Preserve Your Food
There are various ways to keep your fall harvest lasting long into the winter months. Different foods each have their way to be best kept. Historically, keeping food for long months was necessary to survive. In one respect, that hasn't changed. We want to survive WELL, remain healthy, and enjoy what we eat, not have to work too hard and have it all make sense in our modern times.
People are busier nowadays, but not necessarily with making food. Most of the average person's time is consumed by other activities, which makes the preserving of our own food an activity that must fit into our lifestyle. Since there are so many lifestyles, you will need to pick and choose what methods are best for you. Here is a list of some of the ways to preserve a harvest so you can use it all year round.
- Succession planting outdoors
- Succession planting in the greenhouse
- Succession planting in pots indoors
- Grow-lite tabletop systems
- Heated greenhouses
- Drying
- Canning
- Pickling
- Cool storage
- Freezing
- In ground storage (in garden under mulch)
- Indoor hydroponics
- Plant choices
- Cold frames
I hope I haven't forgotten anything. Here & at 4seasongreenhouse.com, the emphasis is on expanding your choices of how you will extend your growing season. Of course, the best and most thorough way to do that is by growing year round in a greenhouse, either in soil beds or using hydroponics. Some of the older, tried and true methods are still valid for certain lifestyles, but if you are going to set out to learn the best methods of preserving a harvest today, we highly recommend growing year round over other methods, such as canning and drying.
Fresh is always best, for many reasons. The best reason is flavor - its why we garden in the first place. You can go to the store and buy what is needed to stay alive, but does it make you happy? If you are a gardener at heart, or a vegan looking for the ultimate in nutrition and taste, or concerned about how food gets to your table, or just want the convenience of growing it in your own backyard, then growing your own food to sustain you and your family is your best option.
I happen to know how to 'can' tomatoes (they taste mighty good in the dead of winter) and make green jeans out of green beans and dry fruit and vegetables in a dryer, make my own raisins, etc. This summer I put some ears of corn and some packages of green beans from the garden into the freezer to enjoy later. I am not going to be able to have them growing here during the blizzard season, so that was my best choice for those vegetables.
Some vegetables are not worth freezing or canning or drying. Asparagus will 'can' and freeze, but who wants to eat it that way? I simply choose to wait for the proper season for Aparagus to be available fresh to enjoy it's flavor. Since drying herbs and using them in recipes is still necessary, I dry some, and have some longer in fresh form. And winter squash will keep in a cellar, as will some varieties of apples, spuds, onions, etc. So planting the varieties you know will store well in this way is one way of preserving the harvest into the winter. But if that is not how you want to do it, you still have plenty of options.
Hydroponics is a complete growing system, usually done inside a greenhouse, but I have seen it in basements with grow lights as well. I think it is limited in a basement and looks like it might be more labor with keeping track of the light ranges. Hydroponics inside a greenhouse that can be heated is going to give a person more options and ability to grow anything year round. Once you have a system set up and know the routine, it is actually less labor intensive than an outdoor garden. You can mix your methods, devoting half of your greenhouse to hydroponics to get your feet wet (so to speak), and still use tradtional greenhouse growing methods. It will allow you to compare the advantages of both. You may want to continue using both methods forever, nothing wrong with that.
Emily's Garden Hydroponic System
4 seasongreenhouse.com offers books on the subjects of Greenhouse Gardening and Hydroponics. A good basic primer is going to be very helpful. You won't be able to remember it all or need to utilize it all at once, so having a reference is just logical.
There are excellent reference books on any method you wish to use. The older methods will be available in most public libraries.
Looking forward to a brighter future for all of us on Mother Earth!
Succession Planting Outdoors
Succession planting in your in-ground outdoor garden is the process of planting seeds over and over at set time intervals, usually during the first few weeks and beyond of the usual planting period. Each plant will grow up and begin producing fruit in a specified length of time. The time it takes is usually on the back of a seed packet or in a catalog and is called 'time to maturity'. Each plant will mature at a different date on the calender. The first planting will produce first, the second planting next, and so on.
You can continue to do succession planting as long as the plant will have enough time to mature before the first frost, unless you intend to protect it from the frosts and allow it to mature in spite of the end of the traditional garden season. You can protect your later sowings with various methods. Some of the easiest ways are to cover the plants with blankets, pots, boxes, plastic domes, glass domes, straw, pine needles, cold frames, etc. You will need to uncover them in the morning after the frost so they will get some sunshine, unless it happens to be snowing and dark out, then you might want to wait until the storm is over.
In order to get the most out of your succession planting, you will need to know what gardening zone you are in and the last and first frost dates that bookend your gardening season. Your local weather station can provide this information. You can get frost predictions on the internet also. Just Google it. Once you have that information, you can start figuring out how late (or early) you can plant and still get a harvest. For instance:
If you look inside a seed catalog, you will see something like "Porterhouse Beefsteak Tomato" 80 days. That means it will take 80 days to get fruit off the plant from the time you have sown the seed. All this is based on normal sowing methods outdoors. Since 80 days is almost a whole summer long, and you want to be able to pick tomatoes way before the Fourth of July, you simply count back from the first of July at least 80 days, and that is the date you will need to sow the seeds. June has 30 days, then go back further and May has 30 days, which makes May 1st 60 days before, so you will need to go back 20 more days to April 9th to have your sowing date in order to have tomatoes by the Fourth of July.
And then, since producing fruit does not necessarily mean a nice big fat juicy red tomato ready to eat, you will want to make sure there is time for the fruit to fully ripen also, so calculate how long that will take, and add that to the total days needed to get your tomatoes ready to pick. Since it is going to be around July 4th, it will be hot, so probably 10 days will be enough to have them ready. Then, if you want to be very sure, put in a buffer zone in your plans - add another length of time you think might make it a sure thing, say 2 weeks. Now you have a seed sowing date that is somewhere in late March, so you simply set up your seed starting supplies and make it happen around that time. It is a good idea to put the date you sowed the seeds on the plant marker. In two weeks you will start another set of seeds, date them, and in another two weeks, repeat the process again, and again as long as you want.
The only thing you need to remember is that it will take at least 80 days to get anything from the planting. Also, if the weather is cooling down, the growth and ripening will slow down as well, and make the maturity date longer than specified.
You can make your later sowings in pots, so you will be able to move the pots into a warmer climate as it gets cooler. Tomatoes like it hot all day, need plenty of sun, but they also like to be able to cool down a little over night. You will need to provide them with what they like to get ripe fruit from them. The simplest and easiest way to provide the desired climate is with a heated greenhouse. You may not need to heat the greenhouse for a few weeks after bringing them into the greenhouse, as the sun will heat it up some, but as temperatures drop you want to start some heat. If you think it is hot out, the tomatoes don't. Same concept for indoor growing. The greenhouse will make it easy to keep it warm. If you have an automatic thermostat on a heater in your greenhouse, it will take away some of the hard work for you.
Tomato plants moved into the greenhouse
Succession planting can be used for any type of vegetable and some flowers as well. The different kinds of veggies will have different maturity dates, and some may not slow down much as the weather cools, prefering cooler temperatures over the hot mid-summer days. See our related article about Winter Vegetables, for some ideas on what to plant during the cooler seasons.