Survive the hungry gap: how to be a locavore when the garden and root cellar aren’t feeding you

What is the hungry gap? And why does it matter to homesteaders?

There comes a time of year, every year, when the kale bolts to seed, the stored root vegetables get woody or mushy, and any root vegetables or potatoes that are left in the ground want to grow like mad, putting their food energy into growing new plants instead of feeding us.

At this time of year, we can’t stop eating just because the garden has stopped producing. Being mostly-locavore and working towards self sufficiency means that I can’t just ignore this fact of life and import foods from elsewhere: imported foods are more expensive, not as tasty, and the use of refrigerated trucks, ships, and planes is a big waste of energy.

If you’re wondering how to eat a homestead-grown diet year-round, and what on earth you can eat when there’s not much in the garden, I hope this post will help you with meal ideas, gardening strategies, and expectations for creating a varied and tasty homegrown diet.

How to eat well when there’s not much growing in the garden

Eating well during lean times can involve several strategies:

• Planting specific crops to minimise the length of the hungry gap.
• Eating different foods at different times of year.
• Storing food in times of abundance to eat during the lean times.
• Finding joy in homegrown seasonal eating all year even if it’s not always pretty or instagrammable, and even if it’s not what you’re used to eating in the modern world.

I think a big part of successfully relying on homegrown food year-round is being able to eat with the seasons and with what nature is providing, rather than trying to impose supermarket-uniformity onto everything.

What to eat during the hungry gap

Meat

Local, naturally-raised meat is an excellent source of nourishment all through the year. If you don’t have much in the way of other foods to eat during the hungry gap, you can eat more meat.

Cheese

Cheese is a delicious source of nourishment and calories. Make mozzarella, ricotta, and hard cheese, and eat these instead of other foods.

Grains and other dry staple foods

Grains such as wheat, barley, oats, rye, corn, buckwheat, and so on store year-round in dry, room temperature storage. Beans and pulses such as pinto beans, chickpeas, and lentils also store well.

Grains can be cooked up plain, made into risottos and pilafs, served as bread, rolls, Yorkshire pudding, or pretty much any baked good you enjoy.

At this time of year, rather than having a roast with lots of vegetables, I will make an extra big Yorkshire pudding to make up for the lack of vegetables. Rather than serving steak or burgers with potatoes, I’ll serve them with some rice or barley, or make a steak sandwich, egg sandwich, or halloumi sandwich with homemade sourdough bread.

Winter squash

Certain maxima varieties of winter squash, if properly cured and stored (I’ll do a post about this soon, join my mailing list if you want to be the first to know), will last all through the hungry gap, and then often into the summer.

My favourite variety to grow is Anna Schwarz. This produces beautiful squash with a deep orange flesh and dark green skin in my short, cool-ish growing season, and they store really well.

Eggs

A popular hungry gap meal in my family is beef burgers topped with eggs. We can serve these up with pickled or fermented vegetables, and maybe some grains in the form of burger buns or rice.

During the hungry gap, the hens are often laying like crazy, so why not get more calories in the form of eggs while there are less calories around from other foods? Eggs are delicious and nutrient dense.

Pickled vegetables

Vinegar pickling can be a serious way to preserve vegetables for eating at this time of year. Beetroot is such a nutrient-dense vegetable, and eating it feels like I’m eating dark leafy greens, so I often serve pickled beetroot on the side of meals instead of greens.

Something else we really enjoy is the golden vegetable pickles from A Year in an Off-Grid Kitchen, made with a mix of cauliflower (or turnip, or cabbage), carrot, and onion. This is almost like a pickled salad and goes beautifully with cheese and bread, or on the side of pretty much any meal.

The zucchini pickles are also something we love to eat at any time of year, but especially during the hungry gap. I usually serve them with burgers.

Chutneys and relishes

A spoonful of chutney, relish, or sauce adds more interest to an otherwise fairly plain meal of rice (or bread) with meat or eggs.

Fermented vegetables

When there’s less fresh stuff growing in the garden, I lean more heavily into the jars of kimchi, fermented turnips, and sauerkraut that I made in the autumn. These fermented vegetables store in larder or cellar conditions for up to a year, and while I serve a spoonful on the side of meals every day for health, at this time of year, they also get treated like a salad in a jar.

Dried zucchini and other dehydrated vegetables

I dehydrate costata romanesco zucchini by cutting it into thin slices and putting it on cake cooling racks in the bottom oven of my wood stove with the door ajar. You can use any kind of dehydrator to do this.

Once dehydrated, store in airtight jars, and you either eat them as crispy chips on their own, or add them to soups, stews, and other dishes.

Home-canned or dried fruit

During the times of year when there’s fresh fruit, we eat plenty of that, but between August and December in Tasmania, there’s not any fresh fruit to be found, and the apples that we store without electricity start to go bad. This is when we make the most use of home-canned fruit and dried fruit.

I make simple sugar-free sauces from apples, blueberries, and apricots and preserve them in canning jars. I also can various fruits in honey-based syrups. Dried fruit is great to have on hand too.

Planning the garden to minimise the hungry gap

Kale and kale broccoli

I recommend Red Russian Kale. Plant way more of it than you think you’ll need, harvest the leaves all through the year, and then in spring, when the hungry gap starts to hit, you’ll get a bonus harvest of “kale broccoli” – the little broccoli heads that form on kale right before it flowers. 

By harvesting this kale broccoli, you not only get a delicious mini-broccoli to cook with, but you also prolong the leaf harvest.

Kale can be planted in the spring or the summer. You can direct seed it or transplant it.

Leeks

Leeks will stay in the ground, ready to harvest when nothing else will feed you. Leeks in cooking are basically a combination of onions and greens: nice oniony flavour, but with the health benefits of leafy greens.

Eventually leeks will bolt to seed and become tough, but this happens later in the spring than for other green foods.

Leeks need a long growing season, so start them in the spring. Either direct-seed them, for lazier gardening, or grow them in trays and transplant them deep in the soil, for more white bits and less green.

Purple sprouting broccoli

Purple sprouting broccoli can be treated much the same as kale, start it in mid-spring, or in the first month of summer. It will grow through the winter and provide you with many small heads of broccoli to eat during the spring hungry gap.

Self-seeding greens

One of my strategies for resilience is to let my favourite plants go to seed, and to not be too thorough in harvesting all of the seeds. Often, self-seeded greens will come up on their own in the garden earlier than you would have thought to plant them, and can thrive where they’re planted, or can be carefully transplanted to wherever they are useful. Some of my favourites are kale, mustard greens, chickweed, silverbeet (chard), and fat hen. 

Perennials and foraging

Perennial foods don’t have to wait until the soil is warm enough for seeds to sprout – they come up every year from the roots.

You can either plant edible perennial plants in your garden, encourage edible perennial weeds like dandelion, or learn how to identify and harvest wild greens.

I am working on growing much more rhubarb, which is a welcome source of food at this time of year, and I have a garden full of dandelions that I’ve been selecting for larger, tastier leaves over the years.

Mustard greens, Asian brassicas, and rocket (arugula)

These are all very cold-hardy, fast-growing greens that can be sown earlier than other plants. Mustard greens have the advantage that slugs and snails (and even most wildlife) leave it completely alone. 

You can sow these as early in the spring as possible, or even late winter, in mild climates, and they will grow to harvest at baby leaf stage when all your kale and broccoli have finished.

If your winters are not too freezing cold, you can also get away with sowing mustard greens in the last month of summer or first month of autumn, and then it will grow quickly and you’ll get a harvest all through winter. I do this when I haven’t grown as much kale as I’d like.

White turnips

Japanese white turnips are fast-growing, and the greens on them actually taste good, as well as producing nice roots really early in the season. I sow these in the first month of spring, and we start harvesting in first month of summer, before our early potatoes are ready.

I don’t grow these as my main crop of turnips, because I find that purple top white globe grows bigger and doesn’t bolt to seed so readily, but white turnips are really useful to have as the first crop of root vegetables for the year.

Broad beans and peas 

These start to yield for us early in the first month of summer if they’ve been sown early enough. Where I live, you can sow broad beans in autumn and winter, and peas can be sown in the last month of winter or first month of spring.

Broad beans won’t yield well at this time of year unless you have cool-ish nights, so are best suited to fairly cool climates.

Polytunnels and other strategies for season extension

If you live in a climate with mild winters like mine (we are in Tasmania, which is similar to Oregon, Washington, and Southern England), you probably don’t need to bother with this, but if you live somewhere where the ground is frozen solid for months, you might want to look into using low tunnels, caterpillar tunnels, and other unheated polytunnel options, and using these for extra-early crops (or extra-late crops). Elliot Coleman’s books are probably the best source of information on this.

Meal planning ideas for homesteaders and locavores in early spring

Some of these recipes are up on the blog, and I’ve linked to them. Other recipes are in A Year in an Off-Grid Kitchen, so I’ve put a page number reference next to each one of these.

Breakfast ideas

Breakfast is not such a big deal for the hungry gap, but if you’re used to having potatoes for breakfast, here are some other ideas:

• Pancakes
• Porridge with blueberry sauce
• Sourdough breads of all kinds
• Nourishing Oat Slice, 203
• Sourdough buns, such as currant buns or cinnamon buns, 191
• Buckwheat bircher muesli with yoghurt and honey, 210
• Crispy buckwheat and almonds with yoghurt and honey, 210
• Muffin cake, 200
• Egg dishes of all kinds, 45, 46

Main meal ideas

I serve main meals with a spoon of fermented vegetables on the side all through the year. If any of these hungry gap meal ideas are too low in vegetables for your liking, simply add some extra fermented vegetables (or pickles, or chutney) to the plate to make up for it.

• Homemade pasta
• Pasties or savoury hand pies with ricotta or meat
• Beef or lamb burgers with eggs on top, rice or buns, and zucchini pickles
• French onion soup with bread and cheese
• Indian lamb stew with rice, naan, or pumpkin
• Pizza
• Roast beef (158) with Yorkshire pudding and gravy (155)
• Roast pork (161) with apple sauce
• Roast chicken (158) with rice and gravy
• Portuguese chicken with rice instead of vegetables, 88
• Spanish rice, 177
• Leftover grain minestrone, 176
• Korean egg, green, and rice bowls, 50
• Steaks (162) with rice and chutney or pickled beetroot
• Tapas-style sharing meal with frittata (45), fermented carrot sticks (115), hummus (87), bread (184), soft cheese (67), and random bits of ferments, olives, and so on
• Mexican beef mince served with rice or other grains, 121
• Cumin-spiced lamb, kangaroo, or beef served with rice or other grains, 166
• Farmhouse vegetable and barley stew (use extra barley to make up for the lack of vegetables), 23
• Pumpkin soup with bread and cheese, 32
• Chickpea and chorizo stew, 34
• Green and egg slabs with bread and chutney, 46
• Huevos rancheros, 46
• Fried rice, 49
• Green egg drop soup, 53
• Nettle soup, 53
• Dolmade casserole, made with rice instead of cauliflower, 55
• Paneer makhani or (butter chicken) with rice or naan, 74
• Onion and ricotta tart, 91
• Pork or beef ribs with rice and greens, 147
• Beef barbacoa with rice, 167