Most gardeners will agree that the most satisfying time of year is when you get to harvest the foods you have worked so hard to grow. This is the absolute BEST part of having your own garden. It is so satisfying to put a meal on the table and know that you actually grew the ingredients yourself. I’ve noticed that the fresh vegetables from my garden tend to taste better than grocery store fare as well plus you can save a lot of money by using your own home grown produce.
There is another great way to use your garden vegetables that people don’t often consider. What do you do if you have a monster tomato plant and you have 30-40 tomatoes all ripen at the same time? How about having 8 giant cucumbers all perfectly ripe but you can’t stomach the thought of eating another cucumber sandwich? Or way too many bush bean plants all ready to harvest simultaneously because you didn’t realize you should stagger the planting times? I have the solution … BUILD UP YOUR FOOD STORAGE!
Garden vegetables are some of the easiest things to bottle, freeze, dry, etc. Last year I bottled whole tomatoes, fresh salsa, and pickles. I froze bags of beans and peas. I recently was given a food dehydrator so I’m going to be looking into preserving veggies that way as well. If you are working on building any type of long term food storage program, these home-grown items will be invaluable to you. The benefits of preserving homegrown vegetables are: they are organic, they retain nutrients better, they only use natural preservatives, and they are FREE! How can you beat that?
So if you have more vegetables than your family can eat this season, try out some of these preservation methods and add some veggies to your food storage. And maybe, just maybe, next year you will find yourself planting extras of certain items so that you can have enough to stock up your food storage shelves even more!
Posted under Miscellaneous Content
This post was written by admin on May 21, 2009
