Preserve Your Summer Harvest

Summer is Coming to a Close

At the end of every summer everything seems to move at high speed. It’s like the garden wants to get everything grown before winter comes and there’s this huge race to beat Winter to the finish line. In fact, if your kitchen is like mine, the garden produce is taking over. You have to start using triage—taking care of what won’t wait and using a variety of food preservation methods to make “putting by” go quicker.

Time for Triage

It’s just like after a natural disaster. I have to decide what needs my immediate attention and what can wait for a while. Here’s what won’t wait: beans, pickles, tomatoes (salsa and whole or diced tomatoes), leafy vegetables (Swiss chard, kale and spinach), corn and brassicas (broccoli, cabbage, Brussel sprouts and kale or collards), eggplant and summer squash. (That almost sounds like just about everything, doesn’t it?) I get these put up as soon as I can. I use a variety of preservation methods so that everything doesn’t depend on using the stove for canning.

Here are some hints to make it a little easier:

• Save big projects for the weekend when your children and spouse can help for a couple hours. Many hands make light work.
• Put tomatoes and fruit juice or pulp into the freezer to can later in the fall when everything else is done. Jams and jellies can be made any time from frozen juices. When frozen tomatoes thaw most of the tomato liquid separates from the meat so that when you sauce it, it is a thicker sauce that does require lots of boiling.
• Do chopping, peeling and other food prep in the evening while enjoying family conversations or watching a TV show. This makes the work go faster and you can begin the actual food preparation first thing in the morning when you have more energy and fewer distractions.
• Put dense foods (squash, pumpkins, all root vegetables, cabbage, etc) into the garage until you can prep them for the root cellar.
• Use a variety of food preservation methods: Freezing, drying, canning, etc.

Freezing is often the easiest—just wash and chop the food before putting it into freezer bags.

Dehydrating is also easy. For most fruits you just wash, chop and put the food on dehydrator trays. Once you put it into the dryer, just forget about it until the next morning. Be aware that for both freezing and drying, some vegetables require blanching. My book, Everyday Drying, will give you all the information you need for successful dehydrating.

Canning can be the most time and energy intensive method of preserving food. But for some foods it really is the best way to preserve. Tomatoes (including salsa, spaghetti sauce, diced tomatoes, stewed tomatoes and tomato sauce), pickles (cucumbers, peppers, beets, green tomatoes and relishes) green beans, pie filling and jams or jellies are best canned. The food is more stable, more easily incorporated into recipes and stores the longest.

Alternate preservation methods

You probably only have one stove and one canner (maybe two) so don’t put all your time into canning. You can have your dehydrator going 24/7 (I do!) to take care of the eggplant, squash, peppers and tomatoes.

Freeze tomatoes to can into sauce later this fall when all the other canning is done.

Store apples, root crops, cabbage and winter squash in a basement or cool room. Then can or freeze these later when some of the more urgent canning is taken care of.

Juice your apples and freeze the juice in gallon jugs and can them later. Or not—you may prefer the juice frozen. It’s just that frozen juice just takes up a lot of freezer space and I like having ready-to-drink canned juice on hand.

This chart shows the best ways to preserve your food:

Extend your garden season

It seems the growing season is never long enough and it’s always sad to see the garden die. You can extend your garden season with row covers, hoop house and cold frames. Or you can just cover your garden with sheets and light-weight blankets on nights that temps are expected to go below 34°. Take the covers off first thing in the morning and your garden will continue to thrive and produce for several more weeks. Your brassicas actually prefer cool temperatures and do not need any protection until the

Put your garden to bed

When all your produce is in and you can no longer protect the garden from the coming winter, it’s time to put it bed. A little work in the fall will make spring planting much easier and will ensure that you have a healthier and more abundant garden the next year.

Pull out all spent plants and roots and toss them into the compost pile. Apply any soil additive you want: slow-release fertilizer, wood ashes or compost.

You may want to sow a cover crop, also known as green manure. Perennial cover crops will overwinter and be the first thing to grow in the spring. They will choke out other weeds, making for fewer weeds. Just mow down in mid-May and rototill into the soil. Annual cover crops will quickly sprout in the fall and fix nitrogen into the soil. After a killing frost, rototill it in and allow it to decompose over the winter. All cover crops help aerate the soil, add organic matter and increase soil fertility. More information on cover crops here.

The only thing better than a successful garden harvest is putting it all up, preserving it so that you can eat it all year long.

P.S. I never thought I’d want to get another canning book. I already have so many books on food preservation. But this one has made me change my mind. Check it out and see if it doesn’t inspire you, as well.