Formerly, this post was about

ripening your green tomatoes,

but I didn’t have much more than a social media slug to say about it — it was actually the shortest blog post I’d ever done. So if you still have tomatoes in the garden, they’re going to go to waste, unless you do this:

Pull up the plant in its entirety and hang it upside down in your garage or cold cellar.
Cherry tomatoes

All the cherry tomatoes on this plant – and there were many more; I’ve harvested them regularly – were green when I pulled it up at the end of September. I’m getting a lot more than I thought possible – at least 40 off of 3 plants!

Other than the standard and cherry tomatoes, I didn’t have a harvest this year – except for a few good beets. It’s been the least homesteading year I’ve had since I got the garden fully underway in 2010. Since June, I dedicated myself to other pursuits (including a trip to England and France). The garden I left to do its own thing.

Autumn is concluding, so get ready for winter

So here we are, with the gales of November (my grandfather was a First Mate on a Great Lakes cargo ship) about to come early. (This year. I’m feeling extra chilly.) I’ve decided to update this blog post into the things one should do to get the garden and the house (duplex, triplex) ready for winter.

But first, an opportunistic hack: make fresh cheese

Let’s just give a hearty welcome to Resume Cooking Season! In this pic, I have a bowl of minestrone (my version, anyway), along with pumpernickel bread and some home-made ricotta. If ever you have milk that’s going bad, before you throw it out, “break it” by gently warming it on the stove. What should happen is it separates the solids from the whey, a pale yellow liquid. If it does this, lucky you! (If it does not do this, then too late/too bad.)

  1. Take a sieve and pour the contents over a bowl.
  2. Toss the whey out, and leave the curd (it’s fine-grained, like ricotta) in the sieve over the bowl.
  3. Mix in some table salt (start with half a teaspoon, you can add more later) and let it dry for a few hours in the fridge.
  4. Then mix it in a regular bowl or tupperware, and taste it. It should taste like “nothing” cheese, just with a bit of salt.
  5. Adjust the salt to your taste, and you can also add a little lemon juice if you wish.

This is fresh cheese, and you can eat it on toast with jam for breakfast, in sandwiches, in pasta, in baking (lasagne or desserts!). It doesn’t keep very long, though.

Tidy up the garden, but not too much

Here’s what that entails:

  • Empty the rain barrel and store it for winter (you can store it outdoors on its side). Put a downspout extension on, to direct rain and meltwater to the garden or to the drain.
  • Take the garden hoses off the spigots and bring them in. There may be a chance you’ll need to use the spigot over the winter but unless the hose is clear and unfrozen, you wouldn’t be able to.
  • Sweep up the leaves, but rather than dispose of them, load them on to the garden beds and into the fence rows. You can also pile them against the house foundation. They are insulating.
  • Use some lightweight landscape cloth and wrap up the plants you want to protect, such as rose bushes. Use a stapler to secure the wrapping around them, but then stuff it with the dead leaves from the garden.
    • Also, you don’t need to prune roses or clematis or, really, any other plants before winter; winter will prune them for you! If you leave them alone and then spruce them up in spring, you’ll have a lot more growth.
  • Put down rubber step mats on your outdoor steps. They help cut down the need for salt, and prevent slips. Put down a winter mat at your front door.
  • Get your heated water bowl ready for the first days where the temperature falls below 0º
  • Clean out any nest boxes you have on your property so they’re nice and ready for next year’s occupants. You can also convert them to roost boxes, too, by changing the orientation of the portal (at the bottom of the front, rather than the top), putting in a perch, and “winterizing” it to make it a little warmer.
  • Of course, it’s also time to put out the bird feeders and stock up on bird seed!
  • And like me, you can also install a squirrel cabin. I bet these four share one together:

Pond owners with fish

If you have a pond and it’s not deep enough for fish during the winter, bring the fish in! If it is deep enough, then make sure the pump is in good working order and obtain a backup (such as a stock tank de-icer, but those things are energy hogs) should it catastrophically fail. So long as the pump or an aerator is running, so long as there’s an air gap between the frozen over part and the water in the pond, the fish will survive.

Winterizing the house:

Inspect any outdoor caulking, and the weatherstripping on doors and windows. Replace any that needs replacing. This is sometimes easier said than done, but at least door weather stripping and door thresholds (sweeps) are easy.

After this, you can also mimic blower-door test by turning on the kitchen and bathroom ventilator fans to create air-exchange pressure in your home.

Walk around with a stick of incense, checking places where air might be infiltrating – draughty corners, window frames, electric outlets. If a room is really drafty, check all joint points in the drywall, such as at closet doors and corners, and the baseboards – chances are excellent that someone screwed up the job and left a crack unsealed.

When you find areas that need sealing, your friends are 1) foam tape, 2) foam backing rods, which you can poke all the way into wider cracks, 3) drywall repair tape and spackling, because cracks and holes in walls should be dealt with, 4) latex caulking, and 4) switch and outlet gaskets from the weatherstripping aisle. Serious sealing may require Tuck Tape and expanding foam. Now seal those gaps and cracks!

Keep the heat in!

Next, go around and check that ALL your windows are closed, both outside panes and inside panes. It does little good to have a window closed if the second window – the storm window, on the outside – isn’t closed. The air between the two panes is an insulation gap. This is why double- and triple-glazed windows have insulation ratings. If your windows in winter have moisture condensing on them, one of these windows is open or broken. Fix it (call your landlord if you have one)! It’s like throwing your money out the window to not have it closed properly. If you can’t, then get the plastic cling window sealing kit from a hardware store. It provides some extra draft prevention and insulation, and you will be a lot more comfortable.

Next, you have the daft people (you might be one of them, for now) who think “It’s ok to have a window open in winter, it lets fresh air in—” Buzz ⛔️ – Wrong! See the above about sealing gaps? Even with all the gaps sealed to a professional standard, there ain’t no building (even all the “spacious” new ones!) that has perfect integrity in its vapour barrier and weather wrapping. All buildings have an Air Exchange Rate (ACH). This is the number of times the volume of air inside your dwelling is exchanged with air from the outside. To see the standards for different kinds of buildings, including homes (10-18 ACH, though the lowest, “residences,” is 2!), follow this link.

Since you’re the one paying to heat that air, you best be energy-efficient and keep the heat in. Seal the gaps, keep the windows closed, and close the vestibule door! Those who don’t have a vestibule have to live with their draughty design choices.

Next, program your thermostats

16º overnight (23h00 to 07h00); 19º (07h00–08h30 or whatever slot you need to get ready for work), 17º (departure time until return time, say 17h00), then 20.5º from 17h-23h00, at least in the common areas (living room, den, bathroom, kitchen). The bedrooms, quite honestly, only need to be 16º except during a slot you might spend reading or meditating. People sleep better in the cool, so get a cozy duvet and you’ll be quite happy over winter.

Change your lightbulbs, and other decorative things

It’s still OK to use incandescent lamps in the Canadian winter, provided the lightbulbs are at people-height. Incandescent lamps shed heat, so both the warmth of their light as well as actual warmth makes you feel cozy. So on Thanksgiving, I swap all such lightbulbs at home to 25W–60W incandescents, and come the first of May, I swap them all back to LED.

And now’s also the time to swap the doormat (seaonal), put up the autumn wreath on the door (the harvest one, before Christmas), and change the throw cushions and blankets. Because:

P.S. Don’t forget to load up on fuel for the pellet stove or wood stove. (Not like you forget, just, do it early!)