Homegrown Garden Vegetables for Food Storage

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Homegrown Garden Vegetables for Food Storage

Thursday, June 4th, 2009 Subscribe To Our Feed

The best time of the gardening season is when you first get to harvest some of the vegetables that you have grown. 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.

I’d like to share with you another fabulous use of your garden veggies that is often overlooked. What do you do if you have a monster tomato plant and you have 30-40 tomatoes all ripen at the same time? What about when you have 10 giant cucumbers sitting in your fridge waiting to be eaten and you can’t stomach the idea of another cucumber sandwich? Or flocks of bush beans that you didn’t realize should have been staggered several weeks apart? I have a wonderful solution … BUILD UP YOUR FOOD STORAGE!

Garden vegetables are some of the easiest things to bottle, freeze, dry, etc. Last year I bottled pickles, fresh salsa, and whole tomatoes. I froze bags of peas and beans. My mom recently passed on her food dehydrator to me so I’m excited to learn how to use that method of preservation now too. If you are working on building any type of long term food storage program, these home-grown items will be invaluable to you. They have no mysterious things added in, they are virtually FREE, they are much fresher and retain nutrients better straight from the garden, and they are organic! 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!

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