I used to think food preservation had to be big. Dozens of jars. Marathon canning days. Bushels upon bushels.

But there’s nothing like having the rug pulled out from under you (plus an epically horrible garden year) to give you a different perspective.

Little counts, too.

Even though my garden is beyond dead, I still have random vegetables hanging around from my Azure box and various grocery purchases.

My Mealcraft frameworks have been great for using up those odds and ends, but sometimes the assortment is a little too weird.

Or, to be brutally honest, sometimes I’m just over it and want them OUT of my fridge. (And I’m not quite ready to surrender it all to the chickens.)

Enter:

Homemade Vegetable Stock Powder

It’s basically homemade bouillon: a concentrated mixture of dehydrated vegetables, herbs, salt, and savory ingredients that you can stir into hot water or sprinkle straight into whatever you’re cooking.

It uses up a surprising amount of vegetable miscellany and takes almost zero brainpower.

YES PLEASE.

It also satisfies my squirrel-like propensity to tuck away food as soon as the calendar switches from summer into autumn.

Anyway, needless to say, it’s a win-win.

Is It Like Store-Bought Bouillon?

Kinda.

But this isn’t really about perfectly recreating those little foil-wrapped bouillon cubes. Plus, since our blend doesn’t have added MSG or a bunch of extra ingredients, it’s not going to be an identical match.

It’s more about turning food you already have into something useful.

Think of it as a savory vegetable concentrate you can use in:

• Soups
• Stews
• Beans
• Rice
• Grains
• Gravies
• Sauces
• Casseroles
• Skillet meals
• Anything that tastes like it needs a little something extra

Why the Nutritional Yeast?

You’ll see nutritional yeast in a lot of homemade vegetable bouillon recipes. It adds that extra punch of umami and helps the vegetable broth taste a little fuller, but you don’t have to use it. 

I’ve had a jar sitting in my pantry for years from that time I was experimenting with homemade cashew cheese (ah, the good ol’ days….), so I used it in this round of bouillon powder.

If you don’t have any nutritional yeast or don’t want to buy it, just skip it and lean harder on other savory ingredients like:

• Mushrooms
• Tomatoes
• Tomato powder
• Onion
• Celery
• Garlic (raw garlic will add a bit of a bite to the finished powder– but I like it.)

The Vegetable Stock Powder Framework

This is not a rigid recipe on purpose, because it doesn’t have to be—especially when its whole purpose is to use up what we have. 

Aka: You’ve got a lot of wiggle room here, my friend.

(Btw, if you like this sort of flexible cooking, you’ll love my Meal Craft Method.)

Here’s the walkthrough with all the deets, and the printable version is below.

THE BASIC HOMEMADE BOUILLON FORMULA

4 parts dried vegetables

1 part savory/umami ingredients

½ part herbs + aromatics

Salt to taste

That’s it.

STEP 1: Choose Your Veg

Use any combination of:

• Onion
• Leek
• Celery
• Celery leaves
• Carrots
• Bell peppers
• Zucchini
• Parsnips
• Garlic

I like a mix that’s heavy on onion and celery because they give it that classic stock flavor. And it’s ok if the veggies are past their prime. For my latest batch I used wilted celery and a thawed/squishy bell pepper that my stupid fridge froze.

Go Easy On:

• Broccoli
• Cauliflower
• Cabbage
• Kale
• Beets
• Strong leafy greens

They’ll work, but their flavors can be overpowering.

STEP 2: Add Something Savory

For every 4 parts dried vegetables, add about 1 part savory ingredient.

Choose one or mix several:

• Dried mushrooms
• Dried tomatoes
• Tomato powder (Here’s my full blog post with all the deets on tomato powder.)
• Nutritional yeast
• Extra dried onion
• Garlic

Mushrooms and tomatoes are especially good here because they add the deeper flavor we associate with broth. I used mushroom powder and tomato powder I had made previously. 

STEP 3: Add Herbs

Add roughly ½ part herbs and aromatics.

Fresh or home-dehydrated herbs can be measured as part of that ½-part ratio. If you’re using dried, already-ground herbs from your spice cabinet, use less because they’re much more concentrated by volume. (Aka, please don’t dump in a 1/2 cup of ground rosemary.)

I rarely have enough fresh thyme or oregano around to dehydrate separately, so I usually just add a smaller amount of the dried herbs I already have.

Good options:

• Parsley
• Thyme
• Oregano
• Celery leaf
• Garlic
• Rosemary (use sparingly—it can be overpowering)
• Sage (same as the rosemary)

How to Make Vegetable Stock Powder

1. PREP

Wash your vegetables and slice them kinda thin and sorta evenly. This is an excellent destination for ugly carrots, celery leaves, vegetable ends, tired peppers, and other odds and ends. Don’t worry about making them beautiful.

I ran my carrots through the shredding blade of my food processor because I was in a hurry that day and rough chopped the other veggies.

2. DEHYDRATE

Spread the vegetables in a single layer on dehydrator trays. Dehydrate at approximately 125°F to 135°F until they are completely dry. And I mean completely. Shoot for brittle and crisp—not leathery.

Your drying time will vary depending on the vegetable, thickness, humidity, and dehydrator.

3. COOL

Allow the vegetables to cool completely before proceeding. This prevents condensation from clumping up your finished powder.

4. MEASURE

Once everything is fully dried, measure your ingredients according to the framework:

4 parts vegetables (I used a mix of carrots, bell pepper, onions, and garlic this time around.) 
1 part savory ingredients (This time I used 1/2 cup nutritional yeast, 1/2 cup mushroom powder, and 1/4 cup tomato powder.)
½ part herbs/aromatics (This time I used a 1/4 cup TOTAL of already dried/ground rosemary, thyme, oregano, black pepper.)

5. GRIND

Place everything in a:

• High-powered blender (the best option, IMO.)
• Food processor (this won’t produce as fine a grind as a good blender so be careful)
• Coffee grinder
• Spice grinder

Grind until you have a fine powder. If necessary, sift out larger pieces and grind them again.

6. TASTE

Mix about a teaspoon of the powder into a 1/4 cup hot water and taste.

Then add salt, herbs, or savory ingredients until it tastes like something you’d happily use as broth. I added 2-3 teaspoons of fine sea salt to this batch. Don’t skip the salt- it makes a HUGE difference. 

How to Use Vegetable Bouillon Powder

Start with approximately:

2 tablespoons vegetable stock powder per 1 cup hot water, then taste and adjust.

Or don’t even make actual broth and sprinkle the bouillon directly into whatever you’re cooking. (This is how I use mine the most.) A spoonful in a pot of beans. A little in rice as it cooks. A shake into gravy. A sprinkle in a soup that tastes flat. You get the idea.

An Note About Storage

This entire method depends on the vegetables being fully dehydrated before you grind them.

If there is still moisture in the vegetables, that moisture is now trapped inside a jar of finely ground food—which is exactly what we don’t want.

So, when in doubt, dry them longer. I’d also rather make several small batches throughout the year than one enormous batch destined to sit in the pantry forever.

Which, I suppose, brings me back to my larger lesson here:

Preservation doesn’t always need to be an enormous production.

Six carrots matter. Half an onion matters. One beet matters.

Saving a handful of vegetables from the trash and turning them into something you’ll use all winter is enough.

Little counts, too.

Love this Post? Check out these:

• How to Make Dehydrated Vegetable Powders
• Check out Meal Craft for more Flexible Frameworks
• How to Put Your Dehydrator to Work Around the Homestead
• How to Make Herbal Vinegar

The post Homemade Vegetable Bouillon Powder Recipe appeared first on The Prairie Homestead.

I have a beet.

A single, solitary beet.

I didn’t grow this beet. (Garden apocalypse this year, remember?)

I got it in a produce box from Azure Standard. Because that’s what you do when your ground is poisoned and barren.

(Okay, okay. I’ll stop being so dramatic about it.)

Anyway.

There was a time when August meant vegetables on every flat surface of my house.

Tomatoes spilling out of bowls. Monster zucchini. Peppers and green beans and onions. Cucumbers multiplying when I wasn’t looking.

A hot kitchen, sticky counters, and entire afternoons spent managing the harvest.

But not this year.

This year, it’s just me and my beet.

And said beet has plunged me into all sorts of ruminations.

For a period of my life, my homestead grew like an out-of-control August garden.

Abundant. Expanding. Always more, more, more.

But as I’ve stripped things down—both in my life and in my garden—I’m realizing there’s something very useful about having less, even if just for a season.

When there’s less noise and excess, you get a much clearer look at what you actually like. What you actually want. And what matters enough to keep.

And what I’ve realized after the biggest shake-up of my life is that I am still the woman who cultivates and grows and preserves—regardless of who is or isn’t in my life.

It is woven into the fabric of who I am. (More thoughts on this soon…)

And I’ve also made peace with another notion:

Little things still count.

Somewhere along the way, food preservation became synonymous with volume.

Boxes of peaches. Bushels of tomatoes. Five-gallon buckets of cucumbers. Hundreds of filled jars over the course of a season.

Friend, trust me— I have done that version. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.

I loved it. (Well, most of the time…) And I’ll probably do it again.

But I think all that abundance perhaps accidentally convinced me that preserving food was only worth it when I had monster quantities.

But the little amounts count just as much. Maybe even more.

Not everything needs to be an epic project in order to have value.

A handful of onions can become pickled onions. Two cucumbers can become refrigerator pickles. Four tomatoes can become salsa for dinner. A fistful of herbs can become herb salt. And one beet can become one very tiny jar of pickled beets.

And that’s okay. In fact, it’s more than okay.

So here’s what I did with my one beet

Quick pickling has been one of my favorite kitchen tricks for years for exactly this reason: it scales up or down beautifully.

I’ve shared my master formula before, and there’s a version in my upcoming cookbook as well, so I won’t turn this into another dissertation on pickling.

But here’s the basic formula I’ve used for years:

My Basic Quick-Pickle Brine

• 1 cup vinegar
• 1 cup water
• 1 tablespoon salt
• 1 tablespoon sugar, optional

That amount is enough for roughly two pint jars, so I scaled it down a little for my lone beet.

The sugar isn’t required, but it softens the bite of the vinegar.

How to do it:

I cooked Mr. Beet until tender, peeled and sliced him, then tucked the slices into a clean pint jar.

I mixed together the brine ingredients in a small saucepan and brought them to a boil so the salt and sugar dissolved. Then I poured the brine over the beet, let it cool, and put the jar in the refrigerator.

I let it sit for about 48 hours before eating so the flavors have a chance to settle in.

That’s it.

You can also do this with cucumbers, carrots, green beans, radishes, or garlic. If you want all the variations, vinegar options, flavor combinations, and troubleshooting, I have a full quick-pickling guide here.

My preservation philosophy for this season:

Preserve what you have—big or small. Don’t wait until there’s enough to make it feel impressive.

Use the handful. Fill the tiny jar. Make the salsa for one dinner.

The point isn’t how much we can put away. The point is knowing how to take whatever is in front of us and make something useful from it.

I’ve spent a lot of years believing the biggest things were the most worthwhile. But this season is teaching me to pay more attention to the small stuff.

The one beet.
The one jar.
The humble rooms in my house.
My handful of chickens.
The three garden beds instead of twenty.
The twenty acres instead of sixty.
The things that don’t look like much, but still matter— deeply.

Perhaps abundance isn’t always measured in quantity. Sometimes it’s simply recognizing the value in what’s already there.

—Jill

P.S. If you like flexible formulas and frameworks like this one, you’d probably like Meal Craft too. It’s built around learning simple kitchen patterns you can adapt to whatever you have on hand—so dinner doesn’t require the perfect recipe or the perfect ingredients.

The post I’m Pickling One Beet appeared first on The Prairie Homestead.

What are we sacrificing in our race towards progress?

It is a horribly helpless feeling to own land and realize you may not be able to grow food on it.

As I’ve been sorting through my recent garden woes, my brain, doing what brains do, has jumped to the worst-case scenario several times:

What if I can never grow a garden here?

I usually spiral over that for a while before my rational side takes over and reminds me that I’m still at the beginning. That I always, always figure things out. That I’ll figure this out too.

But still.

There is something so unsettling about realizing that owning land doesn’t necessarily mean you can feed yourself from it.

And I believe we’re only at the beginning of this problem.

For a very long time, we’ve romanticized the idea that you could buy five or ten or twenty acres, learn a few skills, plant a garden, raise some chickens, and therefore possess a meaningful degree of food independence.

Or perhaps it wasn’t even a point of romance. It was simply the way things were.

The challenge used to be:

Learn how to work with nature.

Now it is shifting to:

Figure out how to overcome what humans have done to it.

Contaminated manure. Herbicide carryover. Depleted soils. Chemical drift. Water problems. Unfettered development. Poisoned resources. And whatever comes next…

Once again, I’m over here in my little prairie office asking the same question I’ve ruminated on repeatedly in my books and writings:

At what cost?

The circle of life.
The water cycle.
The carbon cycle.
Seed to plant to seed again.

Plants grow. Animals eat the plants. Waste and decay return nutrients to the soil. The soil feeds the next generation of plants.

Round and round it goes.

But our progress-at-all-costs obsession seems determined to turn these circles into straight lines.

We extract.

We consume.

Then we extract some more.

Someday, the bill will come due.

Yet anyone who questions when that bill is coming is painted as anti-technology, anti-growth, or nostalgic for a past that never really existed.

We’re told, in no uncertain terms:

This is progress.

This is what it takes to feed the world.

This is just how things are.

In essence?

Get over it.

Dare to question the resources these sorts of projects consume and someone will inevitably say, “Well then, stop using Amazon. Stop using Facebook. Stop using the cloud.”

As if shutting down my laptop would somehow slow the freight train of development barreling toward us.

But okay, sure. I’ll admit my hypocrisy.

I am typing this on a computer connected to Wi-Fi. My businesses exist on the internet. My livelihood depends on technologies and systems I sometimes criticize.

I am not standing outside the machine pointing my finger at everyone inside it. I am inside it too.

But surely participation does not require permanent silence.

Surely we are still allowed to look around and say:

This is hurting us.

At what point does the price of progress become too high?

At what point do we admit that we cannot extract and consume forever on a finite piece of ground?

At what point do we stop dismissing the people asking questions as crackpots, alarmists, Luddites, or obstacles standing in the way of progress?

The consequences of our current choices may not fully arrive in my lifetime, or even my children’s, but that doesn’t make asking hard questions foolish.

And someday, we may wish we had started asking them much sooner.

To be clear, I am not arguing that we abandon technology, modern agriculture, electricity, computers, or every convenience industrialization has given us.

I don’t have all the answers or some easy peasy 1-2-3 solution.

But I am increasingly suspicious of the assumption that forward is always better simply because it is forward, especially when there is so much money to be made from convincing us it is.

Progress is not inherently good. It is a trade.

Sometimes a worthy trade, but a trade nonetheless.

And perhaps we should spend less time asking whether we can build the next thing, scale the next thing, extract the next thing, or make the next thing more convenient— and spend a little more time asking what are we giving up in exchange.

Our soil?

Our water?

Our ability to grow food?

Our landscapes?

Our independence?

Because a machine that requires us to sacrifice the things that sustain us is not progress. And at some point, we have to stop calling it that.

-Jill

P.S. A few years ago, I wrote a whole book on this very topic. You can find it here.

The post When the Ground Can No Longer Feed Us appeared first on The Prairie Homestead.

I’ve had some pretty epic garden failures over the years, but nothing quite like this.

For those who missed it, I moved to a new property this spring. It’s not far from my old place, so I assumed the growing conditions would be somewhat similar: Same high plains. Same brutal wind. Same short growing season.

How different could it possibly be?

Well…. very, VERY different, apparently.

Before I show you the full extent of my current horticultural humiliation, let me preface this by saying:

I know how to garden.

At least, I thought I did.

I have grown gardens that ended up in magazines.

I have grown gardens that were screenshotted, reshared, and labeled with hashtags like #goals.

I have grown thousands of pounds of food over the years. I’ve preserved it, canned it, fermented it, cooked it, photographed it, and taught other people how to grow it.

This isn’t my first rodeo.

I didn’t intend to plant a monster garden this year. Not in the middle of moving and starting over.

But as I so poetically declared back in May, I was determined to plant my two flats of heirloom tomato starts and grow a small, humble garden for my mental health.

Ha.

HA.

What followed that innocent little photo was an absolute horticultural disaster.

Everything either died, stayed exactly the same, or disappeared overnight.

I know I’m not the only person whose garden has failed this year. So instead of pretending I have this figured out, I’m going to show you what I’m finding as I go in hopes it will help someone else who may also be wallowing in gardening woes.

Right now, it appears three separate problems have joined forces to create the worst garden of my entire life:

Problem No. 1: Herbicide Contamination

This one is keeping me up at night.

I have dealt with herbicide contamination before, thanks to contaminated hay mulch and manure. I’ve written about it extensively on my blog, and it is a growing problem for gardeners and small farmers.

Some broadleaf herbicides can pass through an animal’s digestive system and remain active in manure for a looong time. They can also stay in hay, compost, or potting soil for YEARS before they dissipate.

Tomatoes are usually the canary in the coal mine because they are so sensitive. Their leaves will curl, cup, and gnarl. They don’t always die, but instead persist in a strange state of deformity.

The problem is that I don’t know where the contamination came from.

I spoke with the previous owner of this property, and he said he never sprayed the garden area. He had only added bagged potting soil to the raised beds.

Now, can bagged soil or compost contain herbicide residue? Yes, but not always. It doesn’t seem to be the most likely explanation, but I can’t rule it out yet.

However, there’s another possibility that scares me more.

There is commercial farmland directly across the road from my house.

Herbicide drift (aka the movement of chemical droplets or particles away from the area where they were intended to be applied) can wipe out entire gardens or landscapes and it’s happening more and more.

However, the farmer across the road told me they didn’t spray this year, so I don’t think fresh drift from that field is the culprit.

But I do suspect a different kind of drift….

Southeastern Wyoming is experiencing Dust Bowl conditions this year. Thanks to our historic drought and continued tilling, massive clouds of dirt have been rolling across the road and onto my property.

And I don’t mean a light coating of dust. I’m talking about a thick layer of soil covering EVERYTHING.

There were days this summer when I’d be only a quarter-mile from my house and couldn’t even see it because it was enveloped in a cloud of brown.

My fear is herbicide residue could be traveling in that windblown soil. However, right now, that is only a theory. I’m still gathering information instead of jumping to conclusions.

Before I can make any real plan, I need to figure out two things:

Where is this contamination coming from?

And what chemical am I dealing with?

I’ve talked to the Wyoming Department of Ag and am looking into several testing options.

More to come on this soon…

Problem No. 2: Terrible Soil Fertility

At first, I blamed everything on herbicide damage, but then I noticed something else:

Even the plants that are less susceptible to broadleaf herbicides were not growing.

They weren’t twisted or distorted, but they weren’t changing or putting on new leaves.

I also noticed that the weeds were different here. At my old place, lamb’s quarters and pigweed (aka amaranth) grew in droves. Both of those are usually associated with fertile, nitrogen-rich soil.

Here, there were no lamb’s quarters. Or pigweed. Or purslane. Or mallow.

What I have instead is kochia.

ONLY kochia.

Kochia isn’t a perfect soil diagnostic, but it thrives in dry, disturbed ground and can live in conditions where other plants struggle. It was a clue that some major nutrients were lacking here. I suspected low nitrogen, so I grabbed one of my trusty Redmond’s home soil test kits to confirm.

The results were eye-opening, but not surprising:

Hardly any nitrogen. Nada. Which totally tracks with the lack of growth I’m seeing in my plants.

So yes, I need to add nitrogen, but I have to be careful as my phosphorus and potassium are also WAY too high…. and just dumping a typical fertilizer or even manure on the garden will further this imbalance. Plus, it’s harder and harder to find manure that’s not contaminated with herbicides.

This will NOT be a one-week fix. Rebuilding soil is a multi-year process.

I know this.

I have taught this.

I believe it.

And now, like it or not, I get to put everything I’ve learned into practice here.

Problem No. 3: Every Animal in the County

THERE ARE SO MANY RABBITS HERE.

Anything I plant outside the fenced garden is mowed down almost immediately.

I planted a young lilac bush, and it was gone overnight. Gone.

They’ve eaten my newly transplanted elderberries. They’ve eaten perennials. They’ve eaten EVERYTHING.

(I also realized my lovely dog has been systematically eating all the blossoms off my potted flowers. When I finally caught him doing it, I was actually relieved because I had been trying to figure out how the rabbits were climbing into my tall pots, haha.)

I’ve never dealt with this much rabbit pressure before. I don’t care to massacre them all, and I won’t use poison, BUT I would also like to have a few flowers and shrubs around my house…

There has to be a middle ground between “rabbit buffet” and “concertina-wire landscaping,” but I’m still trying to find it.

If anyone has ideas, please send them my way.

So What Now?

I wish this essay ended with a triumphant reveal, but there isn’t one yet.

This is not a before-and-after story. It’s just the before.

That’s why I wanted to share it now.

So much of the internet is built around completed transformations, but sometimes you’re still standing in the problem with more questions than answers.

I will NOT be harvesting bushels of tomatoes this year.

There will be ZERO magazine-worthy garden tours or even one respectable zucchini.

But I am collecting information.

The curled leaves are information. The missing weeds are information.

The dust, the rabbits, and the wind are all information.

And eventually, information becomes understanding, which will become a plan .

And a plan with enough time, compost, fencing, and stubbornness, just might become a garden.

Just not this year.

This year, I am growing something else.

Humility, apparently.

And kochia.

An absolutely exceptional crop of kochia.

—Jill

P.S. If you want to try the home soil test kit I used, you can shop it here. Use code HOMESTEAD for 15% off. I’ve found them to be extremely useful over the years when I’m troubleshooting garden stuff. Just keep in mind they won’t test for herbicides or pesticides— just soil nutrients.

More Fails in the Past:

• I Think I Poisoned My Garden
• The 5 Biggest Seed-Starting Mistakes Homesteaders Make
• How to Reset Your Homestead After a Disappointing Year
• The BIGGEST Homestead Mistakes We’ve Made (so far)

The post The Worst Garden of My Entire Life appeared first on The Prairie Homestead.