Growing nutritious food at home can be difficult for the average person.
Whether it's a lack of space or time, having a full-scale garden is often out of reach for beginners.
That’s why a local farmer is looking to share her expertise in growing and preserving a type of vegetable that can thrive with or without acreage.
Bryna Chandler is the owner of a small farm and rescue in Germantown. With years of experience in farming and animal rescue, she said she has found ways to use spaces for gardening that go beyond her yard.
"Even though I have acreage, I went ahead and each one of my windows has a window box. And I have carrots, beets, and radishes planted in there. And so it looks really pretty," she said. "There are things that you can do like that. You can go ahead and grow carrots indoors if you really want to."
After growing and harvesting these root vegetables, Chandler said the next step to stretching your produce use is preserving or dehydrating.
"Whether or not you have a dehydrator, a deep freezer, or the ability to can — we will make sure that people know that anyone can do this," she said. "And it's not something that is huge. It's not overbearing. You're not going to feel completely defeated at the end."
Chandler was raised on a small farm in northern Nevada. She said this lifestyle taught her everything she knows about farming and the preservation of root vegetables.
"That's where I kind of loved and grew to appreciate the root vegetables, is from my grandpa," she said, "And basically it was a circumstance that if we didn't grow it or we didn't have it from the cows or the pigs and the chickens, we really didn't eat it. And that's the way I grew up."
According to Chandler, root vegetables like potatoes, beets and carrots can be a great source of vitamins and minerals.
They are also much easier to grow with limited space and experience.
And once the fruits of their labor are harvested, gardeners can be left with excess produce that Chandler said they should preserve for later use.
"One of the biggest problems when people get into sustainability, when it comes to canning or dehydrating or anything like that, is they have these great products and don't know what to do with them," she said. "So then I make sure to also include a, 'Hey, you've got dehydrated radishes, what can you do with em?'"
Chandler said even if people don’t have the bandwidth to grow at home, they can still preserve and use fresh produce from local farmers.
“I have a handout to give to them that has specific details of what you want to dehydrate your vegetables at, what temperatures you want to can them at, things like that,” she said.
Chandler is presenting on these methods and more at MetroParks’ annual Small Farm and Food Fest on 10 a.m. Aug. 2.
"They open up the historical area so they can see how things were done back when the U.S. was founded," she said. "And they have reenactors there and they're really good with those kids — then they have different workshops and classes just for the kids and then while those are going on, they have the workshops aimed more towards the teenagers, the adults, people like that."
Chandler said she also offers more info through blog articles on her substack listed under The Drunken Duck Farm.
"I [also] have a podcast where I kind of go over a farm report on Tuesdays and Thursdays and I tell people, 'Hey, this is why this is important,'" she said. "Like recently, beef prices went up at the cattle yard and why this matters to people. And we even as farmers don't know how things are gonna change up. Especially with some of the smaller farmers that rely on grants and stuff like that."
