preserving the garden

As much as fresh garden veggies rock, having garden veggies throughout the year that you raised rocks more. And it keeps you from having to buy more veggies, which also rocks. This isn't a complete pictoral essay, but it's close enough. We've diversified a little in our preservation techniques, and so far, that has proven successful in terms of less wasted (ie, rotting) vegetables.

Here is a portion of my shredded zucchini. This is really only about 4 or 5 large zucchinis, but I have about 20 2-cup bags... ready to thaw and make zucchini bread with. I like convenience, and it doesn't get any better than custom-packaged garden veggies!

My corn never does well... I have no idea why. Maybe I plant to few plants? I've tried planting in rows and blocks, and neither seem to do well. Everybody can grow corn... except for me! Here are the first two ears of the year... believe it or not, their appearance is far superior to most of our other ears of corn in past years! These didn't get preserved... but went straight to the plate... yum!

Here's some more of that zucchini. Alpine bought a food dehydrator to try since we had so much zucchini, in the hopes that we would waste less with rot. He should have bought that dehydrator a long time ago... it's the best thing since sliced bread! We sliced the zucchini and gave it a very quick steam blanching...

...then placed the slices on the dehydrator trays, set the temp, and turned it on.

This particular model came with 4 trays, but can be expanded to 30 trays! It does really well... depending on how thick you slice it, the zucchini is fully dried in about 5 to 12 hours.

Alpine has helped me pick smaller cucmbers this year, but we've still got a lot of large ones. So far, I've canned 14 pints of dill pickles with the smaller ones. I need just a handful more to make some bread and butter pickles next. Then I'm going to try some Cinnamon Cucumber Pickles (yeah, yeah... sounds gross, I know!), but I've got cucumbers that will otherwise go to waste!

I've gotten 16 pints out of my beans so far... I'm hoping I can get more out of the garden before they stop producing. At the very least, I'm sure I'll get a few more servings to string up and dry, making "leather britches."

Tomatoes are yet to come... but once they come in, there will be plenty of canning to do!