How To Preserve Your Garden Produce Efficiently
Preserving food doesn’t have to be hard, scary, or time-consuming. Keep reading to see how we use record keeping and a few other basic principles to keep our food preservation process efficient and fun.
We grow and preserve quite a bit of our own food each year. We do it because we enjoy it, it’s healthy, and it keeps our grocery budget down. But like everything we do, we want the process to be as efficient and pleasant as possible.
We regularly ‘put up’ large quantities of blueberries, strawberries, corn, green beans, herbs, and other crops. We preserve our food for later by canning, freezing, or drying it. We also have a root cellar to keep storage crops in. The method of preservation we choose depends on the crop, our end goal, the materials we have available, and how much time and energy we have to devote to the process.
By planning ahead and asking yourself a few basic questions you can streamline your food preservation so you get more done in less time (and get better tasting food)!
How Much Food Do You Actually Need to Put Up?
This is the first question you should be asking yourself, but it’s one we often avoid. It’s not always an easy question to answer, and it takes a little math.
Don’t Preserve More Than You Need
Spending the time to save extra food just because you have it may seem like the frugal thing to do, but it’s actually a waste of time, food, and resources. There’s no point in preserving food that is never going to get eaten before it spoils.
Imagine you got carried away when you planted your basil, and now you’re overrun with it. So, do you make 30 jars of pesto, trying to save every last leaf and maximize your harvest? How can you let it go to waste?
But how much pesto will your family actually eat in a year? Is it really 30 jars? Maybe you love pesto and you’ll eat it every week. We certainly don’t eat it that often. For us, pesto is a nice thing to have around, for a little something different, and a taste of summer in the depths of winter. But it’s not a staple. Even if we ate it once every 2 weeks for the entire year (which we wouldn’t) we would only need to freeze about 12 jars (half pints) of pesto to meet our needs (we get at least 2 meals out of a jar).
Those extra jars? Eventually, they’ll get freezer burnt and gross. Likely well before you ever get around to eating them. And then not only did you waste the basil (that you couldn’t stand to see go on the compost pile) but you’re also wasting all the oil, cheese, nuts, and salt that go with it, and the time it took you to make and freeze it. Not very frugal after all.
A Little Planning Can Save A Lot Of Effort
Sit down and think about how often you actually eat each item you plan to preserve, right now, in your real life. No wishful thinking...if you’re not eating the eggplant fresh out of the garden now, you’re certainly not going to eat it soggy out of a freezer bag. Be realistic about what your diet actually looks like.
We like to think that because something is in our pantry we’ll use it (we’ll suddenly become the people who eat pesto every week) but that’s not how it works. You’ll just keep skipping over it every time you see it in the freezer, getting a nice little dose of guilt while you’re at it.
Think about what the last 2 weeks were like. If you can’t remember the last time you bought a can of crushed tomatoes, don’t waste your time canning them yourself. On the rare occasion you need a can of tomatoes, you can buy them. But if you eat spaghetti every Thursday for dinner, you know you will likely use spaghetti sauce at least 50 times in a year and can figure out how much to can.
Example Calculation: 50 meals x 1 c sauce each meal= 50 cups total or 25 pints/12.5 quarts sauce for a year’s supply).
Remember: You Don’t Have To Harvest Everything
In late summer when the garden is bursting at the seams with fresh produce it’s all too easy to get carried away trying to save it all. If you don’t have a plan made ahead of time it can start to feel like chaos. You’ll want to save and preserve every scrap of food that you can; you can’t imagine letting all that hard work go to waste.
Or, maybe you’ll get so overwhelmed that you’ll let everything rot on the vine while you sit on the porch and ponder why you thought planting 60 tomatoes was a good idea.
Whatever methods of preservation you choose, it’s going to take time and energy to grow, pick, clean, process, and preserve that food. You want to be sure you spend your time and energy wisely.
So is it actually time well spent if you freeze 30 jars of pesto but only end up eating 8? Probably not. Food doesn’t last forever; whether it’s frozen, canned, dried, or stored in the cellar, eventually, it will spoil, or at least not taste good anymore. Usually, we don’t want to preserve more of anything than we can use in a year (or before it spoils, whichever comes first).
It’s ok to just let some of your produce go to the compost heap. It’s not a waste, it’s just being recycled. There’s no need to feel bad about it. Or, give your extra away to family, friends, or the foodbank. Or feed it to your animals if you have chickens or other livestock. It’s inevitable that you’ll end up with a glut of something, like the abundant zucchini, and you just won’t be able to use it all.
What Method Will Make the Best Product?
Knowing the final use for the food you’re putting up will help you figure out how to best preserve it.
Should you can it, freeze it, dry it? Or do something else like ferment it or store it in the root cellar? You’ll likely prefer different preservation methods for different foods. Maybe you’ll even preserve the same food in multiple ways.
Canning is great if you don’t have a lot of freezer space. It makes a shelf-stable product and is great for making ready-to-eat things like jams and pickles. The drawbacks of canning are that it is time-consuming, it destroys more nutrients than freezing, and it can adversely affect the texture of the food. Canning is also a process that must be learned in order to do it safely and can be intimidating. There is always a risk of food-borne illness.
Common Ways to Preserve Food
Freezing food is very easy, but most of us don’t have unlimited freezer space. The food must be packaged well to prevent freezer burn, and often the quality of the food begins to degrade within a couple of months. Freezing preserves more nutrients than canning or drying and often results in a good quality product.
Drying food is a great option for space-saving, however many foods do not rehydrate well. Things like herbs and some fruits are great candidates for dehydration.
Root cellars maintain food at the proper conditions for long-term storage. This is a great option for storing things like fresh root crops and other bulky long-lasting items. The downside is that root cellars can be expensive and difficult to install, and the conditions must be monitored to prevent spoilage.
Fermentation is another common preservation method. Like canning, fermentation has a somewhat steep learning curve and an increased risk of food-borne illness compared to other food preservation methods. Fermentation can be a great way to preserve foods and add variety and beneficial probiotics to the diet.
Choose The Best Method For The Food and Your Situation
Every type of produce will have a ‘best’ method of preservation. The method that produces the best quality product, and hopefully also makes the most sense time, energy, and resource-wise (but not always).
You’ll have to experiment to see how you best like to preserve your foods, as it will be different for everyone, but here are some examples of how we preserve some of our favorite fruits and vegetables:
Tomatoes hold up well to canning and are bulky, so I don’t waste freezer space on them. We can them as crushed tomatoes, puree, or salsa.
Green beans, on the other hand, leave something to be desired when they’re canned. They’re much better frozen, so that’s what we do. If we run out of space to freeze them, then we’ll switch to canning.
Berries can be canned (with the exception of strawberries- they get quite gross) but they’re so, so much better frozen. We freeze all of our berries unless they’re turned into jam. Frozen berries are great straight out of the freezer, in smoothies, or added to things like muffins and oatmeal.
Beets are one of the rare vegetables that are better canned. They get a weird texture in the freezer. The cold storage is also a great place to keep them, and we enjoy baked beets deep into fall. Pickled beets are a favorite snack of ours.
Corn, while it can be canned, is so much better frozen. We blanch and freeze a bunch of corn every September. It’s practically like fresh corn, and a great addition to soups and casseroles all winter.
Does This Make My Life Easier?
Life is hard enough; don’t make more work for yourself by overcomplicating things. Before you preserve your harvest, think about whether or not what you’re doing is going to make your life easier now and later on.
Some people can pumpkin. But is this going to make your life easier? Not mine. Canning pumpkin is a lot of work for something that literally stores itself. This winter we had pumpkins keep well in our basement until February, and still have winter squash in March. To be honest, the squash and pumpkins have outlasted our desire to eat them. We may eat one or two more in the coming weeks, but then the last couple will be composted.
To save time, when I need to cook a squash I cook 2 or 3 all at once. Then I freeze the leftovers as a puree for the next time. For me, this is a nice way to balance both time and freezer space. We could puree and freeze all of our squash at once in October, but it would take up a lot of freezer space (and they keep just fine in the basement on our empty racks). Pre-cooking the squash would also limit how I can use it since it would all be pureed.
Canning applesauce, on the other hand, does make my life easier. I make applesauce once, and then it becomes a ready-made snack that we eat all year long, and it lasts far longer than the bug-bitten yard apples would last in cold storage.
Figure out what will make your life easier. Maybe you want canned soups and frozen meals, or maybe you just want prepped ingredients. Do you like to cook in big batches and then be done, or a little at a time? Do whatever works for you.
Keep Records and Adjust As You Go
Keeping track of your pantry will be critical in streamlining your food preservation. Find a system that works for you, and use it to record what you actually eat in a year.
For us, a simpler system is better. I record three times: when I plant, when I preserve, and in late summer when the pantry is at its emptiest before we restock. This gives me a great outline of what we use and what it took to get there. For each year I have the relevant information and spent a minimal amount of time getting it.
In the spring I record the number and type of each planting; for example, that we planted 30 San Marzano paste tomatoes.
Sometime in mid-late summer, I’ll take stock of the pantry. Usually, by this time we’re eating mostly out of the garden, and anything left from last year is excess. I’ll make a record of how much we actually used, and how much extra we had, or if we ran out early (maybe we still have 20 pints of salsa left, but ran out of crushed tomatoes in February).
As I start preserving the harvest, I’ll record everything I put in the pantry and freezer. Then, I don’t think about it again until the next spring when I’m planning my garden.
Each year, I adjust how much I plant and preserve based on our usage from the year before. Over time the adjustments get smaller and our pantry and garden better fit our needs.
This summer, we’ll grow twice as many beans as last year.
You Can Preserve More of Your Own Food Than You Think
The idea of growing and preserving a year’s worth of anything can be overwhelming. But I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by how easy it is and how few plants it takes.
We often grossly overestimate how much we actually need when we’re stocking our pantry. Most of us like variety, and we get bored eating the same food every single day. Given the choice, we prefer to mix it up. Do some simple calculations to see how much you actually eat in a year of your favorite foods.
What is one thing you could grow a year’s supply of? Tomatoes? Or maybe oregano? A year’s supply of herbs can be grown from just a plant or two. Just a 1 ft by 3 ft. patch of oregano will give you enough to open a pizza parlor.
Experiment and find what works for you, whether it be freezing your food, canning, or a root cellar. Remember to have fun, don’t spread yourself too thin, and enjoy the harvest.
