Storing and preserving garden produce I
t's the height of growing season and your garden is beautiful. Everything is green and growing, and all your hard work has paid off with an abundance of produce. But now what is to be done with all that food? Learning how to store and preserve food is a key step toward getting more out of your garden, and while we tend to associate food preservation with labour-intensive tasks like canning, sometimes it can be as easy as leaving things in the ground. I keep a 2,500-square-foot vegetable garden in my backyard, and usually at some point in late June or early July I start getting more food than I can eat. It starts with garlic. I grow over 250 heads of garlic, and typically each year, just after the summer solstice, all of them start producing garlic scapes, which are edible stalks that shoot up rapidly to form flower-like bulbils. The scapes have to be removed to ensure that the garlic bulbs achieve a good size, but they are also edible if harvested at the right time. They have a mild garlic flavour and are very nice when added to stir-fries, pastas, or any other dish that goes well with garlic. Unfortunately, all 250 scapes have to be harvested within a twoweek window of time, so the excess needs to be preserved in some way. At about the same time, my peas start producing more than my family can eat, and then I have too much kale, and then beans, then zucchini, then potatoes, then carrots, and so forth. This continues right until the winter solstice when the ground is freezing up and I am using a pickaxe to get parsnips out of the ground before they are frozen in place for months. I suppose I could just grow less, but for me, the land is just begging to provide, and it will not be denied! Also, I have found over the years that there are many ways to save food for later, and some are very easy, so let us review all the techniques that I use, 30 • 2021
Story and photos by Greg Auton
Are you drowning in beans? Not a problem if you blanch and freeze them for later.
Pumpkins and winter squash are ready-made for storage. They keep for months as long as they are kept near 10 degrees Celsius.
from the easiest to the most laborintensive. Leave it in the ground Some root vegetables are tough, and as long as you can keep the ground from freezing, you can simply Issue 4
leave them in the ground. I do this with carrots, parsnips and sunchokes (or Jerusalem artichokes). One way to do this is to place bales of hay over the ground where the root vegetables are located. localgardener.net
