#15 Creating FOOD SECURITY in Norway // Garden Tour and Massive Harvest From Our August Garden

For today's video I thought I would take you along with me as I harvest from our garden and start the process of preserving food for winter. I sowed an abundance of beets in the spring so we have a lot of beets this year and although we don't eat that much beet on a day-to-day basis we both really enjoy them pickled. So I'm starting out with boiling water to disinfect the jars. If you feel a bit intimidated by preserving food and don't have a lot of experience I would say that this is the most important step. Having clean jars is key for success. I remember when I was little this incident happened that made me feel very turned off by preserving food. We had two plum trees in our backyard that were producing a lot of fruit and my mom wanted to pick and preserve them before we went on holiday. So she made a ton of jars of plum jam and set them to cool and we went on holiday blissfully unaware of the plum jam jar explosions that were happening in our kitchen. There's still stains of plum jam on the ceiling to this day. This can happen but if you have clean jars and hands during the whole process the chance is minimal. After that I put the beets in. I boil them whole so all the vitamins and nutrients won't leak out as much and I leave a couple of centimeters of stem for the same reason. Depending on the size it might take half an hour to an hour before they're done. I try to pick beets of roughly the same size but you can also just pick whatever you have and monitor them and take them out one by one whenever they're done. When they're done I take them out and let them cool. Then I wash my hands thoroughly and take the skin off which comes off super easy. And then I slice or dice them depending on what I want. Sometimes I make cubes, sometimes I use a mandolin to get them finely sliced. This is just based on what you prefer. Then I put the beets into the jars. Here I've added a bit of thyme and basil as well. You can create whatever flavor combinations you want but I personally like to keep the flavors pretty simple. You might want to use gloves when you cut and handle the beets unless you don't mind having red hands for a day or two. Then I make the brine which is the easiest recipe ever. It is one part sugar, one part water and one part white vinegar which I bring to a boil. It can be a little bit hard to determine how much brine you need but it's really fast and easy to make a little bit more if you make too little and the ingredients are pretty inexpensive if you have too much and have to throw out the excess. After it's boiling I pour it directly over the beets and cover them. I also just lightly wipe down the neck of the jar with a clean cloth if there's any beet chunks or residue there. Then I put the lids on and screw them on lightly. They will seal tighter as the liquid cools so you don't want to screw them on too tightly and risk not being able to open them later. The leftover greens I give to the chickens. Having chickens is so rewarding because they turn whatever you can't or won't eat into eggs and by either composting our food waste or feeding it to the chickens we have reduced our food waste down to zero. I got some more goodies from the garden, some zucchinis, some broccoli shoots. If you saw our July garden tour you saw me point out that the broccoli plant keeps producing broccoli after you harvested the main broccoli head. These that I harvested here are all shoots. I also got a bunch of celery and apples and now I want to make a refreshing juice. Our apples have gotten hit hard by the apple maggot this year. This is a fly that eats rowan berries but since there are no rowan berries this year they go for the apples. So our apples aren't really nice to eat raw and we give them mostly to the chickens but I got some that weren't as hardly hit. I also put some beet leaves in the juicer that I saved from earlier. I wanted to make a nourishing soup for dinner so I cut up zucchini and put it into the pot together with onion that is also from the garden and the broccoli shoots. I also got a bunch of herbs, oregano, thyme and basil that I also throw in there. Then I add some broth and water and let it boil until the vegetables are done and put them in the blender. I also add some oat cream to make it creamy. I hope you enjoyed this video and we'll see you in the next one.