If I had to choose the most mysterious flower in my herb garden, it would be lavender. How to dry it, use it, and cook with it are all questions I asked myself once I started growing lavender instead of buying it fully prepared for my every whim.
Category: Food Preservation
In the articles below, learn all about food preservation, including how to can, freeze, pickle, and make jam from just about everything in your garden.
You can freeze just about anything, but there are just some things that won’t taste good pickled or turned into a jam. That’s why there are so many different methods of food preservation when you’re a gardener. In the articles below, we cover lots of food preservation basics and the specifics of preserving various fruits, herbs, and vegetables.
Unfortunately, there are just as many ways to improperly store and spoil your vegetables as there are ways to preserve them.
For example, did you know you should not store white or sweet potatoes in the fridge? The cold can injure them. You also shouldn’t store them with fruit. Gas from the fruit makes potatoes sprout. And unless you’re cooking, keep your potatoes away from onions; the two in close proximity will make the potatoes sprout.
Or how about storing corn? Once the ear leaves the stalk, the corn starts converting its sugar to starch. The longer you wait to cook and eat it, the more it will taste like grocery store corn rather than fresh-picked. If you store it in the refrigerator, you have about a week.
And did you realize that berries need moisture to stay crisp? If you pick a few bushels of strawberries or blueberries, it’s a good idea to rinse them before storing them because the moisture will keep them plump longer. Blueberries can last over a month in a device like a berry box, which allows you to rinse the blueberries and keep them in a strainer inside an air-tight box, which keeps the berries crisp without sitting in water.
And we haven’t even gotten to our posts on canning, freezing, making jams, and all the ways you can preserve vegetables for the much longer-term so you don’t have to risk storage spoilage.
In the articles below, you’ll learn about everything from canning apples to freezing squash, storing potatoes, and drying herbs. We welcome you to also read our Recipes from Your Garden freebie. Enjoy!
Losing power always makes me think of orange sherbet. It was 1991, and Hurricane Bob had wiped out our electricity and all my mother was worried about was how we needed to eat all the food in the refrigerator before it went bad. There I was, sitting on the couch next to my grandmother, each […]
There’s something special about growing pounds and pounds of your favorite vegetables. It makes every meal feel like a celebration when you have heirloom tomatoes, fresh basil, crunchy cucumbers, and sweet peppers on your plate. As much as I love to cook, however, there are only so many veggies I can eat or share before they go bad.
I’m sure some people believe it’s ridiculous to think about ways to preserve jalapeños and other hot peppers. Why wouldn’t you just eat them fresh? Add jalapeños to your pizza. Use habaneros in your fresh salsa. Get that awesome curry heated up with some Thai hot peppers.
No sugar freezer jam? Yup. I know the first year I had a bumper crop of strawberries, I didn’t know what to do with them all. There was no way I could use them all before they went bad, no matter how many strawberry-rhubarb pies I made and gave away to friends.
I’ll be the first to admit that I love potatoes. They’re so versatile in the kitchen; you can roast them, mash them, bake them, make chips, potato salad, potato pancakes, home fries for breakfast… I could go on. But you didn’t come here for potato recipes (yet). You probably have a number of your own favorites, which is why you want to know how to store potatoes over the winter.
When it comes to buying or picking apples, I always end up with way more than I actually need. The giant basket of apples taunts me from my countertop, knowing that I will never get through them fast enough before they start to go bad. Freezing fresh apples is one way of keeping them from going bad, but I also love pressure canning apples and storing them in my pantry for later use in pies, breads, apple butter, and apple sauce.
Because spinach is so easy to grow, I almost always end up with way more than I can eat, no matter how many recipes I have. What to do with all of the extra? Can you freeze spinach? The short answer is, yes, you can. But you can’t just throw your harvest into a freezer bag and forget it. (Well, actually you can, but we’ll get to that in a minute.)
Cabbage is pretty easy to grow, especially if you live in a cooler climate. One only needs to think of a traditional Irish garden to understand how much cabbage you can grow if you live in areas with shorter summers and long temperate spells with high temperatures in the mid-60s. That means it’s entirely possible […]
Fresh apples are divine but what if you can’t eat them fast enough? At room temperature, fresh apples will last about a week. Then they start to get bruised and mealy. Stored in the fridge, apples will keep for about a month or two depending on the variety.