5 Ways to Preserve Your Harvest

Your hard work is finally paying off. Your tomatoes are brilliantly colorful, your carrot tops are full and leafy, and you should be proud. But when it all comes at once, you're left with one big question: How am I going to eat all of this?  Don't fear- your harvest won't go to waste! There are tons of different ways that you can stop the clock on food decay and set yourself up with delicious dishes for months to come. We're sharing 5 simple preservation methods that will help you handle your harvest when you have your hands full. 

• Drying Herbs
• Freezing Vegetables
• Jamming Fruits
• Pickling Vegetables
• Food Swaps

These preservation methods may seem like they might be complicated, but they are easier than they sound and can be done with ease in your own kitchen. With the exception of a couple of household ingredients that you may need to visit the grocery store for, there is very little you need to accomplish these techniques.

1. Drying Herbs

Using up your fresh herbs can be difficult, especially with very prolific plants like dill, rosemary, and oregano. You can dry them instead of letting them wilt away, thus supplying your spice shelf for the rest of the season.

There are two main ways of drying herbs:

• Air Drying
• Oven Drying

Generally speaking you can make either of these methods work for your herbs, but some herbs are better suited for one method than the other.  Air-drying works best for low-moisture herbs like oregano, rosemary, lavender and dill. Herbs like basil, chives and mint contain more moisture and it’s best to dry them in an oven.

Once dried, store the herbs in air-tight containers like jars, plastic storage containers, or plastic bags. Label and date the container for easy usage. Dried herbs will maintain their flavor for a full year.

2. Freezing Vegetables

Freezing vegetables is one of the most effective ways of preserving the fullest possible flavor from your produce. Think of it almost like freezing your produce in time. Though you could throw your produce straight into a plastic bag and toss it in the freezer, they won't come out quite the same that way. To get your vegetables properly prepared for freezing, we're going to teach you how to blanch them. 

Blanching is a quick method of partially cooking vegetables and then rapidly transitioning them into freezing. How does this help, you might ask? Water expands when it freezes (think of how the ice cubes in your ice tray are always a little more robust than you remember when you poured the water in), so when you freeze a vegetable (which is mostly made of water), it's cells will expand and burst. The result is a vegetable that is mushy and hasn't quite maintained it's structural integrity. By blanching, you are cooking out some of the water and giving the plant cells a little more breathing room for the freezer. 

When you're ready to use your frozen vegetables, letting them thaw before cooking will help preserve their cellular structure. To bring vegetables right back to life, you can take them directly from the freezer into boiling water. For more delicate fruits and vegetables, like berries, don't allow them to thaw completely before eating them. They are likely to get a little mushy if left to reach room temperature. 

3. Jamming Fruits

Whether you want to call it jam or jelly, we're not going to get into. There are specific distinctions here, but the process we're talking about today is the same, so we're not going to split hairs. Turning fruit into a jam is a simple process that utilizes the sugar, pectin, and acid from the fruit to turn it into the more concentrated, gelatinous form that we know and love: jam. 

What you'll need:

• A medium, wide cooking pot
• Heat-proof stirring spoon (ideally wood)
• Small, wide fine-mesh strainer
• Jars with rubber-sealed lids
• Powdered Pectin
  
• 1/2 Cup Sugar
• 1 Lemon
• 4 Cups Fruit

There are essentially 2 major phases to making a jam: Cooking and Canning.

NOTE: 

Some fruits have enough natural pectin in them to set into a jam, though if you're having difficulty getting your mixture to thicken up, you can add a pinch or two of powdered pectin while cooking

The jam is ready to consume by the time it  has fully cooled. You will know that it is finished because the tops of the lids will  pop in, assuring you the jar has sealed. Enjoy on toast, waffles, croissants, cheeses, sandwiches, charcuterie, crackers, or any way you can imagine. 

4. Pickling Vegetables

Pickles. If you have a pickle craving, you won't just stop at cucumber pickles. Pick up this quick pickling technique and you'll be trying it out on all kinds of produce. We shared our Quick Refrigerator Pickle recipe on a past blog post, including the details for making dill pickles and ideas for other pickled vegetables here. This is the short of it. You'll be surprised at how simple and fast the refrigerator method, giving you fresh pickles overnight. We'll break it down into just 4 steps. 

5. Food Swaps

Okay, this isn't technically a preservation method, but it is an excellent way to reduce waste from your harvest, build community, and stock up on a variety of produce that you wouldn't otherwise have in your own garden. By swapping the produce you can't make use of with produce that you can make use of, you're making your stockpile more efficient. Food swapping is a simple concept: It can be as small as knocking on your neighbors' doors with a basket of extra veggies, or as large as a community-wide  food swap.