We had our first real freeze last night, so I have spent the last few days harvesting the remaining crops from our garden and preserving everything. I thought I was almost finished on Saturday, but then on Sunday a friend told me about a field just down the road from our house where the huge local organic farm had put up a “help yourself” sign after the field got lightly frosted. I guess they decided it wasn’t worth harvesting, even though there was still a ton of good produce out there. I went on Sunday afternoon and filled four reusable shopping bags with tomatoes, peppers, and broccoli. Then I went back on Monday with the boys (baby in the Moby Wrap, three-year-old helping me find veggies) and filled another four bags. This is part of the haul:
I was up until midnight on Sunday blanching and freezing broccoli:
This was especially awesome because we didn’t grow any broccoli this year in our garden. But now I have 17 quarts of perfect little broccoli florets in the freezer. Did I mention that the farm is organic?!
I also ended up with about 12 quarts of roasted tomatoes and tons of frozen pepper chunks. I’ve stopped keeping track, and I’m still freezing peppers since I can only do two baking sheets at a time. I think I still have about 30 peppers in a bag on the counter waiting to be frozen or roasted, but all the rest of the gleaning haul is in the freezer.
I’ve had several readers who want to see pictures of our preserved harvest. Here are the canned jars of tomato sauce and diced tomatoes:
Here’s the freezer:
And the door of the freezer:
The freezer door has one bottom shelf that didn’t fit in the picture – it’s got another seven quarts of roasted tomatoes on it. The ziplock bags are all full of greens (chard and turnip), peppers, onions, and pumpkin. The main part of the freezer also has some of our Costco stash – lots of frozen berries and cherries – but is mostly stuff from our garden. I’ve lost track of how many quart bags of greens I have now, but I’m guessing it’s somewhere around 60 or 70. We got our cold frame in place recently over the garden bed that still has lots of greens in it, so we’re hoping to extend the growing season for greens for another month or two, and then we’ll rely on the frozen greens for the coldest part of the winter. The top two shelves in the freezer still have some room on them, but I’m hoping that they will be mostly filled by the end of the day today. My plan is to finish chopping and freezing most of the peppers, and to harvest and freeze the rest of the chard that isn’t under the cold frame in the garden.
In addition to all the canned/frozen stuff, we also have a few boxes of potatoes and onions that we dug out of the garden recently:
I only bought one bag of seed potatoes last spring. But I had a bag of potatoes that I had forgotten about in the pantry and they were all wrinkled and covered in sprouts when I found them. It was planting time, so I just chopped them up and stuck them in a garden bed. Midway through the summer, I thought that our potato crop hadn’t amounted to anything, because all of the plants died by the end of July. But then we dug into one of the beds (to plant something else) and the first shovel full of dirt had four potatoes in it. We ended up with three beds full of perfect potatoes – not bad!
Whew! I don’t know how many hours I’ve spent preserving food in the last few days, but I can say that I’m glad garden season is just about finished for another year. We love it, but it’s a lot of work. By early spring next year, I’ll be itching to get my hands in the dirt again. But right now, I’m ready to just enjoy cooking with all the food we have stashed away for the winter. I will miss plates full of freshly-sliced tomatoes just off the vine though…
Jaime says
What a wonderful harvest. I hope you know that I’m living vicariously through your gardening. ;)
Kelly says
Wow! Will you even need to go grocery shopping at all this winter? That is amazing! Nice job!
Sense says
That is AWESOME!!! My only thought is (after surviving Hurricane Irene) that I hope you have a generator in case the power goes out… Would be a horrific shame for all that work/food to go to waste!!
Meg says
Wow! That is incredible! Great job!
I tried my hand at canning (apples) for the first time ever last weekend, and it took the entire day, but seeing those jars full in the pantry made it worth it! I look forward to canning beans from the garden and tomatoes next year.
Your pantry and freezer looks awesome! Great job FrugalBabe!!
And what an awesome thing for the organic farm to allow you to pick all those veggies for free! Great deal!!
You are an inspiration.
I’m with you – as sick of gardening as I get at the end of the season, I am planning the Spring garden by January, usually! :-)
Kay says
Hi FB,
That’s fantastic!! When I look at your storage, I can’t help amazed at all the hard work you put into it!! Way to go!
Do you have any xl sheet or something on paper to tell you how much is in there and where? how do you keep track of the stiff you stored? I have a freezer attached to the fridge (regular bottom freezer – smaller than usual) and I have tons of store bought stuff in there, but I have no idea where what is and how much.. So I’m looking for ideas to keep track of freezer storage.
We are planning to buy an upright freezer.. Can you give any suggestions and how you went about buying yours..
Tanya says
I commend you for all your hard work. I’ve never been good at gardening, but I would really like to get better at it.
FrugalBabe says
Kay – I don’t have a list anywhere, because it’s pretty easy to see what I have in the freezer, and I store like items together. So I can see when certain things are running low. I do rotate things through the freezer when we make a trip to Costco. Items that are already in the freezer in the basement get brought upstairs to the freezer in the kitchen so that the newer stuff is always downstairs. That way we don’t end up with the same bag of cherries sitting in the deep freeze for two years.
We got our deep freezer at the Habitat for Humanity thrift store. My parents found it and called to let us know it was there. I went over, liked it, and bought it. We paid $150 (I think) a couple years ago, and can’t imagine living without it now. If you like to shop in bulk or preserve a lot of your own food, a good deep freezer is a big help.
Kay says
Thanks FB! I’ll remember to store like items together and to move stuff into the freezer-attached-to-the-fridge and put latest stuff into the deep freeze. That sounds awesome that you got your freezer at HFH!!
What do you buy from costco that you store in the freezer? I can think of organic spinach and nuts… but what else?
SonyaAnn says
Congrats! I received a ton of peppers from a neighbor and I just cut them up and put them right in the freezer. I have used some and they are fine. I would just throw the rest in the freezer. I hope this little tidbit helps, it’s the least that I can do for you after all of the help that you have given me.
FrugalBabe says
Kay – Costco is my favorite place to buy frozen fruit and berries. I only buy organic, and those are really pricey at the regular grocery store (usually at least $3.50 or $4 for a 10 ounce package). Costco sells four pound bags of frozen organic cherries, blueberries, raspberries, peaches and sometimes other stuff like strawberries. Usually the bags are between $10 and $12 each. So I stock up every time we go. I use frozen berries and fruit in our green smoothies, and to sweeten all sorts of desserts. We like to just dump the cherries onto a plate, let them thaw a bit, and eat them just the way they are!
SonyaAnn – Thanks! I’m glad you’ve found my site to be helpful. That’s exactly what I did with the peppers. I think I had about 100 of them, and most of them got chopped up, spread on cookie sheets, and frozen. Then I put them in canning jars and stored them in the freezer. I roasted several of them and added them to salads last week too. And now we have lots and lots of peppers in the freezer for this winter.
Kay says
Thanks FB!! so far we’ve lucked out buying frozen wild blueberries and mango chunks on sale at regular grocery stores to use in our smoothies.. but our Canadian costco has to go a long way…. they have very few organic stuff – quinoa, greens, carrots, carrot juice, tortilla chips, pasteurized salsa… that’s about it. I hope they start offering more organic options in Canada as well.
I’m glad US Costco is offering a lot of good options.. I remember reading that every time you go to costco you spend about 200 or so and I wondered how come, considering you are vegan et al.. now it makes total sense to me. Thanks for all the patient replies, FB!