that you have to have very secure fencing if you want to keep animals like that that are lower on on the uh pecking order of life.

SPEAKER_01 9:58

Yeah, we have a very similar experience. The one of the first times we did meat chickens, uh, we put them in a chicken tractor in our pasture and ful, you know, just like yours, fully contained, chicken wire. We thought it was great. And we woke up one morning and half of them had been eaten by a raccoon, and it was devastating. Devastating. We learned very quickly hardware cloth is the way to go.

SPEAKER_00 10:34

Yep. I think it it seems like a lot of homesteaders have a a similar story, maybe. So I I don't know. I try I try to spread the word as much as I can so other people don't have to experience that, but man.

SPEAKER_01 10:47

Where did your passion come from for sharing online with others?

SPEAKER_00 10:53

Oh, that's a good question. You know, I'm not sure. I think I I think that I'm by nature a teacher. I like to teach people things, and I really I really love this lifestyle and and living in it, so I think that it kind of just it came really naturally for me to want to share that and to want to help other people. I also think that um kind of like I said before, I'm somebody who does like to do a lot of research. I like to try things in my garden and test different methods of things, and I'm kind of always searching for the best way to do something, which I think is really valuable for for other people who then don't have to spend the time doing that, and it comes naturally to me, and I and I like that, so I like to share that and be helpful to other people when I can.

SPEAKER_01 11:38

Can you talk to us a little bit about food preservation? What methods you prefer and use, just that topic in general?

SPEAKER_00 11:48

Yeah, I um I think I I probably do a little bit of everything of the main preserving methods, even freeze drying. I got a freeze dryer this last year, which has been really fun. It's probably my favorite part of homesteading and of growing things is of growing things is preserving it. I think I like that more than anything. Um above all, I would say that I love to freeze stuff, which is no surprise because as you know, I had uh I wrote a book recently called Freeze Fresh, which is all about how to freeze your produce, how to freeze your fruits and vegetables. And um, and so that's my favorite way, but I do still do canning every year and dehydrating as well. There's just, you know, some things that are best done with every single method, so I kind of just pick and choose what I want for whatever crop I'm working with. But for the most part, I tend to freeze stuff.

SPEAKER_01 12:37

You mentioned your book, and um I feel blessed that you sent me an early copy to look at, and it is just beautiful. And yesterday I was preserving basil, and typically I slice and freeze an olive oil, but my brain said, I wonder what Crystal's book says. So I pulled it out to look and see what you said about how you preserve basil, and um, the book is just beautiful, and I feel like uh, you know, over the last I think it's been how long, a year that you've maybe longer that you've been working on the book? Years. Um, you know, you shared a lot in your stories on Instagram, and I feel like we all got to be a little bit part of that process of you creating the book. And my absolute favorite part of the process that you shared was when you shared about the photo shoot. I was like fascinated. I was like, they're using dry ice and all of this neat stuff, and it was it was just a lot of fun. So tell us about your book and where that came from. Anything you want to share about your book.

SPEAKER_00 13:44

Yeah, I wanted to create this book to give other people options for preserve preserving food uh more accessibly and to to make it feel more doable for the average person. Freezing is freezing is and has always been my favorite way to preserve fruits and vegetables for a long time. It's fast, it's easy, much easier than say canning, and the quality of food is very good if you do it right. And that is what my book walks you through. So it has kind of three main three main things in it. The first is really thorough, detailed instructions for freezing fruits and vegetables in common ways, plus unique and creative ways. So for example, you'll find instructions for freezing shredded zucchini and chunks of zucchini, and zucchini noodles, which is a little bit different. And then in the cauliflower chapter, you'll learn how to freeze florets, of course, but also you'll learn how to freeze cauliflower rice and pureeed cauliflower, things like that. And then the second part is recipes that freeze well, like above and beyond the basics. These are things like sauces and salsas and jams and pesto, using zucchini as an example. Again, two of my favorite ways to freeze zucchini are as stewed garlic butter zucchini, which is like a slow-cooked zucchini that eats kind of like mashed potatoes. It's so good. And then uh zucchini pancakes, which you reheat from frozen in a toaster, like a Pop Tart. So those are kind of fun too. And there are a lot of recipes for fruit butters and fruit sauces and lots of things in the tomato chapter. One of my favorites there is a tikka masala simmer sauce and um pickles. A lot of people don't realize you can freeze pickles, so that kind of thing. And then the last part is recipes for using the frozen produce. Because frozen produce doesn't behave quite the same as fresh, I have lots of recipes that go through using it and really help to make it shine and bring out its best qualities. These are things like, for example, you can freeze cabbage, and then I really like to use that in cabbage roll soup in the winter. And then um you can freeze beets, and I like to freeze puree beets and then make crackers with them. They make the best crackers. And of course, fruit, you can do all sorts of things with fruit. One of my favorites is making pies, or um, I have a like a recipe for tart cherry oatmeal bars made with frozen cherries. So that's the kind of thing. Um, the kind of stuff that's in the book. Tell me more about frozen pickles. Do they stay crunchy? They do. They're uh they're limp but crunchy. Okay, interesting. That's one of those things that um growing up my grandma always had in her freezer was old Kool Whip containers and old country crock containers full of all sorts of things, and she always made freezer pickles. So I have her recipe. She's past now, but I have her recipe that I uh that I worked from and making those, but it's something that people have done, I think, for for a long time, and they actually do really, really well. I have a dill pickle and a sweet pickle recipe. The sweet pickles are by far my favorite, they're like a bread and butter pickle, and something about the sugar content in them really makes the texture very good. They are you would never know that they're frozen, honestly. They're they're not firm, they're limp, but they do have a really great crunch. Interesting.

SPEAKER_01 16:52

Okay, I think I'm gonna go find that page in your book as soon as we are done here because cucumber season is kicking off. So here too. Um, can you share a bit about nutritional content of frozen food? I know for me, I you know, it's important to me that I am feeding my family nutritionally sound food. Um, and I know that dehydrating you lose nutrition, canning you lose nutrition. Um, what do you know about the nutritional content in frozen food that you could share with us?

SPEAKER_00 17:26

It's such a it's a really complex topic. One that I've been very interested in too. I have a very high interest in the nutritional content of food and how different preservation methods affect it. So it's something that I've looked into a lot. Basically, whenever you pick a vegetable, it starts, it starts losing its nutrients almost immediately. And every preservation method, of course, has pros and cons. There is a lot of information out there. I'm somebody who I have a science background. I really enjoy reading like journal articles and and that kind of literature. So I have looked at so many journal articles of food preservation and nutrient content and nutrient loss over time. There is a lot of information out there. There's a lot of old, what I think is outdated information, there's a lot of conflicting information. You'll find some people saying that dehydrated food contains the most nutrients, and then some people will say canning contains a lot of nutrients. And um, from what I've found, uh freezing is one of the higher, but you have to be mindful when you do it. Um blanching vegetables especially will help retain nutrients over time. You can't really just, for the most part, throw vegetables in the freezer. They will do better if they're blanched first, especially if you intend to keep them over like six months, because it seems to be at around the six month mark. Vegetables and fruits too will lose more nutrients. Um but if you pick something when it's ripe, you know, the best thing you could do is if if you can grow it yourself, that's great, of course, because you you know where it's grown. But the sooner you can pick something and get it preserved, the better. So don't pick something and let it sit in your fridge for days and days if you can avoid it before you preserve it. Pick it and get it preserved right away. Make sure you follow any preparation technique, like blanching, if it's required. And um, the colder your deep freeze, the better that will help as well. If you can keep your food just solidly cold, that will help as well for long-term storage. But it's I I wish it I wish there were a more simple answer on what happens to the nutrients in food, because it even depends on the nutrient itself, too. Some of them, like vitamin C is a common one, that does start to degrade over time, even in the freezer, even when you take proper precautions. But some other nutrients actually might increase over time. It's it's it's kind of wild to me the differences in things. But I guess the other important thing to note is also eat your food in a timely manner. Try not to keep fruits and vegetables in the freezer for, you know, like the two years if you can avoid it, because they do tend to stay good, like they stay edible for two years, but you'll get the most nutrition out of something if you can eat it within a year is kind of a good recommendation.

SPEAKER_01 20:02

Um, I've also, you know, I have a freeze dryer, you have a freeze dryer. It seems like everyone is fascinated with freeze drying right now. And freeze drying, I've done no personal scientific information, but um, they say that it retains 99% of its nutritional content. Why did you decide to get a freeze dryer? And what are some of your favorite things to freeze dry?

SPEAKER_00 20:26

Yeah, I've heard that too about freeze drying retains the most nutrients. I have not looked into it myself. It's one of those things is like, okay, that's what the freeze drying company is telling me. I haven't looked into it myself. I do believe that it probably does keep a lot of nutrients, but I I wouldn't want to quite say that confidently until I have personally researched it more. And you know, I've kind of just got started. I got it this winter, and so I didn't have like all my fresh garden stuff to be to be freeze-drying. So I've done, you know, I did potatoes and squash because I had those still because they store. But now that the garden is taking off, I have been doing a lot, a lot of stuff. I'm really interested in more of like snack stuff. So I've I've got a batch in there right now. It's zucchini and green bean pieces that have like a ranch seasoning on them, and my intention is to eat them crispy, you know, like a I'm hoping they taste like a Cheeto or something. Like a nice uh junky snack food, but actually healthy. Um, other than that, I've done a lot of fruits. I I do really enjoy freeze-dried fruit and keeping that on hand as well. I did some herbs the other day, those turned out really, really good. Um I mean the color is just the most vibrant, beautiful green. It retained that. So I th that's actually probably a good clue. If it retained such a great color, it probably did retain a lot of nutrients too. So I'm actually just looking forward to doing a lot of experimentation now that I have a whole entire garden full of things.

SPEAKER_01 21:54

Yeah, that was one of the reasons that we uh decided to invest in a Fruice dryers being able to uh have another method to preserve all of that garden produce. Like um, and we did asparagus, and it it is like so good, just crunchy. It's like a crouton alternative, and I was so surprised at how delicious it was.

SPEAKER_00 22:22

I agree. I actually did asparagus this spring too, like little asparagus poppers, and they were they were incredible. I thought they were so good, but I'm I'm like you, I wanted another method. I I do can, I don't love canning, and I don't always love canned food, so to have another shelf stable option was really appealing to me.

SPEAKER_01 22:41

Yeah, we are really texture picky. Um and so there are some things that I just will never can because they they just don't hold up very well, and so those things we will typically freeze um because we'll we prefer it that way, but I'm finding the freeze dryer is replacing that for a lot of things, so I've been just pleasantly surprised with that. Can you tell us a bit about gardening? Um, that's a big part of what you share on Instagram, and maybe just tell us a bit about your garden space, how do you plan that?

SPEAKER_00 23:22

Yeah, so we have um, I actually just measured it the other day. We have 4,000 square feet of vegetable growing space. And we have we're primarily in-ground gardeners, so we plant directly in the soil. I have a couple raised beds, but the bulk of our garden is directly in the ground. We're very fortunate here in Wisconsin in the Midwest to have pretty beautiful soil, which I am so grateful for. I I realized since being on Instagram and interacting with other gardeners over the years that that is not the case at all for most people. A lot of people are on sand or clay or um, you know, just have kind of cruddy soil. And I was like, gosh, I that makes me really thankful that I have not really had to put a lot of inputs into our soil naturally. Um but I grow, I would say I grow three main categories of things. The first is fruits and vegetables for eating fresh for as much of the season as possible. I really try to push our season and use succession planting and some makeshift cold frames and things to have fresh produce as soon as we can in the beginning of spring, but also as long as we can into late fall. And then I grow a lot of things with the intention of preserving them. That's actually the majority of the garden. I do a lot of freezing, of course, but we have a makeshift root cellar as well, and so I store a lot of potatoes and squash in there. I have learned um how to store carrots so that they last the entire year until we have fresh carrots again in the in the garden. Same with apples. I have learned that I can store apples the entire year in a fridge and make them last. Um, and you know, we grow like all of our own onions and all of our own garlic, and and a lot of things have finally come full circle like that, which is really cool that I can grow them fresh and preserve them to have all year long, which has been a huge goal. So it's really, really cool to see that kind of coming along. And then I do like to dedicate a little garden space to like new or fun things. I really like to try new vegetables I haven't tried before, or like unique and rare things or different varieties of things, whatever catches my eye.

SPEAKER_01 25:22

I am one of those gardeners that is not blessed with good soil. We are on year two here, and we have sand. It is like it will not hold moisture. I found my first worm this year, and I was so excited. I was like, there is life, there's life in my soil. Um, we are when we we moved here to Idaho in 2020 and we moved from Southwest Washington. So we lost 100 growing days and went from we were producing all of our own berries, probably 80% of our vegetables. Um, and so to move from that to here and be starting over was very difficult. Um, but I did not realize how bad the soil was until I started uh digging in, and I was like, okay, we have a long journey here. Um can you tell us about your makeshift root cellar?

SPEAKER_00 26:28

Yes. So we we have an old 1800s farmhouse, and um it was overhauled like 20, 30 years ago by the previous owners, and what I discovered is that there is we have a coat closet in our entryway, and apparently it's not insulated from the outside, or the insulation is just you know like 100 years old and deteriorated. So we have a coat closet, and and if we close it and I have a little like air blocker on the bottom so the hot air from the house doesn't go in there, it stays like 45-50 degrees in there during the winter, which is just perfect for storing potatoes and squash. And I sometimes store like flower bulbs in there as well. Um, you know, the ones you have to dig out in the winter and then plant in the spring. And it just it's such a blessing that I did not expect, and it works so wonderfully. That's awesome.

SPEAKER_01 27:22

Um, we have a 1927 farmhouse that they uh two owners ago, I think it was like 20 years ago, they redid some things, and I am almost positive they tore out a root cellar. Um, because we have a basement and it is all cement, cement floor, cement walls, but I see signs of there was some kind of wall thing here, and there's a window in that area. Um, and I am so sad that they did that. I'm like, why? Why would you take out a fruit cellar? Um, you know, it's just a sign of the things that are no longer important to people, you know, like you said, living close to the land and you know, just this whole concept of you know, having a toe in the past. Um tell me a little bit more about uh, you know, just that whole idea for you of having a toe in the past. I know that it is something that is totally romanticized online. Yes. Um, and I am so grateful for my modern conveniences, but um, I too feel like maybe I should have been Ma Ingalls or something.

SPEAKER_00 28:42

So Yeah, I feel the same. Like maybe I was I was born in the wrong time period or or something. You know, I don't I don't know what it is, and it that's something I think about often and and wonder why. Like, why did I turn out that way and other people are not that way at all and just love the modern lifestyle and living in a city and the busyness and shopping at a grocery store. Like people are so glad and thankful that they don't have to grow their own food and they can just buy it from the store. And I'm over here like, no, I feel the I feel the opposite. I'm sure that it has to do with the way that I grew up. Um, I do also wonder if I I'm actually uh a chiropractor. I went to chiropractic school, so I've I I've been kind of in a natural medicine world for a long time, and I think that that maybe have something to do with it too, and kind of just appreciating the health benefits of raising your own food and and living peacefully, I guess. Um you know I I appreciate that that this lifestyle gets me outside and connecting with nature. I just I just feel like my soul longs for that so much. And like besides just having my hands in the dirt, you know, living this way and gardening and growing so much food, like I spend a lot of time under the sun and and I have fresh air and I pay attention to things like the cycles of life, and I feel like I'm a part of something bigger, and like this I'm a part of this life, and it's like things that I might not have otherwise paid at temp uh paid attention to, like temperature, like like what temperature, what's the forecast gonna be, and the amount of rain, how much rain have we gotten, and what way is the wind coming in, and what flowers are blooming, and what birds have arrived, and I think it's just a really um a wonderful way to live for me, anyways. It's a really beautiful, peaceful way to live. And I I think that feeling that deep connection with nature is a bit of a lost art, and one that society is probably worse off for forgetting and and neglecting, especially health-wise. And I just love that raising my own food and and kind of living this way helps me feel closer to that.

SPEAKER_01 30:47

What advice would you give someone who wants to start moving towards that kind of a lifestyle?

SPEAKER_00 30:57

I think there are a lot of opportunities out there. Like if you are somebody who maybe lives in an apartment or lives in the city, I mean just get out and enjoy the parks if you can and meet your local farmers. There are just there are great farmers all over the place. And you can find them and seek them out. You can tour their farms, you can see where the vegetables are growing, you can buy your meat and vegetables from them and feel that connection to them and the connection that they have to um you know the natural world and where that food comes from. So even if you can't do it, do kind of the homesteading and the gardening in a big way yourself, there definitely are more ways to connect. And even if you grow something, uh if you can have a little pot of basil that you can pick from, even that I think is just so soul satisfying to do. I agree.

SPEAKER_01 31:48

Um, there's something about just like getting your hand in the soil and just feeling that connection and uh you know just growing your own fruit. We started our journey uh in a community garden because we were living in student housing. So um, like there's a way you just grew up. Yeah, and I do not think I grew one thing. Like, I don't remember harvesting anything in that garden, but what I do remember is so it would be me and three little little children, all under six, so that's probably why nothing grew. But um, I remember the older women and older men would always stop by my little plot and be like, Allison, how's it going? And they taught me so many things. You know, they're like, Oh, did you know this about tomatoes? Or they would go play with the kids and I'd weed, and it was it really was like a community garden. And I hope they're I don't know what they're like nowadays, but I I hope that that sharing of knowledge and community aspect is still a part of it.

SPEAKER_00 33:02

I think it probably is, just because I don't know, do do gardeners just tend to be really fun, great, great people? I think it's because when you it's so exciting to grow something and you are just so excited to share what you know with someone else so that they can experience that as well. I think it just it's kind of like a ripple pass down effect.

SPEAKER_01 33:22

Yeah, and I think that people who are very passionate about something, no matter what the topic is, um, like Joe is a beekeeper, and anytime anyone, you know, I'm gonna say older generation here that is also a beekeeper, finds out he's a beekeeper, it's like they are so willing to pass on and share their knowledge about their, you know, their passion, because we we don't want to see it lost.

SPEAKER_00 33:52

Yeah, I think you I think you nailed it there. It is, it's just like when you have a passion about something, whatever that is, and people who grow food just tend to be very passionate about that as as well. But I think you're right, it's the passion behind it that makes you want to share with somebody. Yeah, yeah, definitely.

SPEAKER_01 34:09

Let's see. We have talked about food preservation and your book and your homestead. Uh, is there anything else that you were like people need to know this?

SPEAKER_00 34:19

I actually have a question for you. If you don't mind, I assume this is something I think about a lot. I assume you have freezers full of stuff at your house. I assume you have some freezer space. I do. Do you um, and obviously your community is very interested in preparedness and being prepared, as am I. I don't talk about it a lot, or like that's not my the stuff I I love to share about, but I I am interested in it and doing it. But I was wondering if you have a plan in place for say a long-term widespread power outage, or what would you do with everything in your freezers, or what do you recommend people do in in a case like that?

SPEAKER_01 34:56

Yeah, so I do have a plan, and we have um, I'm counting in my head. We have two chest freezers and upright. Uh, when we moved into this house, they had left a freezer in the basement, so we inherited that, and I was gonna get rid of it, but then I was like, there's no way we're moving this up those 1927 stairs. Like, I don't even know how they got it down there, so it stays. Um, and then we have our refrigerator, which obviously has a freezer on it, also. Um, so we have a lot of freezer space because we buy a cow every year, we buy a pig, um, and we source those from local farmers. Like, we got our peg from a neighbor down the street, garden produce, obviously, fruits, vegetables. There's a lot in our freezers. Um, so I have all of these supplies on hand to preserve those foods. So jars, lids, pectin, pickling spice, um, the fuel to run the stove. Our kitchen stove happens to be propane, so that's a bonus. Um, but yeah, so like long-term scenario, my plan is get it shelf stable as whatever I can. Yeah, did that answer your question?

SPEAKER_00 36:15

Yeah, I have, you know, I always think like, so I have the benefit of we have a very cold winter, so if something happens in the winter, that that does buy me a lot of time because I can just throw stuff out in the snow for the most part. But definitely, like, I think of okay, what I would dehydrate these things and I would make the fruit into jam and fruit leathers and dried, and I'd probably be doing a lot of jerkying and canning as much meat as I can, and you know, prioritizing meat, of course, that's the first thing that gets preserved in a different way because that is the most valuable. Uh, but then if it's summer, that's like a different story. I mean, I mean each season has its own set of problems, of course, but summer, you know, we have a generator that would buy me a little bit of time to keep the freezer on while I preserve stuff, but I'd be out dehydrating foods in my car, probably making sun jam in my car. Um, I've actually I've started to use my car as a solar dehydrator a little bit, which is really kind of interesting. But I I'm sure I would be scrambling. I'd love to have, of course, like a solar generator. I think that would be that's a that's a bucket list item for me. Um, you know, and obviously in a widespread long-term power outage, there would be a lot of other problems to deal with too. But my goal would be to save as much of our food as we could through dehydrating and and canning too, definitely.

SPEAKER_01 37:30

Yeah, and I think, you know, I mean, with prepping, I really think of okay, there's multiple different scenarios. Um, there's long-term power outage from say a a winter storm. And like you said, we're also in a snowy area, so you know, I'm just using a snowbank because it would keep everything just fine. Um, but a neighbor recently told me that um a couple years ago, maybe I don't know. I don't know when it was. We weren't here. Um, there was some kind of tornado that knocked the power out in our neighborhood um for two weeks. And I was like, oh, and they're like, Yeah, it was just this freak thing, never happens here, but it happened. Um, so like I know one of our freezers, um, and it was actually my grandmother's freezer, so I'm sure it is not at all energy efficient, but that freezer can hold cold for seven days. Um, like when we I'm rabbit trailing into a story, but when we moved uh and bought our first home like six years ago, um the movers unloaded the freezer and I forgot to go plug it back in. And then I had one of those oh no moments when you're laying in bed and you sit straight up because you remember something, and it was five days later, four days later, and I remembered I had never plugged that freezer in and it was full. I ran out to the garage at two in the morning, and there was a loaf of bread uh sitting on top of everything else in the freezer, so it was exposed on all sides but the bottom, and it was still frozen solid. So I know that freezer at least is gonna give me some time, but um generator in these, I'm gonna define shorter term as like two weeks to a month-ish. You know, a generator is definitely like if you want to keep your freezer stuff cold, that is the way to go. Um, longer term, definitely canning, dehydrating some way to get that stuff because you're gonna need it.

SPEAKER_00 39:49

Yep. And one of the things I talk about in my book is uh about choosing a freezer, and that is one benefit of a a chest freezer instead of an upright freezer, is that they typically hold cold for one entire day longer than an upright will. So if you if you are somebody who maybe has short-term power outages for like a you know a day at a time or a couple days at a time, or just generally unreliable, um, electricity, uh a chest freezer is a much better option if you're in the market for a freezer.

SPEAKER_01 40:20

Yeah, we had a situation recently um that I had not at all planned for, like it had not even crossed my mind, but the power went out in our garage, which is where three of our freezers are, and it's detached from the house. And the main line from the breaker, whatever, I don't, I don't know, electrical, whatever the main power thing is called to the garage underground. The line had broken. So we had our three freezers out there, no power, and the generator's a whole house generator, so it's not gonna click on because we technically still have power. So I had made no plans on how to keep my freezers on if just the garage went out of power. So we spent two weeks rotating an extension cord that we had ran from the house, and our upright freezer. Um, I ended up moving everything into the chest freezers because it just couldn't handle keeping any of that going.

SPEAKER_00 41:30

Yeah, isn't it amazing all the things that just life throws at you that you you think you're so prepared and then something comes up that you hadn't even thought about why? It's just amazing to me how often that kind of thing happens.

SPEAKER_01 41:42

Uh yeah, definitely. Uh, I would love for you to share a little bit about preparedness. You brought it up, so I'm gonna ask.

SPEAKER_00 41:50

Um, what does prepping look like for you? Um, I I think I I was thinking back to this probably like 10, 12 years ago when all of the doomsday prepper shows came out, is probably when I got a spark in me that I was like, oh, you know what? This I I don't need to be that extreme with it. Like that's dramatized and a little far out there, but you know, it is a good idea to think about. So I'm I'm what I would call a low-key prepper. It's definitely something I think about, I'm sure, way more than the average person. Um, but I'm I'm definitely out there doing it kind of under the radar. I just I don't I don't talk about it a lot. I don't know why. There's no there's no reason, but I I feel like I kind of fit those kind of things into my everyday life. It feels natural, natural to me. Just like homesteading comes so naturally, so does being prepared for stuff, like big stuff or little stuff. I am a classic overthinker. I've always been somebody who plans ahead. I'm that person going away for a weekend trip and planning my packing list like a month before I I leave. Maybe that just tells you how often I I go on trips or leave the homestead. But I I think that's part of human nature that a lot of people have lost, like this inner feeling that I need to watch out for my family and myself and take care of myself. And that's something that I try to foster. And I think that that's a lot easier being a homesteader and living like we do, even something as simple as cooking from scratch. Like I can take ingredients, any ingredients you can give me, I can turn them into something delicious or at least edible, and I can do that in a lot of different ways. In an oven, on a stove, on a wood stove, over an open fire, and that's because I cook from scratch all the time. Like I'm practicing it every day, and you know, I'm gardening and I'm growing stuff, and I know when to harvest it, and I know how to harvest it so it stores well or preserves well, and I'm learning more of what works here and for us every single year and every single day, and tweaking it to be better and better. And I know how to save seed because I'm doing it and I'm practicing it, you know, every day. And I feel like I could go on and on in so many different topics saying that exact thing. But that's one of the things I love about Homestead. If needed, I have a lot of knowledge in the art of life skills, which gives me just. A ton of peace of mind and makes me feel a lot more prepared for all of the wild and crazy things that life will throw at someone.

SPEAKER_01 44:09

I um yeah, like homesteading, in my opinion, just plays such a huge role in preparedness. Um, I think you can be a prepper and live in the city. I'm not saying you have to have, you know, 40 acres to be a prepper, but um like we started homesteading before I even like really knew, like I'm sure I knew the word prepper, but I'm sure my brain said preppers are crazy, like the doomsday shows, you know. Um so when we started I always say intentionally prepping, we already had 10 years worth of homestead skills under our belt. And we were already, you know, in apple season canning our years worth of applesauce or our years worth of raspberry jam or you know, whatever the item is. And so for me to jump into the mindset of okay, you know, this is prepping is planning for the things to come. What does that look like for my family? It wasn't this huge drastic leap because we had already been homesteading and we had already been doing all of those things and learning all of those skills. Skills are so important, and I think it's just something that we have lost in our society, um, which I think is so sad. I'm like, I just want everyone to learn things, and you know, we're getting back to that, going back to the roots and ma ingles, but yeah, cooking from scratch is huge, huge. I would love for you to share maybe before we were coming up on an hour. Um, every year I see you make sun jam, and I have never done it, but I would love I think that's just something that's so fun that someone who doesn't know how to can or preserve or is just jumping in, I think that's an easy thing that they could jump in and start doing. Can you tell us a little bit about you know using your car as a solar dehydrator and sun jam?

SPEAKER_00 46:26

You have you just have to try sun jam. It is, I I can't even explain it. It is it is ruined all over all other jam for me. I used to make a ton of different jams and jellies, and now all I want to eat is sun jam. Like I have jars of jam on my shelf that are that that I should eat because they're going bad because they're like three years old at this point, and I just all I want is strawberry sun jam. So it's really a fantastic, fantastic way to do it. And I have instructions, it's um the recipe is in my book because you freeze the finished jam. It's a it's kind of a freezer jam. It's not a freezer jam like a traditional freezer jam at all, it's very different than that, but it is a jam that you would freeze, not can. And you the sun turns it into jam. And so you basically uh strawberry is the most common one, although I have done a lot of other fruits as well. I've not met or heard of a fruit that didn't sun jam so far, even though I haven't tried them all myself, but strawberry is the classic and the best, in my opinion. You basically cook your strawberries with um sugar, and it's a reasonable, I always say it's a reasonable amount of sugar. A lot of strawberry jam recipes have like twice as much sugar as strawberries. This one doesn't. It's it still has sugar because it's jam, but it's what I think is a reasonable amount. You just heat it up gently and kind of mash up your strawberries, and then you pour the mixture on a couple big pans, and then you set them in the sun. And I like to use the car because it gets a little hotter in there, of course, because like the greenhouse effect, but it also protects it from bugs because you have to protect it from crawling insects and flying insects. And it takes about, um, depending on the day, and then this will depend on where you live, too. If you live somewhere where it's really, really hot, this would probably be a much faster process for you, but it typically takes me anywhere from like five to eight hours of a full day of sun. And I stir it every couple hours, and it turns into the most beautiful jam. And I think the reason that it's so good is because unlike a traditional jam that is like long boiled, it it still retains like a brightness, you know, because it's not long cooked, you don't cook the the flavor and the brightness out of it, but it's also concentrated. So unlike a traditional freezer jam where you just mixed fruit with pectin and sugar, this one is actually concentrated. So the flavor is just so bright and so deep and so cheery and summery, and it's it is fantastic.

SPEAKER_01 48:44

I as you're talking, I can see like pictures that I've seen of your sun jam in my head, and I'm like, it and it is that's I always look at that color and I'm like, wow, it is just so bright.

SPEAKER_00 48:58

Yeah, yep. And that has really spurred me to okay, I can make jam in my car. Like, what else can I do with my car as a solar dehydrator? I've done herbs before. Herbs are a great one. If you don't have a dehydrator, I would say the car is the next best option and is a much better option than even hanging herbs to dry because the faster you can dry something typically, the better the quality is gonna be. And um, and it's just a fantastic way. I'm looking forward to exploring what else you can do. I I'm gonna try some fruits and some like regular dehydrated fruit this summer, too.

SPEAKER_01 49:30

How do you, when you put something in your car, like the herbs, do you lay them on trays or yep, just uh I just use like a regular old baking sheet. Interesting, interesting. Okay. Um is there anything else you want to share before we close out for today? No, I think we've talked we've talked a lot, a lot of about a lot of great things. And I think I could probably keep asking you question after question after question. I'm like, I just yeah, I love hearing how people do things, and I just want to thank you so much for sharing your journey and your story and um about your new book. Why don't you tell people where they can find you online?

SPEAKER_00 50:13

You can find me at wholefedhomestead.com. That's my website. Uh, I also have a YouTube channel. The real party, I would say, is on Instagram. I share a lot on Instagram every day and posts, and I do a lot of stories and educational stories of whatever we're working on, whatever we're cooking and preserving, and um, you know, shenanigans around our homestead. And then you can find my book wherever you like to buy books. It's available on Amazon and at bookstores um everywhere.

SPEAKER_01 50:40

And your Instagram is Whole Fed Homestead, correct? That's right. Perfect. And everyone, the book is beautiful. Um, I highly recommend it. It has found a space on the shelf in my house where I keep the cookbooks I actually use regularly compared to the shelf that's off in a corner somewhere with books I like use once a year. So it is beautiful, it is full of great recipes, and it is full of tips that some of which I have read and been like, why did I not know this until now? So definitely recommend Crystal's book, Freeze Fresh. Thank you so much, Crystal, for being on the podcast today. Well, it was my pleasure, and thank you so much for having me. And listeners, thank you so much. If you enjoyed today's podcast, I would love it if you would leave me a review on Apple Podcasts. You can leave a review or do the star rating, and that helps get the podcast out there for others. Thanks so much for listening.