Eating Seasonally on the Homestead: 4 Seasons of Delicious Food

What is it like to eat seasonally? As I write this, it’s 17 degrees here in Montana, with a blanket of snow covering the ground. It’s beautiful, but the lack of sunlight and the cold make it nearly impossible to grow any fresh food. That’s where eating seasonally comes in. Seasonal eating will look a little different for everyone, depending on what your growing season is like and what types of food you grow, but today I want to share a little about how our family eats seasonally on our homestead.

 

What Does it Mean to Eat Seasonally?

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Simply put, eating seasonally is sticking mostly to foods that can be grown in your area at a certain time of year. Foods eaten in season are fresher, have a higher nutrient content than those shipped from afar, and are often cheaper.

For example, if I went to the grocery store and purchased strawberries at this time of year, they would be shipped most likely from Mexico. They would be expensive, not very fresh by the time I got them, and not very nutritious either.

For our family, eating seasonally is a way to eat primarily what we grow on our homestead or purchase locally. While we occasionally buy some fruit at the grocery store, it’s not a main part of our diet. Although we have a very short growing season, with only about 3 1/2 months between frosts, we still grow the majority of our diet.

We supplement what we grow with some staples like salt, baking ingredients, oil, coconut products, beans and popcorn. While some of these could be grown at home, we have limited space so it makes more sense to purchase inexpensive foods that are  space hogs in the garden. Dried beans is one example. While we have grown our own dried beans, to grow the amount we use in a year would take our entire garden space. Right now it makes more sense to buy dried beans in bulk from Azure and dedicate the garden space to more expensive crops.

For us, seasonal eating really revolves around growing as much of our diet as we can and not being dependent on the grocery store.

 

Eating Seasonally in Summer

 

For us, seasonal eating really begins in the summer. This is when we have the most diverse variety of vegetables and fruits. Meat is one thing that is in shorter supply in summer, however. The meat we butchered in fall is mostly gone. We do butcher some chickens in the spring and summer, but the bulk of our protein needs are met with dried beans and an abundance of eggs. We have fresh goat milk as well during this time of year.

Summer Breakfasts

• Eggs, alone, with veggies, as quiche, or with various combinations of sausage, veggies and potatoes
• Fresh berries and other fruit
• Egg rich baked goods, such as German pancakes
• Hash browns with freshly dug new potatoes
• Zucchini bread and zucchini muffins
• Fruit smoothies

Summer Lunches and Dinners

• Tacos are a big one for our family. We mix them up with store bought taco shells or different types of homemade tortillas, various combinations of beans, chicken and canned burger, and a wide variety of garden fresh vegetables. Taco salad based on ingredients fresh from the garden makes a great lunch!
• New potatoes from the garden
• Egg salad and potato salad
• Fried chicken (you can find my recipe for keto fried chicken here!)
• Pork and Beans; while we call it pork and beans, we often make ours with lamb bacon! The onions or leeks and garlic are sautéed in the bacon grease and then tossed into the beans along with some coconut sugar or homegrown maple syrup.
• Fresh salads or coleslaw
• Stir fry with a combination of fresh vegetables and a little chicken or steak
• Eggs; in summer we eat eggs any time of the day. For a hearty lunch or dinner, try cooking some chopped potatoes and veggies, add eggs at the end, and top with cheese to serve. Fruit makes a nice side.
• Sautéed vegetables, starting with asparagus in May. Later in the summer we have green beans, broccoli and cabbage

 

Eating Seasonally in Fall

 

Homesteading in a short season climate means that many of the foods we grow aren’t really ready to eat until fall. Around the first frost we harvest thousands of pounds of food, which will be the bulk of our diet for the fall and winter. We eat a lot of winter squash and potatoes, along with an abundance of root crops and cabbage. Tomatoes are available for about 6 weeks after the first fall frost, as they slowly ripen indoors. Meat is back on the menu after we butcher lambs and turkeys. Melons are a special treat in August, September and sometimes into October. Eggs are in short supply as the chickens and ducks go through their fall molt, so we have to get more creative with breakfast.

Fall Breakfasts

• Waffles and Pancakes
• Hash browns
• Oatmeal
• Fresh apples
• Applesauce
• Canned fruit
• Bacon and sausage
• Baked goods such as muffins and scones
• No sugar pumpkin pie

Fall Lunches and Dinners

• Lamb, turkey and chicken
• Potatoes
• Cabbage
• Winter Squash
• Soups with homemade bone broth and garden veggies
• Salads with combinations of cabbage, root vegetables, greens from the greenhouse and sprouts
• Chili
• Cornbread, biscuits, or low carb almond bread
• Spaghetti; we use a combination of corn pasta and zucchini noodles with our canned red sauce
• Frozen vegetables
• Lacto-fermented and vinegar canned pickles
• Canned fruit or applesauce

 

Eating Seasonally in Winter

 

In winter nothing grows in our climate, so the bulk of our diet is food preserved from the summer abundance. That doesn’t mean that we don’t eat anything fresh, though. Our stored root crops and cabbages keep well into the winter and some till spring. We keep a small indoor garden growing microgreens, herbs and cherry tomatoes among other things. And once or twice a month we’ll get some fresh fruit at the grocery store. I do more baking in the winter, since I have more time. Many of our winter meals are combinations of meat with vegetables and potatoes or winter squash. We also make lots of soup! Our chickens usually pick up laying by January, so by mid winter we have plenty of eggs again.

Winter Breakfasts

• Oatmeal
• Waffles and Pancakes
• Eggs; often with combinations of sautéed veggies, bacon or sausage and potatoes
• Hash browns
• Baked goods such as muffins and scones
• No sugar pumpkin pie
• Applesauce
• Canned fruit
• French toast

Winter Lunches and Dinners

• Lamb and Venison
• Bean tacos
• Winter Squash
• Cabbage
• Salads with combinations of cabbage, root crops, microgreens and sprouts
• Soups made from homemade bone broth and root vegetables
• Homemade bread, biscuits and cornbread
• Spaghetti with a combination of corn pasta and dried or frozen zucchini noodles
• Chili
• Potatoes
• Rice
• Frozen vegetables
• Lacto-fermented and vinegar canned pickles
• Canned fruit or applesauce

 

Eating Seasonally in Spring

Although spring is an exciting time for planting and new arrivals on the homestead, it’s also called the hunger gap by homesteaders. By spring, the storage crops are mostly gone or sprouting, much of the meat has been used up, and in a cold climate like ours the garden isn’t producing yet. Potatoes, a staple for our family, have usually been used up or have sprouted. We typically buy some ground beef locally in the spring, and eat eggs for more of our meals as they are in abundance this time of year. A case of canned salmon from Azure makes a great protein supplement to our diet. While cool crop seeds planted in the garden won’t germinate till late April or later, we can have salad greens ready to eat by late March when we plant them in late summer the year before and cover them for the winter. Ideally the lettuce and kale planted this way is about 1″ tall going into winter. It doesn’t grow in the cold, but as soon as the weather warms up in the spring the salad greens will spring to life! Radishes are another important spring vegetable, ready in as little as 2 1/2 weeks from planting.

Spring Breakfasts

• Eggs
• Quiche, frittatas and eggs with veggies
• German pancakes and crepes
• Applesauce
• Canned Fruit
• Waffles and Pancakes
• Muffins
• Fruit smoothies

Spring Lunches and Dinners

• Burgers
• Salmon
• Soup
• Rice
• Pork (or lamb bacon) and Beans
• Tacos
• Pickled and lacto fermented veggies
• Frozen veggies
• Fresh salad, at first a combination of the leftover cabbage and roots with the first fresh greens from the garden
• Homemade bread, biscuits and cornbread
• Egg salad
• Applesauce
• Canned Fruit

 

Eating Seasonally for Self Sufficiency

Eating seasonally is important to our family not just because it is healthier and cheaper, but because it helps to reduce our dependence on grocery stores. With how unstable our supply chain is, we try to keep the bulk of our diet foods grown at home or close to home. This makes us resilient to whatever craziness is going on around the world and give us peace of mind that our family will be fed.