Eating through last year’s crops

Spring has sprung, and while we’re already enjoying freshly harvested produce, we’re still eating through the tail end of our 2011 harvest.

We finished the last of the onions at the end of March.  We dug the onions at the end of June, which means we had garden onions nine months out of the year — not bad!  We made it that long even though some of the stored onions went bad, despite our drying and storing efforts.

We already have some Egyptian onions coming in from the garden, but not enough for our everyday needs.  Going to the store to buy a bag of onions the other day felt strange.  I guess if we were hardcore locavores, we would do without onions right now.

The potatoes lasted a similar period of time from harvest to depletion — harvested in late July and finished in early April.  They made their final stand in a delicious potato salad Matthew’s mom made for our Easter gathering.

So what’s left?

Non-processed, root cellar-type items

• Two HUGE sweet potatoes
• A few assorted winter squash

Canned

• A few jars of green beans
• Tomatoes and tomato sauce
• Catsup
• The shelves are not as full as they were here!

Frozen

• Six one-quart bags of cooked, pureed winter squash
• Six bags of Swiss chard
• Maybe some other stuff that I’m not thinking of right now.  We have a very official system for tracking this that I will show you someday.

Matt’s mom also discovered some frozen garden veggies with 2010 dates on them in her deep freeze, so we’re helping take care of those.

Though I often bemoan the amount of Matthew’s time that goes into the garden, and his lack of free weekends during a majority of the year, we DO get quite a bit of food from his efforts.  Since he’s unlikely to give up gardening any time soon, it’s good to focus on the delicious results as much as possible.