Preserving the harvest comes to mind when you have more ripe tomatoes than you can eat. Making hay while the sun shines comes to mind because as the crop comes on good and ripe, you can’t wait until the weekend to put by - you must strike while the iron is hot. With a bountiful garden it’s never too early to begin preserving the harvest and canning and freezing are usually the first option. Your choices are not limited to canning and freezing though. Other choices include drying or dehydration, root cellaring, and fermentation.

The pasta vegetables work well with dehydration: tomatoes, peppers, mushrooms, eggplant, onions and basil. Since they do not rehydrate to full crispness, I use the these vegetables in stews, soups, sauces and pasta dishes. The type of dehydrator I prefer has a door that opens like an oven with removable trays which lends itself to drying larger crops more efficiently, as opposed to the round stackable type which has limited capacity.

Dehydration is the only popular method of preserving which retains 100 percent food value. By maintaining a constant temperature range of 80-120 degrees, you will produce a bounty of food with nutrients intact.

Also, your dehydrated items will take up 1/6th the space of canned or frozen goods. My preferred method of storing dried foods is to vacuum seal them in canning jars. Mice love to eat through plastic bags, which necessitates your storing the bags in plastic buckets, thereby requiring a trip to the garage to fetch the goods, which as we all know is so easy to blow off, and before you know it you have 5-year-old dried peppers. Canning jars stored on the shelf are reusable and easily accessible. After removing what you need from a sealed jar, it can then be resealed. (Don’t you just love these common sense solutions.) The value to you in drying your own foodstuffs is immeasurable. You gain nutritive value by doing it yourself and avoid deleterious processes such as food irradiation.

Canning is a good option too. Tomatoes are easy to can because they require the simple waterbath method. If you are particularly ambitious you can sun dry them and place them in olive oil. Though I do it, freezing is my last choice as it requires a lot of space, is subject to freezer burn and must be used in a fairly short amount of time. Canning supplies are seasonal and available at most hardware stores and some larger discount stores. You can pick up instruction materials such as the Ball Blue Book or the Kerr Canning Book at any of these stores as well.

Root cellaring is the first choice for onions. I’ve harvested nearly 30 pounds this year and am presently curing them in baskets inside the house where the humidity is relatively low. Onions are a challenge to cure in humid climes as they need to dry crisp on the outside and the stem needs to twist closed so that it does not become infected with mold. The onions that do not cure properly, will be cut up and dehydrated. The key to root cellaring is to create the appropriate temperature and humidity required by the veggie you wish to store.

In the meantime, on the subject of fermentation Bill Mollison comes to mind. He is one of the founders of the concept of Permaculture (permanent agriculture). Permaculture takes organic gardening into the province where my friend Ishmael resides — away from cultivation and toward no-till gardening while making use of the natural setting and thereby duplicating the hunter-gatherer diet.

Organic farming is based on rotation of crops, growing a different crop on each piece of ground every year. Permaculturists, on the other hand, prefer to grow a diversity of crops on the same piece of land at the same time. Something they call “stacking,” where trees, vines, shrubs, herbs and vegetables grow together just as they do in the forest. However, this method enables a garden to be far more productive than either orchards or annual vegetables gardens on their own, because several crops are being grown on the same spot at the same time. To enlighten yourself further, you might look up a book called “Permaculture in a Nutshell” which tells you in 73 pages what I am attempting in this paragraph.

Many of us know that most food preserving methods actually reduce the amount of nutrition available. In his book The Permaculture Book of Ferment and Human Nutrition, Bill Mollison explains how fermentation prolongs the life of many foods and builds proteins and vitamins into starchy or low-grade foods. Most Western peoples are familiar with yeast breads, sourdough, cheese and beer. But few of us realize how skillfully traditional peoples enhance the flavors in their diet, or make simple carbohydrates more nutritional through fermentation. In other words, we can actually increase available nutritive value of a particular food through a process which requires little energy to produce or maintain.

According to Ferment and Human Nutrition, “As an industry, fermentation and its products may be one of the largest in the world next to motor vehicles (New Scientist, 4 Sept. 1986).” Products range from beer, wine, cheese, soured milk products, bread, other yeast products and antibiotics. Not so well-known are the fermented foods of Asian countries, notably soy sauce, miso and sake. Almost unknown in the West is the fermentation of vegetables, including soybeans and cabbage (tempeh and kim chee, respectively), and the southern African fermentation of grains and porridges. A good part of this world we live in does not have access to electricity or appliances - their food must be stored without refrigeration. If the lights go out at your house, would you be able to provide meals for your family?

See you in the garden!

(Kathleen Lamont is president of the Mountain Chapter of the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association as well as a seasoned speaker on organic gardening practices. She can be reached at garden_girrl@yahoo.com)

 

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