My Boreal Homestead Life

Every  year I plan out the garden, start the seeds and try to get the garden in the ground before the middle of June.  Some years go better than others.  But unlike is often recommended for newer type gardeners, I rarely only plant what I can use up in a year.  Certainly for things where I am only  using fresh or storing in a root cellar type methodology, I only plant what I will use up by the following spring, plus a little extra as a buffer.  But for everything else, preserving the excess is part of the process.  When you put the garden in, you don't know what will happen over the next months and having that buffer can become important.  Especially when you have an interesting gardening year like I did in 2025.

Growing tomatoes can be a very rewarding and frustrating experience, especially for a northern garden with a growing season of around 100 days.  But with a moderate consumption rate of tomato products throughout the year, they are one fruit I feel the need to grow.  However, without a greenhouse to do the growing in, the experiences are ever changing and so experimentation with varieties is key. With so many tomato varieties available, each having their own attributes regarding ripening rates, fruit size, pounds per plant, pH, flavor and peel thickness, to name a few, finding the perfect tomato or combination of tomatoes for eating and/or preserving creates a yearly garden of experimentation and trial.  But with so much experimenting going on, it seemed prudent to document the results as I continue with The Tomato Trials.

Long term potato storage in less than ideal conditions is something that most gardeners have to figure out. Gardeners come up with  ingenious places to store the potato harvest such as the upstairs pantry, a cold corner in the garage, under the house, and many  other inventive solutions.  But unfortunately before too long the potato has started to sprout and shrivel.  Try as we might, long term storage is short lived.  More often than not though, contributing to this lack of storage ability is the variety of potato being grown.  Some potatoes just store better than others.  So in 2023 I started a potato trial to see if I could come up with potato varieties that will store in my less than ideal conditions whilst maintaining flavor, texture and decent production.  Read on for the results of the 2024 Potato trials.

I have been raising Cornish Cross broiler chickens for a number of years.   During that time, I have tried a number of different ways  of housing these birds but it is only  recently that I started to use a chicken tractor to move them across my yard so that they get fresh grass every day.  And I love this method of housing for the Cornish Cross.   However, how long I leave them out on the grass has always been a bit of a debate because although I like a bigger broiler, most customers do not.  A one meal sized bird is all they want.  This customer driven demand is reflected in the teachings one can find online.  And typically, it is recommend that the Cornish Cross be only raised to eight weeks of age and then processed.   The claim is that this is the point when you start loosing money if raised longer.  I question this and so in 2024 I set out to determine if this was in fact the case.

I have been canning for years, decades really.  During  that time, I have been told countless times that it is so much work and that it would be easier and cheaper to just buy it from the store.  Those same folks however would always enjoy it when I would give them a jar or two of something I canned.  An interesting reality that speaks to the convenience we as a society have come to.  Although there is a lot of work that goes into canning, the many benefits far outweigh the work.  But despite the many benefits, the thing that always comes up is does it save me  money?  For the second year now, I have gathered the data to determine if it does.  This article will dive into the 2024 data and subsequent analysis to determine that answer.

If you would have told me 20+ years ago when I first started raising laying hens that eggs would be newsworthy, I would have laughed.  But here we are in 2025 and eggs are making headlines!  Go figure!  When I first started in the  egg laying business, it was simply for my  own use and to sell a few with the hopes of making a few dollars. But I was very laid back about it and basically set prices based on store bought prices, not really paying attention to my expenses.  They were great eggs and folks enjoyed them.  But a couple of years ago, I decided that enough was enough and I needed to know what these eggs were costing me and how much profit I was actually making.  It was time to treat this like a business!  It is time to get real!