Preserving Your Harvest

[BReeder!]

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!

 

[BReeder!]

Some pics of our preservations and harvests this year. This is just a sneak peak. I'll try to add recipes and more later.

 

[Artichoke Lover]

We do a good bit of pressure canning and freezing. Winter squash are stored where ever they can fit though lol. Right they are sitting on the bookshelves in my bedroom

 

[rosemarythyme]

What do you freeze them in? I tried freezing in zip bags, but I found the Jam didn't freeze solid (sugar or pectin content maybe lowered the freezing point) and a bag hot popped open. I've heard of freezer lids for mason jars, but haven't ever tried them.

There's freezer safe jars, I use ones similar to this:

For bigger batches I save plastic pint size gelato containers which are obviously meant to be frozen.

As far as the jam not wanting to freeze, the freezer jam I make is lower in sugar than most jams/jellies, and I don't buy pectin. Instead I rely on grated green apple to provide the pectin needed to thicken the jam. For example, my strawberry jam has:

2 pints strawberries
3/4 cup sugar
2 peeled, grated medium Granny Smith or other tart apple
1/2 - 1 Tbsp lemon juice

 

[Sally PB]

I blanched and froze 7 quart bags of beans today. Last year, I had purple and one called Dragon Tongue, and froze them separately. This year, I had those two plus some green that I planted to finish a partial row. I just mixed them all together.

Dragon Tongue is hands down my favorite. It's more of a wax bean, I think; the pods are big before the seeds get much size, and they stay tender. I might plant just those next year.

This might be the first year ever that I get zero butternut squash. They have always been my no-fail crop.

 

[ladybrasa]

First batch of Serrano peppers fermenting

See the ‘face’ on the one pepper slice in the middle of the jar on the right? Yeah, that’s my face if I ever ate a Serrano pepper …

Fingers crossed your fermentation goes well!

 

[Happy hen lover]

8 pints of kosher dills, chips, and stackers.

 

[Stipenvlerk]

Looks like a picture from a magazine @Sueby ! Gorgeous braid! what type of soil do they grow on?

Yesterday I made quince compote. Very easy recipe (quince, some water, cinnamon and star anise). Since processing quinces is always a time consuming thing to do, I made the task even longer with my very first very amateur video of the proces.

The kitchen smelled delicious!

 

[TJAnonymous]

I have a lot more freezer space (1 big chest freezer, 2 smaller freezers) than I have shelf space, so I've been chopping mine up and freezing them in gallon sized ziploc bags. The only down side to this is that it isn't easy to separate out what I need without thawing out the whole bag.

We did can some salsa and make some jelly. I'm not completely against canning, but simply didn't have enough stuff to can. Also, I have a glass top stove which limits what I can do. I can do a water bath, but not pressure canning. We have a turkey deep fryer so I was thinking about putting a pressure canner on that, but there's some question about whether it can maintain heat properly and consistently for the purposes of pressure canning. Especially for something like meat or tomatoes which must reach a certain internal temperature to kill botulism spores and other nasties.

I am working on collecting enough hot banana peppers to make some hot mustard. I'm about halfway there. Still up for debate whether I want to can the results of this effort or simply pour it in a mustard bottle.

 

[BReeder!]

I have a lot more freezer space (1 big chest freezer, 2 smaller freezers) than I have shelf space, so I've been chopping mine up and freezing them in gallon sized ziploc bags. The only down side to this is that it isn't easy to separate out what I need without thawing out the whole bag.

We did can some salsa and make some jelly. I'm not completely against canning, but simply didn't have enough stuff to can. Also, I have a glass top stove which limits what I can do. I can do a water bath, but not pressure canning. We have a turkey deep fryer so I was thinking about putting a pressure canner on that, but there's some question about whether it can maintain heat properly and consistently for the purposes of pressure canning. Especially for something like meat or tomatoes which must reach a certain internal temperature to kill botulism spores and other nasties.

I am working on collecting enough hot banana peppers to make some hot mustard. I'm about halfway there. Still up for debate whether I want to can the results of this effort or simply pour it in a mustard bottle.

I have frozen jam in the past (it doesn't really freeze solid in a household freezer or even our standup deep freezer. So it leaked after succumbing to the weight of things being placed on top of it. Oops! What a mess that was. I also froze corn this year as we were gifted a whole case by a guest to our 4th of July BBQ. We blanched it first and then froze it. Do you blanch vegetables first? Are there any other techniques you use to ensure quality when freezing produce?