Starting to Put up the Harvest

A typical day's harvest at the moment.

Our refrigerator has finally filled up enough with fresh veg that it was time to start putting some away for the future. I started with the beans because they are by far the easiest. We are growing two plants each of yellow, green, and purple garden beans. That makes for a fist-full or so picked every day. I added about that much to my ramen at lunchtime today but there was still a lot leftover. So into the freezer the rest of them go! Each bean got lovingly rinsed, trimmed, dried, and gently shoved into a quart size freezer bag. No blanching, no muss, no fuss.

Yellow bean on the vine.

All clean!

Bagged up, labeled, and ready for the freezer.

Before I got too busy cleaning beans, I put a pot of water onto the stove to boil. Once I had the beans all bagged up, it was ready for blanching squash. Summer squash takes a little more prep before freezing. I had two types of squash to put up - the patisson strie melange and the yellow zucchini. I cut the patisson into chunks and blanched them for five minutes. I cut the zucchini into thin wedges so they only got three minutes. After their hot baths, they all dried a little on kitchen towels. Then I spread them all out on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper and put them into the freezer. Freezing them this way makes it so they stay loose pieces once frozen. I can take out just the amount I want for a meal and leave the rest frozen if I want. I can also add more to the bags later down the line if/when we get overwhelmed with fresh squash again. After a couple hours, I was able to break them up into individual frozen chunks, put them into freezer bags, and returned them to cold storage.

Two varieties of blanched summer squash ready to freeze.

Bagged, labeled, and back into the freezer.

I'm still happily enjoying my cucumber-a-day habit, but that's not enough to go through them all before they start to turn on us. So, I did a couple of things with our abundance of cukes - I made a creamy cucumber soup for dinner this evening and I made some freezer pickles.

This is starting to get out of hand!

Many of our cucumbers have grown into Mobies (what we call the cucumbers that have managed to grow whale sized - Moby Dills!). Fortunately, we've had nice consistent rain this season, so none have turned bitter even as they grew humongous. They are all actually still quite sweet and tasty and made a wonderful soup. I took the four largest, peeled them (which I normally don't do but I'm following a recipe here), scooped out the seeds, diced them up, and put them in a pot with onions, garlic, a little lemon juice, vegetable broth, salt, pepper, and a dash of cayenne. Ten minutes of simmering later, I added some fresh parsley and whirled it all together in the blender. Into the fridge it went to cool. Just before serving, I whisked in some Greek yogurt to make a creamy, slightly spicy, cucumber soup. So good!

It might look like apples, but those are cucumbers!

This is such a delightful, flavorful, cool soup!

And finally, I used six more cucumbers to make quick freezer pickles. I sliced them up, added garlic and dill from our garden and a few red pepper flakes, and poured on a brine. They'll sit for about a week in the freezer before we can try them, but I've made this recipe before and they turned out well. That leaves seven cucumbers untouched, but that seems more manageable.

I love a simple freezer pickle!

Sleep tight proto-pickles. I'll see you in a week!

All of that took a couple of hours and now we have plenty of space in the refrigerator for more fresh produce. I expect it will start to fill up again very soon!

End of August Accounting

It’s been a good gardening season. Things have gone so well, in fact, that we plugged in the extra freezer in the basement to keep the surplus produce. 

One evening's produce gathering

 The zucchini and yellow squash produced very well. That shouldn’t be a surprise. The over-abundance of zucchini has become a well-worn cliché but we haven’t really had much luck with summer squash over the last couple of years. Last year the yellow squash did not produce at all and we only got a few zucchinis. This year, so far, we’ve picked 14 yellow squash and 21 zucchinis.

Squash plants in early July

Yellow squash and zucchini

 A couple weeks ago I realized the squash had a pretty bad infestation of squash vine borers. The poor plants looked terrible but they were and are still producing fruit.

Squash vine borer damage

We have eaten a lot of squash so far and given some away but we had way more than could be eaten fresh. So, into the freezer they went. I diced up the squashes, blanched them in boiling water for 3 minutes, dunked them in ice water, drained them, and then spread them out on towel-lined cookie sheets. After giving the squash pieces some time to dry, I removed the towels and put the sheets in the freezer. The next day, I broke up the pieces of frozen squash with a wooden spoon and put them in quart size zipper-top freezer bags. There are now six full bags in the freezer and a half dozen squash still in the fridge.

Frozen zucchini ready to be bagged

I made a double batch of zucchini muffins for the freezer too.

The green beans are not doing as well as they did last year but I’ve still manage to put away a quart size freezer bag full of them. The chard, on the other hand, has been doing very well since I managed to head off the leaf borers. I’ve put three full quart bags away in the freezer so far.

So much lovely, leafy goodness!

The cucumbers have also been very productive. They are sneaky, however. I’ll look at a cucumber and decide it’s slightly on the small size and decide to wait a day or two before picking it. A day or two later, it’s gotten huge! Fortunately, these cucumbers, no matter what the size, make great pickles. I will admit that I’m a lazy pickler. I’m a fan of making small batches whenever it is convenient. I don’t want to heat up the house with the canner or risk getting limp pickles if I screw up the process. So, I make freezer pickles. They are so simple and are delicious. So far this season we’ve picked 37 cucumbers and made 11 ½-pint jars of dill pickles, 7 of sweet pickles, and 5 of bread and butter pickles. I’ll probably be making some more this week as the collection of cucumbers in the fridge are starting to add up again.

Cool as a cucumber and ready to be pickles

Six 1/2-pink jars of dill freezer pickles

We’ve done a little fridge pickling as well. The beets and watermelon radishes are doing fairly well this year. We didn’t plant that many of either. The radishes are great on sandwiches but we worried we wouldn’t go through them quickly enough in their raw form. The solution was fridge pickles. Since we were doing the radishes, I figured we could pickle a few beets as well. We picked just enough for two ½-pint jars of radishes and one of beets. The radishes are crunch and taste good but I will say that they leave a definite funk in the air.

Just a few beets and radishes

Quick fridge pickled beets and radishes

We did do one bit of unplanned preserving as well. Early on when we first moved into this house, my husband built a trellis for wild grapes that were growing behind the garage. Last year, they didn’t do much but this year they produced enough that I thought I’d see if I could make a little jelly. Well, it did turn out to be a little jelly – just a ½-pint jar and a smaller jelly jar – but it turned out really tasty. The tartness of the wild grapes is really wonderful; not at all like the standard store-bought grape jelly. I only had one cup of juice so it took a little mathing to get the pectin measurement right but I’m calling this experiment a success.

Lots of grapevines on the trellis

Bunches of wild grapes

Draining the juice from the cooked grapes

Mmm...jelly!

Putting Up Our Harvest

Years ago, when we lived on the mountain, we had to buy a chest freezer to store all the extra produce from our garden. We have no plans on plugging that freezer in this year but we still have more vegetables from the garden than we can eat fresh. So, here are some of the things we did with the extra veggies.

So many tomatoes!

I intended to make a big batch of cucumber pickles when it wasn’t too hot out. Unfortunately, we had a very dry spell after a very wet spell and that stressed out the plants enough that the cucumbers went bitter. I felt really bad throwing dozens of cucumbers into the compost but they just weren’t edible. I did have a small heap of cucumbers from before the plants turned. There weren’t enough to warrant pulling out the water-bath canner so I made a small batch of freezer pickles instead.

I used the recipe for Freezer Dills in the book Farm Anatomy by Julia Rothman. (This is a great little book, by the way, with lots of basic information and beautiful illustrations.) The recipe is also available on Grit magazine’s website.  I have yet to try them but I’m sure they will be a wonderful treat when the snow starts flying.

Pickles in the freezer

I also decided to pickle turnips. I had not heard of pickled turnips before but the power of Google showed me that they were, indeed, a thing. So, I decided to give them a try. There are a bunch of recipes available online. I ended up using one from Eating Well. I filled two quart jars and look forward to trying them.

Turnip pickles

Back in June I made two jars of pak choi refrigerator pickles. We got into them last week. They are very vinegary (maybe a bit too vinegary for some people’s tastes) but they are really good on hotdogs. The white stem parts are nice and crunchy. I’m definitely going to plant more pak choi next year.

During the winter, I bring soup to work every day for lunch. During the summer, it feels odd to make soup but with all the wonderful fresh vegetables coming out of the garden I had to make a batch of minestrone soup. There are a lot of recipes out there for summer minestrone. The August issue of Cooking Light magazine has a good recipe and it happened into my mailbox just as I was wondering what to do with all my veggies. Homegrown carrots, green onions, tomatoes, squash, green beans and chard all went into my massive soup pot along with cannellini beans and ditalini pasta to make a wonderfully hearty soup. We ate some for dinner and I put the rest (three quart-bags full) into the freezer for later.

Bags of summer minestrone in the freezer

We are currently being inundated with tomatoes. I love fresh tomatoes on sandwiches and salads but it’s beginning to get out of hand. I don’t want to throw out any because I didn’t get to use them in time. So, today I made some tomato juice. I was going for tomato sauce but we didn’t grow sauce tomatoes so it was a bit more watery. No problem. The juice will be a great base for soups and sauces. All I did was cut up the tomatoes and simmer then for about 45 minutes. Then I pushed them through a sieve with a wooden spoon to get rid of the skins and seeds. (This is one time when I really miss my mom’s old food mill.) I then put the juice into zip-top sandwich bags in 1-cup servings. I laid them flat on a cookie sheet and put them in the freezer. Once they are frozen, I will transfer them to a gallon size freezer bag.

From tomatoes...

...to tomato juice ready for the freezer.

And since I was heating up the house to process the tomatoes anyway, I decided to make oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. And yes, I did put two dozen of them up in the freezer so we wouldn’t just eat them all!

Mmm...cookies!

And a cardinal, just because.