Simple Homemade Life: Your Ultimate Guide to Fall Harvest Preservation & Farmhouse DIY Home Improvement

Welcome to another enriching episode of Simple Homemade Life, where we delve into the heart of seasonal living and practical home projects. As the vibrant hues of summer gently fade into the golden embrace of autumn, our gardens generously offer their final bounty. This transition brings a wonderful opportunity to connect with our food, reduce waste, and extend the flavors of the growing season deep into the colder months. Today, we’re focusing on ingenious and easy ways to preserve your abundant fall harvest, ensuring you can savor fresh, homemade goodness all year long. Beyond the kitchen, we’re also thrilled to share an exciting update on our farmhouse tiling project, revealing how savvy DIY efforts can lead to significant savings and immense satisfaction.

The art of preserving the fall harvest has experienced a remarkable resurgence in popularity, becoming a cornerstone of sustainable and frugal living. This renewed interest is evident in our community, where preserving techniques dominate our most-read articles. We’re sharing our top five invaluable tips for effortless preserving – strategies designed to save you precious time, simplify the process, and guarantee a delicious supply of your homegrown produce for future enjoyment. And for those with an eye on home renovations, don’t miss the thrilling details of our bathroom tiling update, where we reveal how we saved thousands of dollars by embracing the DIY spirit in our farmhouse!

Discovering Simple Homemade Life: Video Insights

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In The Kitchen: Harnessing the Power of Your Harvest

The end of the growing season brings a flurry of activity to the kitchen as we seek to capture and store the garden’s abundance. It’s truly inspiring to see how many of you are embracing the practice of preserving. During August and September, three articles focused on preserving soared to the top of our website’s popularity charts. These comprehensive guides offer simple yet effective strategies for keeping your pantry stocked with garden-fresh flavors.

1. Leading the pack as our number one most-read article is How to Freeze Corn Three Ways: Blanched, Unblanched, and Whole. This guide is a game-changer for corn lovers, detailing methods that cater to various preferences and time constraints. Whether you prefer the vibrant color and crisp texture of blanched corn, the speed of unblanched, or the ultimate convenience of freezing whole cobs, this article provides all the insights you need to enjoy sweet corn long after summer ends.
2. Closely following is another fantastic resource on freezing vegetables: How to Freeze Green Beans the Easy Way without Blanching. This method simplifies the process significantly, cutting down on preparation time without sacrificing quality. Discover how you can bypass the traditional blanching step and still achieve perfectly frozen green beans that retain their garden-fresh taste and texture, ready for countless recipes throughout the year.
3. Finally, for all the tomato enthusiasts and salsa aficionados, our guide to canning salsa holds a special place: My Favorite Thick Salsa for Canning. This recipe is one of the best reasons to grow tomatoes, transforming your harvest into jars of delicious, versatile salsa. Learn how to create a robust, flavorful, and thick salsa that’s perfect for dipping, topping, or incorporating into your favorite Mexican-inspired dishes.

Top 5 Game-Changing Preserving Tips for Season’s End

Beyond the most popular articles, I’m excited to share my top five foundational tips and essential recipes for dealing with all the final produce from your garden or farmer’s market. These strategies are designed to simplify your preserving efforts and maximize your yield, ensuring no delicious vegetable goes to waste.

• The Easiest Ways to Freeze Tomatoes (Whole!)

  Freezing Tomatoes Whole is an absolute revelation for busy preservers. Forget the tedious peeling and chopping upfront! Simply wash your ripe tomatoes, place them in freezer-safe bags, and pop them into the freezer. When you’re ready to use them for sauces, soups, or stews in the dead of winter, a quick rinse under warm water makes the skins slip right off. This method preserves their fresh flavor and saves an incredible amount of time.

• Home Canned Pizza Sauce From Frozen or Fresh Tomatoes

  Transforming your abundant tomato harvest into Homemade Pizza Sauce is a profoundly rewarding experience. Whether you’re starting with fresh tomatoes or utilizing your newly frozen ones, this recipe guides you through creating a rich, savory, and perfectly seasoned sauce. Imagine pulling out a jar of homemade pizza sauce from your pantry on a cold evening – it’s a taste of summer that elevates any homemade pizza night and gives you complete control over ingredients.

• How to Easily Ripen Tomatoes at the End of the Season

  Don’t despair over those lingering green tomatoes as the frost approaches! Our guide on How to Easily Ripen Tomatoes at the End of the Season offers practical techniques to bring those last fruits to their luscious, red potential indoors. From simple paper bag methods to storing them in a cool, dark place, you’ll learn how to extend your fresh tomato supply and ensure every last bit of your garden’s bounty is utilized, preventing unnecessary waste.

• Green Tomato Salsa Verde (Canned or Frozen)

  For those stubborn green tomatoes that simply won’t ripen, a vibrant and tangy Green Tomato Salsa Verde is an absolute must-try. This delicious alternative to traditional red salsa offers a refreshing zing and is incredibly versatile. It’s an excellent recipe for canning, allowing you to store this unique flavor for months, or it can be frozen for immediate enjoyment. It’s a creative and flavorful way to make the most of your end-of-season harvest.

• Freezing Basil Leaves 6 Ways: Which is Best?

  Basil is a delicate herb, but its aromatic essence is a cornerstone of many dishes. Our comprehensive guide to Freezing Basil Leaves 6 Ways explores various techniques, from freezing whole leaves in olive oil to creating convenient basil cubes. Each method offers distinct advantages, and this resource helps you determine which approach will best preserve that vibrant flavor and color for your specific culinary needs throughout the year.

• Bonus Tip: Easy, Frugal Pesto to Freeze

  Building on basil preservation, transforming your harvest into Easy, Frugal Pesto to Freeze is another brilliant strategy. This recipe focuses on maximizing flavor while minimizing cost, allowing you to create a ready-to-use sauce that’s perfect for pasta, sandwiches, or even as a flavorful topping for roasted vegetables. Freezing pesto in small portions ensures you always have a taste of summer on hand.

• Beyond Pesto: 22+ Ways to Preserving Basil

  For the ultimate basil enthusiast, explore 22+ Ways to Preserving Basil that go far beyond just freezing and pesto. Discover methods like drying basil for seasoning blends, infusing oils and vinegars, and creating herb salts. This extensive list ensures that no precious sprig of this fragrant herb ever goes to waste, allowing you to enjoy its delightful aroma and taste in myriad forms.

• Roasted Garden Tomato Sauce to Freeze

  Elevate your tomato preserving with this recipe for Roasted Garden Tomato Sauce to Freeze. Roasting tomatoes intensifies their natural sweetness and deepens their savory notes, creating a remarkably rich and complex sauce. This method yields a gourmet-quality sauce perfect for freezing, ready to transform simple meals into culinary masterpieces.

To make your preserving journey even smoother, here are a couple of my favorite supplies that proved indispensable, especially when making that delicious roasted tomato sauce:

• The over-sink cutting board, which you likely spotted in the video, is a true game-changer for kitchen cleanliness and efficiency. It allows you to chop and prepare produce directly over your sink, catching all cuttings in a bowl placed in the basin. This ingenious design means juices can flow directly into the sink, making it PERFECT for handling juicy tomatoes and other vegetables without creating a mess on your countertops.
• An immersion handheld blender is another essential tool that saves a tremendous amount of time and effort. Instead of laboriously transferring hot sauces or soups to a traditional blender (and risking a fiery spew if you’re not careful!), an immersion blender allows you to blend directly in the pot. It’s safer, cleaner, and incredibly convenient for achieving perfectly smooth textures with minimal fuss.

• Mastering Boiling Water Canning: A Step-By-Step Tutorial

  For those new to canning or seeking a refresher, our Boiling Water Canning Step-By-Step Tutorial is an invaluable resource. This comprehensive guide walks you through every stage of the process, ensuring you can safely and effectively preserve high-acid foods like fruits, jams, jellies, pickles, and most salsas. It demystifies canning, making it accessible and enjoyable for everyone.

• Essential Canning Supplies: Plus a Few Nice-to-Haves

  Having the right tools is crucial for successful canning. Our list of Essential Canning Supplies covers all the basics you’ll need to get started, from canning pots and jar lifters to headspace tools and funnels. We also include a few “nice-to-haves” that can make the process even more efficient and enjoyable, helping you build a well-equipped preserving station.

• Garlic Spiced Pickled Beans: A Tangy Delight

  Don’t limit your preserving to just sweet fruits and savory sauces! These Garlic Spiced Pickled Beans are a fantastic way to enjoy garden-fresh green beans with a zesty, savory kick. Perfect as a snack, a side dish, or an addition to antipasto platters, this recipe adds a delightful tang to your pantry and utilizes another wonderful garden vegetable.

And if you’re looking for an organized way to keep all your preserving efforts in check, be sure to get your FREE Preserving Notebook. This invaluable tool allows you to easily track all these fantastic recipes, record what you’ve made each year, note successes and tweaks, and plan your future harvests. It’s the perfect companion for any home preserver!

Farmhouse Bathroom Update: Tiling Success & Incredible Savings

Moving from the kitchen to our farmhouse renovation, we are absolutely thrilled to report significant progress in the bathroom! We have finally finished tiling the shower – a moment that certainly calls for a happy dance – though the grouting still awaits. The transformation is already incredible, and we can almost see the finish line for this major project.

Even more exciting, Brian and I have completely finished tiling AND grouting the bathroom floor! And I can confidently go on record right now to say that I would do it again in a heartbeat. Why, you ask? Because by tackling this project ourselves, we saved an astounding $1600! We were quoted this amount for our small, approximately 60 square foot floor (yes, you read that correctly – sixteen hundred dollars!). That’s a huge saving that makes all the DIY effort incredibly worthwhile.

Our experience with this floor tiling project was remarkably smooth, especially when compared to the smaller, more intricate tiles we used in our cottage bathrooms. The choice to use larger 6×6-inch tiles made a significant difference, simplifying the layout and installation process considerably. Brian and I worked seamlessly as a team: I focused on laying the tiles, ensuring even spacing and proper alignment, while he expertly handled all the cutting. Together, we completed all the tiling in less than six hours! The grouting process, which I undertook on a separate day, took less than two hours. The entire process, from prep to a beautifully finished floor, was efficient and immensely satisfying.

The feeling of accomplishment, combined with the substantial financial savings, is truly wonderful. It reinforces our commitment to the “simple homemade life” ethos, demonstrating that with a bit of effort and teamwork, significant home improvements can be achieved without breaking the bank. This DIY approach not only saves money but also instills a deep sense of pride in our home. We hope this inspires you to consider tackling your own home projects!

Missed previous episodes of Simple Homemade Life? You can find them all right here, offering a treasure trove of tips for seasonal living and DIY projects.

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