If you’ve ever wanted to try making homemade pickles or try out other preservation techniques such as drying herbs or fruit, now is the time! Peak harvest for farms in Maryland is August-September, and during this time not only is most produce at its ripest, you’ll also likely be able to get bargains as most farms have a bounty of tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, okra and eggplants. At least this is the case at Koiner Farm in downtown Silver Spring – their farmstand is open 5-7pm Mondays and Thursdays. 

Koiner Farm is a unique place as it is home to fellow Grace student Hannah Sholder, who not only learned produce growing techniques from the centenarian Montgomery County farmer, Charles Koiner, who she named her nonprofit land trust that protects Koiner Farm honor of, but she also learned traditional preservation techniques from her grandma-in-law who was a lifelong small scale producer in the mountains outside of Tehran, Iran. 

According to Hannah, her Grandma-in-law, Mamani, had “storerooms full of drying herbs, nuts and fruits, and on my trips to visit her over the last few years I observed her and made it my mission to carry on these ‘old ways’ of produce preservation”. For decades, Mamani provided all the fresh and preserved produce to her extended family that they would need for the entire year, including fruit leathers, bags of dried mint, dill and parley for winter stews, shelled walnuts, and pickled cucumbers. 

Hannah has adapted many of Mamani’s traditional recipes and posted them on CKC Farming’s website to help inspire the next generation of urban homesteaders. “If you are into eating locally and seasonally, then the next step in your journey towards self-reliance can be experimentation with the old ways of preserving produce at its peak” says Hannah, “so that you can enjoy tasty, local produce all year long”.