The Complete Guide to Preserving Your Harvest

We are in the glut of summer. The tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers… you name it… that you’ve toiled over for months are coming in faster than you can eat them and faster than you can give them away. The farmers markets are teeming. Your grocery store is probably running sales too. There is a very unique kind of guilt of losing food you grew yourself. I’m guilty of it too. I’ve let a few eggplants go bad this month before I got to them. The answer to the bounty? Preserving. There are so many ways to preserve your harvest and I’m going to walk you through all the different methods.

In today’s post for paid subscribers:

• Eleven ways to preserve what you’re growing, sorted by how much effort each one takes. Start easy and work your way up!

• For each method, I delineate what produce it’s best for, how long it keeps for, what you need to buy, and how I do it

• Some safety rules that really matter

Most of the methods that I mention in this post have versions that make them shelf stable. That is, you can keep them without refrigeration or freezing. To do so, you must water bath or pressure can the item. I cannot stress enough the importance of using legitimate recipes when it comes to canning. There are recipes available through the National Center for Home Food Preservation on their website as well as recipes available through many college extensions. Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving (my preferred resource) is also a great resource if you prefer a physical book. An important distinction I want to make is between water bath canning and pressure canning. You cannot just throw anything into a mason jar, seal it up, boil it and call it a day. You can only do that with food items that are of a certain acidity. Beyond that, you would need to pressure can these. Pressure canning gets the items within the jar to a high enough temperature that you cannot achieve with simple water bath canning. Pressure canning requires a bit more vigilance. With either method, again, you must use legitimate recipes from a legitimate source.