Storing the Harvest: Best Ways To Preserve Food

Imagine this, you have a harvest of a bumper crop of certain fruits and vegetables in your homestead garden or someone has shared their bumper crop or you’ve made a trip to the local farmer’s market or fruit stand. The question becomes, how to preserve all that food?

Here are some of the best ideas for storing the harvest. Consider these ways you can preserve your fruits and veggies for use later in the year.

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Dehydrating Food

Storing the Harvest: Best Ways To Preserve Your Fruits and Veggies

This is probably one of the first methods to store food for future use. Consider Indigenous people who used fruits, nuts and meat to create pemmican, a dried bar that provided much needed nutrients in the winter when hunting was scarce. You’ve probably also seen or eaten beef jerky. You can dehydrate fruits and vegetables from your garden that can be added to soup in the colder months.

You can preserve food by drying in a number of ways:

Sun Drying
Solar Drying
Oven Drying
Dehydrator Drying

To effectively dry food it is necessary to have the right combination of low humidity, air current and warm temperatures.

1. Sun Drying

Sun drying is probably one of the oldest ways to preserve food but it depends on the temperature, weather and relative humidity. If you plan to use this method to dry vegetables, it is imperative to do so when there will be 3-5 days of warm temperatures and sunshine. While this is method is free, it takes so much longer.

2. Solar Drying

Solar drying is similar to sun drying but it is also different. Solar drying in order to preserve food is accomplished by creating a box with a glass lid, solar oven or placing the vegetables in the car window. You’ll have better luck if you have a long stretch of sunny days, but you must leave the windows open to allow for air circulation. This method is quicker than sun drying, but there is still a better way.

To learn more about solar ovens, how they work, what to use them for and what are some of the best kinds, I’ve provided a video review of various solar ovens used by full-time RVers.

3. Oven Drying

Oven drying is an option you may only want to consider for small-scale drying of 4 to 6 pounds of vegetables at a time. However, this method is not free as the oven will have to remain on the entire time the vegetables are drying. This method will take longer than a dehydrator and you have to rotate the trays to ensure even drying. You also may have difficulty maintaining the necessary 140 degrees in your oven or won’t have the proper air circulation.

4. Dehydrator Drying

Dehydrator drying is probably the best way to dry fruits and vegetables. Most dehydrators allow you to expand the number of trays; they are sturdy, safe and much quicker than any other method. They provide a constant heat source, you can set the temperature, and the fan allows for even air circulation. Most you can get a fruit leather tray as well.

I personally like to use my Excalibur food dehydrator but I started out with a smaller, less expensive Nesco one that worked quite well.

If you’re considering drying or dehydrating the bounty from your garden, consider these four different ways. Some of the methods are free but they will require a good amount of time. Other methods will cost money but they are much more effective and the results are predictable. The choice of which method you use is entirely up to you.

Canning to Preserve the Garden Harvest

Canning is almost as old as dehydrating. Nearly everything can be canned if done properly. Canning of most vegetables will require the use of a pressure cooker/canner. If you haven’t ever canned vegetables, you may want to get help from someone who has the experience to make sure you have canning success.

Canning fruit is much easier. They do require a water bath canner but it doesn’t have to be done in a pressure cooker. Technically, tomatoes are a fruit, so water bath canning is the best method if you want to can whole tomatoes for soups or chili, crushed tomatoes, spaghetti sauce or salsa. You might be surprised how much money you can save by using home-canned sauces.

Pickling

If you have more cucumbers than you’ll be able to eat, consider making homemade pickles. There is nothing quite like them. You will also need onions, sea salt and vinegar. Most people think of cucumbers when they hear “pickle” but the fact is you can pickle many different types of fruits and vegetables in a similar manner.

Peppers, apples, pears and relishes are also prepared in much the same way. Some of our favourite vegetables to pickle are asparagus, green beans, cabbage (which turns into sauerkraut) and beets! Pickling can be done in a few different ways as well. You can pickle and then can the food or you can lactose-ferment your pickles in crocks or jars

Freezing

There is a lot to be said about filling your freezer with produce from your garden. It is great to be able to open the doors to the freezer and seeing all that food you’ve preserved. Corn on the cob, carrots, broccoli and other foods that aren’t great to preserve in other ways. It isn’t advisable to try to freeze fresh lettuce or potatoes; you probably wouldn’t want to eat them and there are other better ways to preserve them.

Freezing is one of the easiest ways to store the harvest but remember that you may lose the food in your freezer if the power goes out.

Our family favorite foods to freeze (boy, try and say that 5 times fast!) include blueberries, grapes, plums, and a fantastic roasted tomato recipe which I discovered in the book The Homemade Pantry (which also has fabulous recipes for canned and frozen foods).

Root cellar

It used to be common for families to have a root cellar to store their fruits and vegetables like potatoes, carrots and apples. This isn’t quite as usual these days, but the concept still has merit. Check with your local extension agency or land surveyor to see if it would be possible to create a root cellar on your property.

We personally haven’t had a lot of experience with root cellaring but it is certainly one method of food preservation that I hope to work on in the future. I have read and recommend a couple resources on building a root cellar including:

Building a Homestead Root Cellar e-book from the Homestead-Honey website. This one is great because it is under $10 and it is an instant download packed with super useful information.
Root Cellaring: Natural Cold Storage of Fruits & Vegetables

And here is a video tour of one of my favorite homestead blogs and channels The Elliott Homestead Root Cellar Tour:

Hope you have enjoyed this round-up of the best way of preserving your fruit and veggie harvest from your homestead!

Storing the Harvest: Best Ways To Preserve Food