Hi fellow Hiveians,

Today I found some pictures I forgot to post about our food prep for the winter!

Saving Farm Freshness

I know it's not exactly gardening.. but it's equally as important! The farm that we support throughout the year provides us with a substantial amount of frozen delicious food and one of the things we got better at last year is trying to stretch that food throughout the fall and winter through food prep.

With all of the crazy stuff that was going on last year for "supply chain" stuff and the intentional destruction of fertilizer resources and stocks (completely intentional, let's be serious. Control the food, control the population. It's all about control quite frankly), one of the things that we knew we needed to get better at is saving the delicious fresh and local food that we were getting throughout the summer so that we were much better prepared for wintertime.

We've been getting better over the last several years ahead of necessity thankfully, on supporting and buying as many things locally as we could when it comes to the fresh food that we were consuming. The first part of this with any impact was when we opted for purchasing what's called a CSA program share. CSA, for those that don't know, is a Community Support Agriculture program where the people of the community will give a farm an amount of money the farm determines for different size "shares" of their crops throughout the growing and harvest season. This means that you do a few things that are crucially important:

1. Support a local farm which is the most important aspect of it all. Local farms and businesses are what is going to allow any community, state or country to survive economic troubles. Big business is NOT the key to doing that, despite what may be pushed in our faces.
2. Reduces the financial burden the farm has to undertake in order to have their season. If more people purchase a farm share, that means that is less money that the farm needs to borrow through loans or government programs which is a win for the farm overall as it's more money in their pocket and less money lost to interest on the loans.
3. Allows people to understand what is truly fresh and local versus what is available at a grocery store. Grocery stores are not always a good indication of what's available since the food often travels from long distances to get there and that means different growing seasons.
4. It often reduces pesticides and other nasty chemicals that are sprayed on the food because they don't need it to last as long as if it was being shipped hundreds or thousands of miles to a store.
5. It establishes a relationship with the community and the farm. People who understand and support a farm are a lot more connected to what's going on at various levels.
6. It saves money! This is one of the biggest and most immediately noticeable benefits!

Throughout the summer, we were eating a lot of the food that we were getting and trying to waste as little as possible which was great but one of the things that we also tried to do was make sure that we were saving a portion of the food so that we could freeze it and have freshly frozen food that was ready to make in various things throughout the winter, reducing food bills and also improving our diets at the same time as the wintertime is a great time for soups, stews and warmer meals which help to put more nutrients into it via cooking it with things like chicken broth and spices instead of just eating the raw vegetables.

As you can see, we've been pretty well stocked to fight off the economic food woes that have plagued a lot of people that were less prepared than we were. I think I took these pictures in about October or so and I can say that we are still making soups to this day, although not every day, but a few days a week and it's just about February! This has been great because it's saved us quite a bit of money in the long run and it reduces our food waste which is good. I think we will be able to clean out the freezer completely of this freshly frozen food by about April so that we can be ready for the late spring and early summer vegetables.

We haven't been perfect with our food saving but we are trying to do the best we can with what we've got as far as space and capabilities. It's a big step in the right direction that's for sure!

One of the other things that I've enjoyed is another farm that we go to is a butcher and we've gotten freshly slaughtered meats so that we can buy a little bit but freeze most of it so it will go into the mix of it all and add some extra flavor to the soups.

^-CmplXty. _{Real human written content, never AI.}

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