Putting By

At Bear Butte Gardens, now is the season of "putting by" or preserving food for future use.  Probably most customers of Bear Butte Gardens did this in August or even September, but October works out perfectly for me.  In August I am hip-deep in vegetables in the gardens.  Full harvest season has begun and it is going to continue until frost, which is approximately early October.  My focus during the heavy harvest season is getting loads of vegetables picked daily and quickly getting them to our customers through CSA shares and to local health food stores or selling through direct sales.  Many mornings I start picking 6:30 to 7:00 a.m. to avoid midday heat, take a break in the middle of the day, then get back to it late afternoon and evening.  Not only do I not have the time to start preserving vegetables, but I really don't have an urge to when the days are pushing high 80s and low 90s.  Who wants to stand over a range of simmering pots then?  Possibly, in future years we will consider putting together an outdoor kitchen in a shady spot so I could do a little preserving outside where the big messes won't seem so big.

But my current calendar actually works very well.  Two weeks ago, with the threat of an impending storm (which broke all October blizzard records for the area), I harvested buckets and crates full of tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, tomatillos, onions, etc., and stashed them away in corners of the garage and in the cooler.  I knew that I would be able to gradually sell them to our customers over the next several weeks as well as hopefully have some indoor days when I could do a little preserving.  Unfortunately, the next six days were powerless, so I chose not to do any vegetable preserving in the interest of conserving fuel.  Once our power was restored, I knew it was high time to get some vegetables out of the crates and into the freezer.

At this point in time, my preferred method of preserving vegetables is blanching and bagging for the freezer or just putting them directly into the freezer in some cases.  I am not much of a "canner."  I do make a few dozen jars of jam from the berries on our place, but those are about all of the hot water bath-ing I want to do.  We have a nice sized chest freezer in the garage, so most things are prepared to go into that freezer.  Since most of my frozen vegetables are used up by next early summer's harvest time, the threat of losing frozen produce due to a power outage isn't too big.  And, quite honestly, it is not going to hurt a bag of frozen eggplant to defrost and be re-frozen.

Each year I add another item to my list of favorites when it comes to preserving.  One of the first years it was blanched whole tomatoes so that I could avoid canned tomatoes.  The next year I added tomato sauce to the freezer simply by pureeing the tomatoes before filling the bags.  The next year I ventured into tomato paste, which has ruined me on store-bought tomato paste for life.  One year I discovered
salsa verde made from tomatillos.  What a treat that is in February with some organic chips!  A couple years ago I started baking, pureeing, and freezing pie pumpkin and, again, I will probably never eat pie pumpkin out of a can again.  Pumpkin cookies with cream cheese frosting are an absolute favorite of mine now.

This year I am doing all of those and adding bags of shredded zucchini to the freezer for breads and muffins and soups, making homemade ketchup, and freezing chopped okra as well as beans, peppers, and eggplant.

Of course the easiest things to put by are those that simply need a storage space of the right temperature like winter squash, potatoes, sweet potatoes, garlic, dried peppers, dried herbs, carrots, cabbage, and onions.  Each year we figure out how to dry and cure something new and add that to the bins and shelves of root cellar items.

I am also becoming enamored with fermented foods, with fermentation being a method of "putting by" that should not be ignored.  The health benefits of fermented foods are so great, I believe they deserve equal time to canning, freezing, and root cellaring.  Some fermented foods that I make on a frequent basis and enjoy are yogurt, kimchi, kombucha, and water kefir.  This year I intend to add fermented ketchup and fermented jalapeños to my repertoire.  In future years, when we have a better harvest of cucumbers, fermented pickles will definitely also be tried.  I recently found a recipe for fermented tomatillo salsa verde that I think I will try.

Some of the publications that I refer to for preserving foods are:

Preserving Food Without Freezing or Canning by The Gardeners & Farmers of Terre Vivante
Root Cellaring by Mike and Nancy Bubel
The Art of Fermentation by Sandor Katz

I also frequently just search on the internet for info about whatever item I have available that needs preserving.  My search words generally include "easy" as I always like a minimum number of steps and ingredients.

I am always looking for new "easy" ideas for preserving the wonderful produce from Bear Butte Gardens and invite blog readers to share their tried and true methods.  If you have any questions about any of the food preservation methods listed above, please feel free to e-mail me and ask.

Michelle
Bear Butte Gardens
Sturgis, SD
605.490.2919
www.BearButteGardens.com
Michelle@BearButteGardens.com