This is the first year that I am attempting to preserve vegetables from my garden. Up until now I have been too intimidated by the process, and I also had a hard time with the self-control aspect of not gobbling up all the produce as it ripened! But today, I found myself wondering how in the world we were going to eat all the beans, swiss chard and beets that needed to be picked NOW...and then I thought, "duh, I can freeze it". This kind of preserving doesn't intimidate me...it's just the idea of canning that I have to learn more about before my tomatoes start yielding way more than we can slice, dice and stew per day. But freezing? No problem. It did take all morning, but now we are set with about 4 quarts of beans, 2 quarts of beets and 4 quarts of swiss chard...and that is just for now! I'll give it a couple days, and there will be more to come...and my pole beans haven't even started to bear fruit yet. I'm so excited about my garden this year, and it is in large part to whole-heartedly embracing Mel Bartholomew's Square Foot Gardening techniques.
This top shelf of my freezer filled with green goodness redeems the bottom shelf stacked with a couple frozen pizzas and General Tsao's chicken wings! ;)
1 comment:
Looks great! I too am afraid of canning. Why not freeze your tomato sauce too? Deborah, my right hand in the Rafiki kitchen uses a grater with the tomatoes. She cuts one in half, then just starts grating the cut side. You end up with lovely tomato puree on the cutting board, and the skin of the tomato in your hand. It's really nice! Once I have tomatoes in my garden, I'm going to freeze a ton of tomato puree made like this, maybe with garlic added.
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