We have a garden that had produced very well this year. In fact, it's our best garden in 6 years and two homes. I have a real passion for growing food we can eat. It's always great to have a salad fresh picked form the garden or cook a meal with fruit and vegetables, and even meat, harvested right from our backyard. Over the years we found ourselves faced with small abundance that we sometimes gave away. With our first garden I started making homemade pickled cucumbers and zucchini and canning them. Then two years ago we got a killer deal on flats and boxes of berries and grapes at a local store, so I ventured into making jams and jellies and canned those. Now that our garden is producing incredibly well this year, we have (or "have had" in some case) abundance of peppers, cucumbers, tomatoes, zucchini, kale, radishes, potatoes, onions, garlic, peaches (less abundant, but still too many to eat within a few days) and herbs such as parsley, basil, oregano, thyme, cilantro/coriander and dill. We also expect to have a decent harvest of corn, brussel sprouts, and Jerusalem artichokes/sunchokes, dried corn, dry beans as well as a few sunflower heads. I might even plant a lot crop of peas and radishes. We have so much harvest this year, we had to find ways to preserve the fruits of our labor. We began canning homemade salsa, pickled peppers, pickled cucumbers (whole, halves, spears, chips and relish), and I'm preparing to make pepper jelly for the first time ever. We also have hung onions and garlic to cure for dry storage for the first time ever. There's so much more food coming out of the garden still though. What to do with all this harvest? Certainly we could just give it away, but we want to keep as much as possible for those months when we cannot garden (we are in zone 5). So preserving has become our focus.
How do you preserve your harvest?
I want recipes, pics, ideas, etc. Whatever you have, tell me all about it!
How do you preserve your harvest?
I want recipes, pics, ideas, etc. Whatever you have, tell me all about it!