I try to but like you said if you grow a ton of one thing, it's going to go to waste. You only have so much space to preserve it in, (freezer, shelves) I would suggest giving extra produce away to nursing homes, homeless shelters and soup kitchens for feeding the less fortunate. Senior citizens are another one to give to. Preserving garden produce takes a lot of time and money and if you can't eat it all just give it away.

This has been a zucchini year for us too. I'm giving it away, because I don't really like it frozen. But almost everything else we grow gets put up. That's why we grow so much. I don't pressure can anything anymore because we prefer our vegs frozen--broccoli, peas, corn, beans, okra, tomatoes. I do still pickle some things, but I tried annie's salsa last year and went back to buying Pace mild, as the annie's was too hot for our taste and I didn't like the addition of commercial tomato paste. I also have a crock full of cabbage turning into sauerkraut which I will water bath in a couple weeks. I also helped my daughter can a batch of dilly beans. We dug onions, potatoes and garlic and shoved them under a bed.

Part of me wants to preserve EVERYTHING, but reality is, I need a wife to do the cooking and canning, I don't enjoy it much. DH keeps the freezer so full there's little room for produce. So, while I plan to do some canning, I also think learning to live on what's in season might be the best option for me. I need to experiment more with dehydrating. Fermenting is an option, but I still worry about that one, so, maybe save that till you are more comfortable with preserving (though, darn, fermented pickles are good). Growing more things that "store themselves" is another option.

What scares you about canning? Pressure canning? Botulism? Just having trouble getting started? If I can do it, anybody can. I have canned a little bit of everything over the years. Not like Dawn cans, but enough to know I can do it, if I am so inclined. Pickles would a good place to start. You don't even have to can them, refigerator pickles are good. Then try a recipe that is water bath canned. Nothing better than home made bread and butter pickles.

Zucchini is one of those things you give away, or give it to someone with critters to feed. I used to give my bolted greens to a guy with a turtle. It will go hungry now that I have chickens.

I really grow what I want to eat fresh and what will freeze well and that I know I will use later. For instance, in the early spring/late fall I harvest a lot of kale, blanch it, freeze it, and then just let it thaw and cook it up with a little olive oil in a cast iron skillet. Same thing with okra. I dice it up, freeze it in gallon zippies, and then thaw a bag at a time. Green beans are the same, no blanching ever, just freezing in 1 gallon zippies. I gave up on growing much summer squash, and as for winter squash, I will bake a whole bunch at a time in the winter, scoop out the insides, and then freeze them in little discs by filling up small pyrex and placing in the freezer until frozen, and then take out and put in a bag with others. These are great in the summer if I want some winter squash but am unwilling to use the oven all winter long. Blackberries get frozen individually, as do peaches all sliced up, etc... Even extra cucumbers get turned into cucumber sorbet so that if my cucumber plants get killed off by aphids, disease, voles, drought, hail, drowning, etc... I still have something out of em.

Moral of the story, grow what you know you will eat later, and know quick and easy ways to freeze them which will enable you to grab what you want out of freezer and use quickly later!

OK, recipe for cucumber sorbet, please!

cucumber sorbet! Sounds fascinating.

I have yet to have too many of anything besides tomatoes. I know you really can't have too many tomatoes, I just had too many at one time to process. Some of them went into the freezer like they were suppose to. We had some friends in town who were hungry so I gave away many of them.

After my first year with decent harvest of okra, tomatoes and corn, I watched my family gobble down okra faster than I could bread it and freeze it. We like to pop it into oil right out of the freezer and eat it like popcorn. My family also loves corn on the cob, but they are forced to eat corn kernels because I don't have enough room in the freezer for cobbed corn. My family loves green beans, but I've yet to have a harvest. Hopefully, this year will produce and I can gain that experience of cleaning, snapping and storing if there is enough. (I just started more and the rest are starting to flower.) I'd imagine I will freeze the green beans and carrots and peas. I'm giving away the excess squash. I have a friend that really loves squash.

Winter squash keeps so well and the longer you wait, the better it tastes. Well, for pumpkin, anyway.

If you love it you will can, freeze or store it!

So cucumber sorbet. First time I ran into this was in Iceland of all places, it had never occurred to me that one could make sorbet with cucumbers, and boy, it is a treat! I do not have a standard recipe, but here is what I do. I take a bunch of cucumbers, shave off the skin, and then test the ends to make sure they are not bitter. I then feed them into my food processor (I have no idea how big it is, pretty standard size, it is the Hamilton Beach Scovill food processor 712, obtained from grandmother-in-law a decade ago) along with maybe 15 leaves of mint, usually prefrozen, and about 1 cup of sugar, maybe a little less. I blend this to death with the s-shaped blade. Many people want to strain it at this point, remove the seeds. I skip that.

So now you have two options. The first is to use a sorbet maker, and follow the instructions on the machine. I got one from my mother this last year, so now I use it exclusively. If you do not, then the second method is to place it in a bowl in the freezer with a lid on it, then going in and mixing it up every 20 minutes or so until it is the right consistency. Hopefully it will stay that consistency and you can just put it in your favourite container (what you do not eat right away) and save for later in the freezer.

Special comment: If you want real sorbet consistency, you should strain it, and use 2 cups of sugar instead of 1. If you happen to have some cucumbers that you know are NOT bitter, like armenian snake melons, or suyo longs, you can leave the skins on a few to add some more green color to the sorbet.

I basically don't grow the things that are readily available for free (from friends) or for purchase at the farmer's market - okra, zucchini, yellow squash, etc. They aren't expensive typically and most years someone just gives me some! I do grow herbs, shallots, garlic, tomatoes, some beans, and whatever other adventure crop I'm into at the moment. This keeps me from having a glut of something I don't know how to preserve. I did learn to can so I could put up tomatoes (I love to make my own pizza sauce all winter...) and have used that knowledge to can some fruit as well.

We grow what we like to eat, first and foremost, so that we are motivated to eat it later on regardless of how it is preserved. My first preference always is to eat fresh, in season, but the reality is that if you only eat fresh, in-season food, then you may find yourself eating so much food during its relatively brief fresh season (like asparagus, for example) that you get sick of it, but then later on you find yourself craving it out of season. I love aspragus but even I don't want to eat it every day during the couple of months it is producing,so we eat it fresh several days a week and freeze the rest. I try to freeze in the manner that is most productive for cooking later on---for example, cutting the produce into bite sized pieces before freezing it and freezing it in batches that are the right size for a meal. That makes cooking it quick and easy in the off-season. With raw materials that can go into meals, like chopped frozen onions, I freeze in 1/2 or 1 cup amounts that can be used with the recipes from which I prepare meals.

Like Dorothy, our garden is a food-preserver's garden, which is quite different from a fresh-eating only garden, because you do get vast amounts (as planned) of produce in-season and you have to deal with it in a timely manner. Every day begins with harvesting in the early morning hours and I plan that day's meals around what we have, setting aside that amount of produce for fresh eating. The rest gets preseved via canning, freezing, dehydrating or fermenting, or is root cellared (potatoes, onions, etc.). When I plant cabbage, for example, in late winter, I know we are not going to want to eat cabbage daily for a couple of months, so I am careful not to plant too much. The excess harvest always becomes sauerkraut or sometimes freezer slaw or it gets used in a chow chow or relish recipe. This year I fermented four batches, three of cabbage sauerkraut, and the fourth a hot sauerkraut that included hot peppers and carrots. All are through fermenting and canned now and that's a good thing because it is hard to keep our west-facing kitchen cool enough for proper fermentation in July and August.

We do use our preserved food, but that is a very deliberate choice. I wouldn't spend all the time growing and preserving it if we weren't going to use it. I value the time and money invested in the garden too much to waste the harvest. You do have to make a very deliberate decision to plan meals around the food you grow and to take the time to cook them. It is a lot more work to prepare home-cooked meals from scratch versus using convenience foods (like Hamburger Helper or whatever) and fast food, but I try to make the bulk of our meals healthy ones from our garden. First of all, they taste better. Secondly, we know how this food was raised. Third, huge amounts of fossil fuels weren't used to transport the food from our garden to our house and that matters to me. I don't know how long we as a world can keep transporting food an average of 1500 miles from the place where it is grown to the grocery stores where it is sold. To me, growing and eating our own produce is part of our effort to live a more sustainable lifestyle that is not based on burning excessive fossil fuels.

There are gazillions of ways to use fresh food. You can, for example, make sorbet out of almost anything you raise in terms of fruit, or you can make chips---I like kale chips and okra chips. Frozen food can be used in many ways. It is all about how you choose to use your time. I have tons of vegetable cookbooks with creative ways for using produce, so that we don't get stuck in a rut and eat the same old produce cooked the same old way every time. Some of my favorite veggie cookbooks are very old ones from Southern Living magazine, published decades ago when cooking meals from scratch was still considered an important art, not a waste of time.

My time goes into the garden, harvesting the produce, cooking with it, and preserving it. That is the choice I make. I get somewhat amused at gardeners (and I bet we all know people like this) who grow all kinds of food, and take photos of their harvest and post those photos almost daily, but who rarely eat the food they grow. I feel like the 'social media generation' (who often are quite a bit younger than I am) love gardening for a different reason than I do---some of them seem to love it for the joy of growing the food and of photographing it and putting it on their FB pages, but they may not yet have mastered actually using very much of it. I have high hopes that their love of growing it eventually will lead to them actually using it for more than photos. Some young adults who grew up on convenience food and fast food have to make a very concerted effort to learn how to prepare and use the produce they raise because, perhaps, they didn't grow up in a home where meals regularly were prepared from scratch. I feel very lucky because my dad always grew produce and cooked from scratch (and he canned as well), while my mom abhorred the work involved in doing that, so when she cooked, it was often using convenience foods. This led to an amusing conversation with my brother in the early 2000s when he remarked that our mom didn't make very special meals on weekends, but that the weekend meals were great. I looked at him, wondering what planet he was from, and informed him that was because our dad did the bulk of the weekend cooking. I couldn't believe my brother grew up in the same household and never made the connection between the weekday vs. weekend meals and who was doing the cooking. It make me laugh out loud and ask him if he wasn't paying attention to who was in the kitchen in our childhood! He seemed completely baffled as our other siblings and I assure him that it was indeed Dad who was largely producing those great weekend meals. As an adult, I made a deliberate choice to pursue gardening, cooking and canning like my dad did and to largely avoid convenience food cooking. Have grown up eating both kinds of meals, I knew what I preferred and that was what I wanted for our family too.

When I am in the garden, as much as I enjoy being out there, I never lose sight of the fact that my garden is a working garden. I'm not out there to play around, take photos, visit with friends, conduct garden tours, or to sit in a nice chair, sipping a glass of iced tea, and chilling and relaxing. That is not my reality. Particularly, I am out in the garden to work hard quickly (to both beat the heat and avoid the snakes), bring in the harvest and spend the rest of the day using it and preserving it. It is a job, truly, and not a hobby or a past-time, but it is a job I love and a job I enjoy doing overall, though there are occasional days that I hate it because I find myself working from sunrise until well after dark and that gets tiring. So, yes, we use what we grow, but it is because we choose to do that, and because we have developed the self-discipline to use what we grow and to not waste it. If we aren't using it, I yank it out and replace it with something we will use. Right now, with all our tomato preservation needs met/exceeded for this year, I am yanking out tomato plants right and left and replacing them with new crops for fall. It is a somewhat thankless task to be doing this on a hot July day, but I do it because I want to have a great harvest in late summer, autumn and winter. It also leaves some of my tomato-growing friends (who don't preserve their harvest) appalled that I remove plants still capable of producing, but I always keep enough tomato plants for fresh eating, and anything beyond that is a waste of space because I'm through preserving tomatoes for this year.

Because we live in a rural area where families are very tied to the land and many gardens are multi-generational, where the grandparents, parents and grandkids (and sometimes great-grandparents and great-grandkids) all eat from the garden and help preserve the food from it, I had lots of encouragement and support from some of those multigeneration garden families in our neighborhood when I first started growing/preserving our food here. Mostly, though, they just served as an inspiration for me---I wanted to grow enough food to put up huge harvests like they did. As time went on and our garden produced all we could use and preserve, I noticed that these same multigenerational family gardens all hit the same point that mine did---the production level reached a point where nobody wanted to can another tomato. It became amusing as one friend or another would call and ask if we wanted or needed any more tomatoes (or okra or whatever) because they were through with their canning for the year and their plants still were producing. Many of them, like me, were growing 100-200 tomato plants in spring to meet their fresh eating and preservation needs. It made me realize we all were just alike---growing more than we can eat even though we preserve a great deal of it.

To live this sort of edible gardening lifestyle is a deliberate choice. If you like gardening, but don't like using or preserving the produce, then why not just switch over to more ornamental gardening and less edible gardening? Our garden is multipurpose, providing not only fresh and preserved fruits, veggies and herbs, but also flowers for cut flower bouquets and pumpkins, gourds, amaranth and other ornamental decorative items for fall porch displays or table displays. If I don't fill up a lot of our growing space with flowers and only use it all for edibles, I'd never sleep because I'd be too busy preserving food. There's always room to grow some ornamental/decorative items or to grow compost crops to feed the compost pile or to grow cover crops to hold the soil When you are preserving food, why not use it later on? It is so wasteful to grow it and preserve it but then not to use it.

I am happy every single time that we walk through a grocery store and aren't buying food that I have a home---whether that food is fresh and sitting on the kitchen counter or in the fridge, or if it is frozen, dehydrated, fermented, canned, etc. I love breezing through the produce section and only buying, let's say, lettuce, bananas, apples and grapes in summer or cranberries in fall or whatever. I love skipping the frozen food section (except to buy waffles and ice cream) because our own home-grown food fills the freezer.

There's a part of me that gets very tired of the summer workload, but not tired enough to stop doing it. Every time there is news of yet another food-induced illness involving salonella, e. coli, etc. on produce, I am grateful we raise our own and don't have to risk bringing home some disease on grocery-store produce. I don't even like buying lettuce in summer, but Tim must have his salad, so we buy it and then we just have to hope we aren't buying contaminated produce. I'm happier fall through spring when we have our own lettuce and salad greens.

Many people go to the grocery store and buy food and plan their meals around that purchased food and there's nothing wrong with that, but we are exactly the opposite when we go to the store. We already have planned our meals based around the food we have, whether fresh or preserved, and we just buy whatever we might need to make those meals complete. That's our preference, always. When we eat something like a purchased pizza, I still always joke with my family that "I grew this on the pizza tree out back" and we laugh. I do can pizza sauce and we do make homemade pizzas too, but there is room in everyone's life for a little fast food or convenience food as well.

Dawn

Dawn - I do eat local as much as possible. Like you I worry about how all the transportation of food puts stress on not only the environment, but how long they sat on the shelf and rotted before they got to us? It's scary business. It is one of the reasons I started gardening. That and the price of stuff in the stores these days. Yikes...I started gardening after I paid 4 bucks for two tomatoes that didn't taste all that great.

Pickles don't have to be canned? How long to they last in the refrigerator?

Dilly beans sound good..I am going to have to look into that...

I think most of my problem is education. I know how to cook veggies so preparing is not an issue. It is the education around preserving. This year I have frozen a lot, but I do worry about what may happen if the freezer goes out. Weird fears like that keep me from trying. As well as canning. I am scared of killing us both due to botulism LOL!

I think what I grow may be an issue as well. Like this year I grew black eyed peas. We don't eat black eyed peas. I wanted something to grow in the heat for the act of growing. I am going to take them to work and give them away. But that space could be used to grow something we would use.

I need to make better decisions with this! :)

I suggest you grow ANY cow pea other than black eyed. They taste better. You can pick the pods when about 4" long and eat them like green beans. The yard long asian beans are a variety of cow pea. Pink eye purple hull is maybe the most popular alternative to black eyed.

Where are you located? Johnny of Vision farms does occasional canning classes. I would check local cummunity colleges or extension services for classes, too.

As long as you follow the latest recipes you will be safe. Use the latest Ball book or this site NCHFP. These recipes have been tested and as long as you don't change proportions they are safe. You might follow the harvest forum here on Houzz. You will learn a lot just reading through the posts. I learned that my pickle relish needed the extra liquid I ended up with for propper canning.

Refigerator pickles usually tell you in the recipe how long they will last. If there is lots of vinegar in the recipe it's a pretty long time.

Cucumber pickles are probably the easiest way to get started canning and get some confidence.

The only pickles I make that don't require canning are some specific fermented pickle recipes where the recipe itself will tell you how long they can safely last in the refrigerator, and that is only a few select recipes. Most of the fermented pickles I've made have required canning after fermenting. One of the two sauerkraut recipes I used requires canning after fermentation is complete but the other one specified refrigeration only, and for only two months. Oh, and freezer pickles do not require canning. I don't make refrigerator pickles any more, but there still are some safe recipes out there. However, with one specific recipe for refrigerator pickles, the NCHFP found listeria developed in the pickles in just a few days, so you must be sure you're using a safe recipe.

Don't be scared of canning. As long as you follow all the rules, there is no reason to be afraid. Start with simple boiling water bath canning and work your way up. (I did the opposite---started with pressure canning and later on I started BWB canning, which probably wasn't the easiest way to do it, but it worked. I now can preserve food either way.) You can take a canning course to educate yourself and to build your confidence. As long as you followed directions correctly and to a T, botulism should not be an issue. THe NCHFP offers tutorials, recipes and instructional videos:

The fear of a freezer going out is not an unrealistic fear, but there are things you can do: 1) Put a freezer alarm on the freezer to alert you if power fails. This allows you to formulate a plan to save your food if the power outage is prolonged. 2) If the power goes out, refrain from opening freezer door for as long as possible, if possible, so it will retain the cold it has. 3) Save milk jugs or vinegar bottles and fill them about 80% to 90% full of water, freeze them and leave them in the freezer. They'll help the freezer stay cold longer if the power goes out. 4) If you have a generator, you can plug your freezer into it. 5) You can purchase dry ice and use it to help the freezer maintain a cold temperature during a power outage.

I know that power outages are more common in some places than in others. At our place they are exceptionally rare. We've lived in Oklahoma since 1999 and our power almost never goes out. I think the longest it ever has been out has been for slightly under 2 hours. Our power probably doesn't go out for more than 1-5 minutes any more than once a year, and not at all in other years.

I don't eat blackeyed peas either, but I do love pink eye purple hull peas, lady, cream, crowder and zipper peas.

I agree with Amy that cucumber pickling recipes are a great way to start, and so are simple jelly recipes that use commercial pectin.

Natl Center for Home Food Preservation VIdeos

The Aldi's ad for next week has a small dehydrater for $20 if anyone wants to play with it without a big investment.

Tx Amy!

There are some great videos like dehydrate2store

She is very clean and follows the guidelines. And she is intense about dehydrating