Here at Unprepared, we’re big advocates of raising your own food, if only just a little bit to build your skillset. But your gardens and livestock are only the pipeline. When the harvest comes in the real work starts. Your first garden might be pretty easy: clip some greens for a salad or chop open a watermelon and dig in.
Then your gardens get bigger and you’re suddenly facing down several hundred pounds of squash. Many new gardeners find themselves overwhelmed by their output and let a lot of it go to waste. It happens to all of us, but then you get smart and learn how to…
…dehydrate…
…can…
… and freeze.
As my clan drowns in produce and my poor wife slaves away at the canner, I asked our Summer Survival Council how they preserve their harvests.
Nicole Sauce
Nicole Sauce of LivingFreeinTennessee.com has run a homestead for a decade and a half, roasts great coffee at HollerRoast.com, and runs workshops on self-reliance and homesteading (SelfRelianceFestival.com). Her book Cook With What You Have helps folks learn to do just that, and she coaches people through development of a step-wise plan for building an independent, stable lifestyle including income generation, choosing the city or the country, preparedness, and lifestyle balance. She is also hosting a Swale Workshop in Camden, TN on July 30 and 31.
At the Holler Homestead, we harvest in abundance and source low-cost, fresh produce from local farmers and then “put them up” for winter using the following methods.
Freezing: This is accessible to anyone with a freezer and a stove. Some produce you can simply toss in the freezer in a bag. Other vegetables, like green beans and broccoli, do best when blanched first.
Dehydrating: This can be done at room temperature on racks or by hanging in bunches for herbs and some meats and vegetables, and with the assistance of a food dehydrator (electric or solar) for vegetables and meats. The same produce that does best blanched before freezing should also be blanched before dehydrating.
Freeze Drying: This requires specialized equipment. Mine is from Harvest Right, but there are ways to DIY your own if this one is out of scale for your budget.
Canning: Waterbath canning and pressure canning is the foundation of our winter stores.
Fermenting: All you need is a mason jar and some salt and you can begin fermenting. We also transform milk into cheese during the spring and summer.
Root Cellaring: Storing vegetables below grade with earth exposure helps keep root vegetables fresh for a very long time.
Different kinds of produce and herbs do better using different methods of preservation.
Fragile herbs retain the most flavor when dehydrated either hung in bunches in a cool, sun-free, dry place — or freeze dried.
Vegetables that go to mush when overcooked, like summer squash and okra, do best dried, frozen, or freeze-dried. Today I discovered a GIANT ZUCCHINI that I had overlooked, grated it into zoodles with a spiralizer, and froze it for wintertime “pasta.”
Root vegetables and hearty fruits (potatoes, carrots, onions, apples, beets, pears, etc) can be stored in a root cellar, below grade. Some folks will bury a broken chest freezer to do this. We have a half-underground utility room that stays at about 40 degrees throughout the winter. Onions stored in the root cellar in October are still good in April, so long as I take a weekly peek at them and remove any that are starting to grow or go soft. The ones that begin to grow, I can toss in my Aquaponics system to use as green onions.
Cabbage and cucumbers get fermented but we do not start the ferments until mid-September because the house is too warm until that time to create high-quality results. Ferments will store for months at room temperatures or up to a year in the fridge.
Everything else we either waterbath can or pressure can. High acid foods such as peaches, tomatoes (on the border), and pickles go through the water bath canner. Low-acid foods like green beans, corn, and even beef or chicken are pressure canned.
Canning is one of the areas of most focus at this time of year. The goal is to process three bushels of green beans, 100 pounds of beef (to clear space in the freezer), 48 jars of salsa, 24 jars of pickles, 78 jars of pickled beets, and 12 jars of corn. So far, we are on plan for the beets and pickles and madly catching up on beef and green beans.
I recently hosted a digital class on how to can beef because it looks like there will be a dip in price this fall which creates an opportunity to buy meat at a lower cost. If adding freezers is out of the question, consider “buying the dip” and processing the beef by pressure canning it. This class is a step-by-step course on how to do that: Home Canning Beef at a cost of $47. The course includes a free video: Introduction to Home Canning.
Happy preserving!
Joseph—Homestead Padre
Joseph has been homesteading for over a decade and specializes in small-space homesteading and intensive gardening systems. He is married with three children, one grown, and is co-owner of The Smith Homestead with his wife Melody. He also owns a cottage food bakery out of his home, servicing his local community with homemade and artesian breads.
This year has been an abundance for us. I have 20 quarts of pickles alone.
One of the greatest hauls actually didn't come from our own garden. At the weekly farmers market, the main food vendor approached us with a plastic swimming pool full of corn they didn't sell and offered it to us for $5 because they didn't want to take it back home again thinking it wouldn't be good until the next week.
We canned 14 quarts of corn from that load.
Canning is our preferred method of preserving. It's been tried and true for many generations but a little effort is required.
Some crops just aren't good for canning and those usually go in the freezer. Our squashes and zucchini went to the freezer, usually in the form of noodles.
Many of our gourds—like pumpkin—will be frozen as well. Pumpkin doesn't always can well and I generally advise against trying. Botulism isn't something you want to deal with.
We have been getting into fermentation this year, much more than years past, and while I'm not a fan of fermented foods my wife greatly enjoys them.
We make jams and jellies to preserve our fruits but we also use a method I don't hear about often: preserving fruit in honey. This one isn't popular, most likely because most don't know about it, but it's been an effective fruit preserver since at least ancient Greece. I actually learned about it years ago while reading The Natural History of Pliny the Elder.
Not all fruits preserve the same though so you may have to experiment a little. The osmosis process doesn't do well with some fruits and breaks them. I wouldn't try watermelon, but my favorite is plums!
This winter, I will be experimenting more with smoking meats to preserve them. I've been studying what the natives did and with the price of meat so high, I'll reserve my experiments for what I hunt.
I did a couple of threads on Twitter earlier in the year, one with the corn mentioned above and another with canned zucchini bread. Canning bread has become almost an obsession for me. I run a cottage bread operation and greatly enjoy homemade breads. The problem with homemade bread is that it doesn't keep for very long—just a few days. Canning it has the promise of storing for a year!
Editor’s note: The National Center for Home Food Preservation does not recommend canning bread. Your results may vary.
As a baker, I will give you this one tip about bread: Bread can be frozen and maintain quality for up to ten months and come out tasting fresh made. Here's the secret.
I know a lot of people are trying to get away from plastic but it's a necessity here. Tightly wrap the bread in cling wrap and then wrap it again tightly in aluminum foil. That's it. That method will ensure freshness for 10 months in a freezer.
Side note: bread will keep for up to 10 days in a fridge but it needs to be in an airtight container.
Last bread tip: when storing in a bread box or on a counter DO NOT store it in plastic. Plastic helps mold growth. Wrap it in paper or cotton and place half a potato in the bread box for moisture control.
I didn't mean to go on a bread rant but a lot of people don't know how to properly store their bread.
Ultimately food preservation is a passion and hobby of mine. I find a lot of joy in doing it and the best part of all is my family gets to eat from the garden and pasture year round!
Oh, and research water glassing eggs! That's a fun one as well.
Hamilton
Hamilton is a tradesman, father of three, and homesteader in the Missouri Ozarks. With over a decade of vegetable-gardening experience, he recently expanded to a broad-acre farm operation with animals including chickens, geese, and pigs. Follow on Twitter @Watchman_motto.
We have put away 50 or so pints of green beans, plus about 6 gallon bags in the freezer.
8 pints of relish. 10 pints of pickles. A gallon of hot salsa, plus much more to come.
We are looking forward to canning tomato sauce. Still a few weeks away.
We recently put away 23 broiler chickens.
Mrs. Hamilton has been glassing eggs all spring, so we have plenty for the slow winter months.
Hope to put away dry beans, 2 whole pigs, pumpkins, winter squash, and more cucumbers as they come
We aren't the best, but we have a good start.
Winter comes before we know it!
Dave
Dave is a former Navy SEAL (but not the kind who thinks that makes him cool) and aspiring homesteader. He and his family live in an old schoolhouse in the Pacific Northwest where they garden, care for a small orchard, and raise chickens. Say hi to Dave on Twitter, where he is @aspiringpeasant.
Honestly, I’m terrible about this right now. Our life is in so much flux that saving any more food than the meat in the freezers would be kinda absurd for us right now.
That said, the first kinds of preservation we’ll be doing when we settle down a bit are ferments (kimchi, sauerkraut, pickles, kefir) and canned tomato sauce.