PRESERVING 

The wonderful thing about gardening is your plants can produce an abundance of food for you and your loved ones. Sometimes, the harvest is too much to consume at once so you will need to preserve your vegetables to eat at a later time. Three ways to preserve your harvest include making sauce, blanching, or pickling.

Methods of Preserving

  • Sauce:
    Tomato sauce is a great way to preserve tomatoes and basil to enjoy for the cold winter months until the next growing season.
  • Blanching:
    Blanching squash and spinach is an excellent way to keep the integrity of your vegetables when they are frozen.
  • Pickling:
    Pickling cucumbers and radishes is a fun activity for everyone in the family to enjoy.

Sauce

  • Making tomato sauce is a great way to preserve your tomato harvest. At the end of your growing season, you might find that you have an abundance of tomatoes. By making sauce, you are able to enjoy the taste of delicious fresh tomatoes all Winter long. When you can your tomato sauce, it can last for a year or longer. Here are our favorite resources for making sauce!
Homemade Tomato Sauce
Water Bath Canning

Blanching

  • To blanch, prepare vegetables by peeling them properly. Next, boil one gallon of water for every pound of vegetables in a large pot. Once water is boiling, place vegetables in the water and cover with a lid. Begin counting the boiling time when the water begins to boil. Every vegetable has a different boiling time, so be sure to check how long your vegetable will need. After boiling for the correct time, immediately place the vegetables into an ice bath to stop cooking. Pat the vegetables dry, and store them in a container in the freezer for up to eight months. 
Blanching Chart
Blanching

Pickle

  • There are a few types of pickling you can do to preserve your harvest. Refridgerator pickles can last for up to a month, but if you want to preserve them for up to a year, you will have to place them in a water bath. Here is a great resource for pickling!
Pickling

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