Check out my garden harvest so far this year & what I’m doing to preserve them!
I wanted to document what we’ve gotten thus far from our garden and talk about the methods that I’m using to preserve the produce. We are getting to that time of year when the garden is spitting out produce like crazy and we are doing everything we can to preserve it for use year round. Here are some of the first few preserving projects I’ve completed with our garden harvest so far!
peaches
Okay, this is kind of cheating because we didn’t grow these. We have some future plans to plant fruit trees, but until then we are finding other ways to get quality fruit year round. We purchased 25 lbs of peaches from Tree-Ripe Fruit Company which is a truck that makes stops all over to sell fruit from growers. The fruit is such high quality and the price is a pretty good deal. The main struggle is that they ripen so quickly and you have to mad dash to eat and preserve them. Besides baking and making smoothies with them as they ripened, we water bath canned them. This was my first time canning! I also froze a good amount of peach slices because we are huge smoothie people here.
pesto
Pesto is a huge staple in our house, and it is super easy to make! We have three basil plants that are quite prolific. Basil is my favorite kind of garden harvest because it smells divine. Thus far I have gone through and harvested one full round of basil. I picked off all of the flowers that have come in along with a good amount of leaves. I picked enough to scale the plants down but not totally bare. I then made a few batches of a basic pesto recipe and froze it into 2 tbsp cubes. I then dumped all of the cubes into a freezer gallon bag, and will continue to do this and add to the bag over the season. My hope is to preserve an entire year’s worth of pesto by doing this.
green beans
Our bush green beans are going nuts! I have been keeping up with picking to encourage the plants to keep producing. After picking, I give them a good wash and leave out to dry before putting in freezer bags. Freezing them flat on a tray before storing in the bag is a good way to make sure the beans don’t clump together in the freezer bag. These can be steamed or otherwise cooked into dishes like any other frozen veggie.
strawberries & rhubarb
Our strawberries have been producing quite low numbers given that all of our plants were transplanted this spring. In this first year, we have been taking our small strawberry harvest and eating them fresh or baking with them. One of our favorite summer treats is a strawberry rhubarb bar. We also have three successful rhubarb plants going strong right now. This recipe from Sally’s Baking Addiction is by far the best one I’ve tried so far. We haven’t had to so far, but if I had extras I would probably freeze these as well.
