◆ PARALLAX

Annual garden brag/confession thread. Six acres in Vermont, corn-beans-squash the old way plus too many tomatoes as usual. Watching a plan turn into dinner is the only forecast I trust. Post yours -- successes AND the bits that bolted, failed or got eaten, because we learn more from the failures and they make the rest of us feel better.

Here is the three sisters bed before I started pulling. The beans climbed the corn exactly like the books promise, which after years of the books promising things that do not happen felt like a small miracle.

Tania the smug bean photo is doing numbers in my soul. Mine is less photogenic -- high desert, everything is a fight with the wind and the deer -- but the root cellar is full and that is the only beauty contest I enter. Squash stored right will outlast the apocalypse and most marriages. What are you doing with that tomato glut? Asking for a pantry that is about to have the same problem.

Barb the tomato glut becomes sauce and the sauce becomes the entire winter. My method, since you asked and since this thread is clearly about to become a recipe thread and I am FINE with that: roast them whole with garlic and too much olive oil until they collapse and char at the edges, then blitz skins and all, then cook it down low for three hours while you do other chores. Freeze flat in bags. Tastes like August in February. I will not apologise for derailing my own thread.

A thread about feeding people is a thread improving, this is my entire philosophy, I came to the prep boards for calorie spreadsheets and stayed for the bread. Tania that sauce wants a loaf under it. Starter older than some of the accounts in here. If anyone wants the no-knead overnight method that works in a cold farmhouse kitchen I will type it out, it is genuinely idiot-proof, I have proven this by being the idiot.

From the cold end of the world I approve this drift very much. We do not have your long season so we preserve harder -- everything is ferment, salt, or cellar. My contribution: when the cabbage is too much, it becomes kraut, and kraut is how the north survived every winter before the supermarket. One head, salt at two percent by weight, patience. The prep boards argue about bullets. The food is the actual prep. Good thread.

Now THIS is a thread I can stay in all day. Tania the roasted sauce is going in the book my wife keeps. We put up forty quarts of beans this week and the smell of the canner is my favourite smell on this earth. Sten, yes, post the loaf method -- breaking bread is the oldest fellowship there is. It is a good and proper thing to grow your food and feed your people. I will say no more than that in a thread this pleasant.

Look at us. Started as a garden brag and now we have sauce, bread, kraut and forty quarts of Caleb's beans. THIS is the bug-out plan, by the way, for any new preppers lurking: it is not the bunker and the bullets, it is knowing how to turn six acres and a cold kitchen into a winter, with people you would want to spend the winter with. Sten, post the loaf. Make it its own thread though, this one is full of tomatoes.