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.
There is another fabulous way to use your garden veggies that people don’t often think about. 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 eat cucumbers for 10 days straight and STILL have 5 more left in your refrigerator? Or flocks of bush beans that you didn’t realize should have been staggered several weeks apart? 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 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. 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 are looking to build up some food storage, consider taking your excess garden vegetables and preserve them using some of these methods. 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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