Dealing with the massive garden harvest this year can be challenging at times. Here are some ideas from Sanctuary Director Christy Foote-Smith on how to preserve fresh local produce for the coming months.
I grow green peas, lettuce, cherry tomatoes, heirloom tomatoes, cucumber, green beans, shell beans, turnips, spinach, carrots, celeriac, beets, kale, butternut squash, potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, basil and other herbs, and pumpkins. I try to keep track of what does well each year so I can reorder those seeds the following season. This year I am trying corn, sweet potatoes, shell beans, and broccoli for the first time. As you can imagine, with a bountiful harvest, finding ways to preserve vegetables becomes very important. I have a large chest freezer for winter storage since I prefer to freeze rather than can. Most vegetables can be blanched and frozen in serving-size plastic bags. I use bags rather than containers because they take up less space. It’s amazing how quickly a freezer can fill up with the garden’s bounty!
Last year I grew kale for the first time—for a favorite soup recipe. The kale kept growing and growing, so I made lots of soup in single-serving containers to bring to work. It took up too much space, so this year I am blanching and freezing kale in soup-batch quantities so I can make the soup later. Turnips, carrots, and other soup veggies can be frozen in soup-batch quantities as well.
My garden produces copious amounts of tomatoes. What we can’t eat fresh, I pop in a pot and cook slightly and freeze, skins and all. Sometimes I add a few fresh herbs like parsley, basil, and oregano. My husband makes amazing spaghetti sauce with lots of garlic. Or, we add the frozen tomatoes to rice sautéed with onions and peppers. This year I made tomato soup, which required using our Foley Food Mill to remove the skins and seeds.
Basil also grows prolifically. Both at home, and here at Drumlin Farm, we make batches of pesto to freeze. Over pasta, this makes a great contribution to potluck suppers and requires very little work. The cost of pesto making can be reduced significantly by buying and freezing the big bags of walnuts they sell at wholesale stores instead of using pine nuts.
I also freeze bags of pureed pumpkin and make pumpkin bread throughout the year. This is my favorite breakfast! Sweeten with maple syrup instead of sugar, and add some flax seeds, walnuts, and raisins for extra nutrition.
In the past I’ve bought corn to freeze, but this year I’m growing my own. I remove the kernels from the raw cobs with a nifty tool that encircles the ear and zips them off in a neat pile. They are available at most kitchen stores. I found the flat kernel cutter very hard to use. The kernels blanch and freeze nicely and taste almost fresh midwinter.
I’ve talked about the veggies, but what about fruit? Each year I pick strawberries at Drumlin Farm and organic blueberries in Vermont. I like to freeze them without washing them first because washing makes them stick together. I think this is fine since I’m the only one who has handled them and they are organically grown. I use gallon bags and try to fill them so the berries form a thin layer. I freeze them flat in the bags on cookie sheets. They should easily break into individual berries and will then conform to any freezer space. I like to mix them with yogurt for lunch, but my husband puts them on his cereal. In the fall I pick apples at a local orchard and make applesauce in single servings for lunches. I put unpeeled pieces of apple in my slow cooker with cinnamon and nutmeg for about 2.5 hours. When it’s cooled, I put it through the Foley Food Mill to remove the seeds, stem, and core. I generally use McIntosh apples because they don’t require any additional sweetener.
Our dinners in the winter usually consist of a plate of two or three vegetables, often straight out of the freezer. This year my husband swears he’s going to learn a lot of new vegetable recipes to give us more variety. Each year is a whole new learning curve. Growing most of what you eat yourself is personally rewarding. I love the challenge, even in the face of garden pests, ever-present weeds, and long dry spells that require hours of watering. The long nights of chopping kale, shucking corn, and snapping beans, and filling the house with steam from blanching vegetables in the height of summer’s heat are rewarded with the midwinter satisfaction of a warm meal of homegrown veggies. You don’t need to grow your own to get this reward. Produce is plentiful from local CSAs, farmers markets and farm stands. Buying local to freeze is just as good and supports our community farms!
Enjoy the harvest and let us know if you have a great tip for preserving or preparing all those veggies! If you want to learn more about growing, using, and preserving our local harvest check out our Know Your Food programs this fall, including a Jams, Jellies, and Compotes class.
