Gardening can be a very rewarding experience. There are many steps along the way: planting, weeding, watering, fertilizing, harvesting, eating, and preserving. Some steps are more enjoyable than others. When I was young, my family owned Harmony Vegetable Market. The business was started as a way to keep my brothers and me busy during the summer. It worked. We were busy, it seems, from sunup to sundown. Riding on the transplanting machine was fun, picking was tremendously rewarding, and hoeing was just something you had to get through. With all the coverage of the birth of Prince George of Cambridge last week, I am reminded of how I would get through the hours of hoeing. I would imagine that Princess Diana was pulling up on Harmony Road while I was out in the field hoeing. She and I had many long talks on those hot summer days. Little did I know, 15 years later, I would actually get to meet her.
Truthfully, these days I do my best to get out of most of the gardening steps. Chris, my husband, and our children do the planting. My grandfather does the watering. My mom does quite a bit of the weeding. We have just starting harvesting. My favorite part is preserving. I absolutely love spending time processing fruits and vegetables. It is a tangible way to ensure that our family will have healthy food to eat during the fall, winter, and spring. I choose to preserve food primarily through freezing. It is simple, quick, and results in very high-quality tasting food.
The book that I refer to each year as I restock our freezer is “The Busy Person’s Guide to Preserving Food” by Janet Chadwick. Listed below are some notes about foods I typically freeze. Tray freezing involves putting the vegetables on a cookie sheet and then placing them in your freezer. Once the vegetables freeze, you can take them out and put them in bags.
Green Peppers-core, rinse, and pat dry. You can either freeze whole or in slices. I do both. The whole peppers we use for stuffed peppers. Tray Freeze.
Sweet Corn-blanch (make sure you have a lot of ice available when blanching vegetables), cut off the cob (we place the base of the cob in an angel food cake pan when cutting the kernels off the cob), and put in bags. We bag up what we think our family will eat in one meal.
Broccoli-try as we might, we never like the taste of broccoli that we have frozen.
Strawberries-rinse and pat dry. Cut off the stem. Tray freeze them whole.
Blueberries-rinse and pat dry. Tray freeze them whole.
Zucchini-rinse and shred. Pat dry. I then bag it up according to the amount needed for my favorite zucchini bread recipe.
Green Beans-one vegetable that I think tastes much better canned rather than preserved using a freezer method.
Peaches-rinse and peel by hand. (I do not like the peeling by dipping in boiling water method.) Cut up and mix 2/3 cup of sugar per quart of fruit. Mix well and put into Ziploc bags.
Pears-I usually can pears. They are delicious!
Beets-cut off both ends, wash thoroughly, put in large roasting pan in preheated 400 degree oven and cover. Bake until tender or about 1 hour. Remove the roaster and fill with cold water. Slip the skins off. Slice beets and put in Ziploc bags.
Strawberry Jam-Mary, my daughter, started asking in June if we could make this. It is pretty easy. 2 quarts strawberries and 6 cups of sugar results in great tasting jam. We often decorate the top with Christmas-themed fabric and give them out as small gifts around the holidays.
Pickles-I usually purchase a small bag of seasoning for refrigerator pickles and follow the directions.
Tomatoes- This is a great recipe for Freezing Tomatoes:
Ingredients-
8 to 10 tomatoes
1/2-cup water
1 tablespoon pickling salt
Peel and dice tomatoes. Place in a 1 1/2-quart casserole bowl. Add water and salt. Cover with waxed paper and microwave on High for 10 minutes. Cool and place in Ziploc freezer bags.
I put 1 1/2 cups of sauce in small Ziploc bags and then lay them flat on the counter and force all the air out. After sealing, I put the bags on a cookie sheet and put the cookie sheet in the freezer. These thin, flat containers are great space savers in the freezer.
Vegetables and fruits can also be preserved as part of a recipes. Coleslaw, applesauce, and fruit pies are examples of this.
