There are many ways to store produce. Each type of veggie or fruit has specific storage requirements, and many of them can be stored in different ways. You have to tailor your storage method to the specific fruit or vegetable's needs as well as how you like to eat the foods. Some veggies or fruit can be stored 'fresh' for a relatively long time, while others have a relatively short storage period in the fresh stage. Stone fruit (fruit with pits like cherries, peaches, apricot and plums) and berries have a relatively short shelf life as fresh fruit, but they can be preserved using multiple methods. For example, with peaches you can preserve them by freezing them, canning them as peach halves or slices, pickling them, dehydrating them, or by turning them into jam, jelly, syrup, pie filling, conserve, marmalade or fruit butters (plain or spiced). You can use peaches in some fruit salsa recipes. That gives you a lot of options for the peaches you cannot eat fresh. In a good fruit year, a tree will give you more fruit than you possibly could eat fresh and in a timely manner. While stone fruits don't store well in a root cellar, or at least only for a pretty brief time, apples can be stored for months if your root cellar is cool enough.

We use a combination of canning, freezing, dehydrating, fermentation and root cellaring, so I'll briefly mention each one.

ROOT CELLARING: There are entire books on this subject and you don't have to actually have a root cellar to use root cellaring techniques. Some people use in-ground tornado shelters as root cellars, other use home basements, and others dig storage pits in the ground. As long as you can provide the appropriate air temperature and relative humidity, you can root cellar quite a few veggies, including potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, winter squash and pumpkins, and miscellaneous root crops like carrots, parsnips and turnips. Some of these can be stored on open shelves and others can be stored in containers of sand. Even without any sort of a cellar, many of them can be keep indoors in a cool, dry location where the humidity stays fairly constant. I often keep sweet potatoes in plastic trays in an extra bedroom. The foods our family most commonly store this way are onions, potatoes, sweet potatoes, winter squash, and sometimes carrots or cabbage. Winter squash, in particular, can be stored up to about a year in a cellar type situation.

FREEZING: This works best if you don't have to worry after frequent power outages like the ones often caused by freezing rain or sleet. I am far enough south that we rarely have power outages, so I use freezing as one of my primary storage methods. I have 3 freezers. During the height of the canning/storage season, all 3 will fill up. Then, throughout the year as we empty them out, I consolidate the remaining produce to one freezer and unplug the other two. Right now we are down to 1 and 1/2 freezer full of food. By May, we'll probably be down to one freezer, but then the harvest will start rolling in and I'll start filling up freezers again. With freezing, it is important to use the appropriate methods, of which blanching is one, to ensure food quality. Every year when we harvest onions, I set aside enough to last us about 6 months for fresh eating, then chop or slice the remainder. I put them in 1/2 C. quantities in plastic ziplock bags and put the smaller bags in larger 1 or 2 gallon bags. They are great to use in any recipe you'll be cooking and do not, therefore, require crisp onions. I store the onions for fresh eating in netting tubes in my tornado shelter.

The foods we usually store this way include broccoli, carrots, corn, some of the onions, sugar snap peas, green peas, green snap beans, okra, southern peas (zipper, cream, purplehull pinkeyes, blackeyes, etc.), corn, spinach, some cabbage (in the form of freezer slaw), some melons (you can make melon balls and freeze them, then thaw them and eat them half-thawed so they don't get mushy), summer squash (frozen sliced for use in casseroles, soups or stews or frozen shredded for use in zucchini bread, muffins, cakes and cookies), sweet and hot peppers to be used in cooking after they are thawed, and some fruits like peaches or apricots, which can be frozen and then eaten as plain fruit when half-thawed or which can be used in pies, cobblers, and homemade ice cream.

CANNING: There are many ways to preserve by canning. With some methods you use a boiling water bath and with others you must use a pressure canner. The most important thing is to always use safety-approved recipes and do not change the recipes unless various options are listed. Any cange you make to a canning recipe can alter the density or pH of the finished product and that can lead to the growth of various microorganisms that can be deadly for whoever eats that food.

I do a lot of canning in a good year and not so much in a bad year. The items I most commonly can are tomatoes (as pasta sauce, canned stewed tomatoes, canned whole tomatoes and particularly as salsa), peppers, cucumbers canned as pickles, and jams, jellies, ice cream toppings and syrup. Most the jams and jellies are made from fruit, but I do make quite a lot of Habanero Gold pepper/apricot jelly and jalapeno jelly.

DEHYDRATING: There are different methods you can use to dehydrate food. You can build your own solar dryer from plans found on the internet, you can purchase a stand-alone dehydrator or, if you have a oven that has a convection oven feature, you often can use it to dehydrate food. My stove has a convection oven mode and within that mode, it has a 'dehydrate' mode. I use my oven to dehydrate food all summer long.

You can dry almost anything you raise. I mostly dehydrate tomatoes and peppers. I dehydrate thousands of bite-sized tomatoes in a good year and we eat them in the months where there are no fresh tomatoes from the garden. Dried peppers or garlic can be ground down into pepper flakes, pepper powder and garlic powder. With dehydration, the key is to dry the foods down to a very low moisture level for storage in your pantry. If you don't get them dry enough, mold will form and grow. Or, you can dehydrate them and then store them in the freezer.

Some produce can be allowed to dry on the plant. This includes beans and southern peas. Then all you do is remove them from the hulls and store them in jars or bags.

FERMENTATION: Some foods can be preserved using various methods of fermentation. About the only fermentation I do involves making sauerkraut out of cabbage. Some people also make kim-chi.

LONG-TERM REFRIGERATION: Some veggies will hold a very long time in the refrigerator, including carrots and cabbages. I have kept both in the extra refrigerator in the garage for months with no discernable loss of quality. Leeks can be kept in a refrigerator for several weeks.

There are many ways to store food and you'll learn through experimentation which ones work best for you. Different people like different things. Some people prefer to can their green beans in a pressure canner, while others prefer to freeze them. Different strokes for different folks.

The best guide to food preservation is the website of the National Center for Home Food Preservation. It is the bible of food preservation and you will not find unsafe recipes or recommendations there. Otherwise, there are often good recipes on the websites of companies that make and sell canning supplies and they can be trusted. The Ball Blue Book of Canning is a good basic guide and can be purchased on the canning aisle at places like Wal-Mart for about $10.00.

If this is your first year to raise a garden, I wouldn't worry excessively about how to store the produce,and I wouldn't spend a lot of money on food preservation supplies until I knew I was going to have a surplus to store. Sometimes it takes a few years of gardening experience to raise enough of a produce surplus that you have to worry about long-term storage. You also have to have a pretty large garden to produce large amounts of most produce.

I love filling up our freezers, canning closet and root cellar (tornado shelter) with food from our garden, but it can be very time-consuming. It is better to start small and work your way up to processing ever-enlarging amounts of produce as you gain experience.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: National Center for Home Food Preservation

I second what Dawn said and ESPECIALLY in that last paragraph. Start small ... and work your way up. The people here are SO helpful that you are pretty much guaranteed success with some of your plantings this year which is good...but bad in that you'll want to plow up your whole yard next year and plant 20 varieties of everything you love to eat and then you'll be hard pressed to find time to not only care for everything but preserve it as well. (Voice of experience here talking!!)

We are pretty much on track with the way things go with this forum. January thru April we all plan and plot the garden. After that we start talking first pickings and their flavor/performance. By July we start talking harvest quanities and how we're storing, etc. Just wait until you see the first thread of "What will you plant/do differently next year?" in late August or September!!!

It sucks you in, I tell ya! But it so much fun and rewarding. Be sure to utilize the option of "clippings" that's in the upper right-hand corner of each post to a thread. It will save you tons of research time later.

Dawn as usual has given very good advice. I do things pretty much like she does, except I do less canning and no jelly making. I agree with the "start small" advice. The first year we lived in Oklahoma DH and I went to town and got a chest type freezer. He insisted on buying a 27 cu ft one, the largest available in our town. I looked at that and said, "there's no way I'll ever fill that up," and even after putting a small calf in it it wasn't even half full. And for several YEARS it was never more than 3/4 full. But when it finally went out 40 years later, it was one of three freezers and like Dawn I fill them every year. (None of the current three is that big though.) Many of us who garden also have an extra frig in an unheated outbuilding that we plug in during the warm weather and unplug during the winter. I store fresh produce in it during the summer and freshly ground cornmeal and flour and dried fruit all winter. Pears picked on OCt 19 lasted for two months. DH and I ate a fresh pear every day. ANd now we have dried pears and frozen pears and pear juice. Apples last even longer, as Dawn said. She didn't mention beets, but they last a LONG time in a frig. (I once kept two beets pulled in June in the crisper of a frig for a year just to see if they would last. They were a bit shriveled, but not moldy or rotten. Usually though, I eat them within six months.)

I store a couple hundred lbs of Irish potatoes under a bed. Last year's crop is just now finishing up. I also store the sweet potatoes under a bed. We still have plenty of them because we don't eat many until the Irish are gone.

ANd neither Dawn or Paula mentioned it, but I believe they, like me, give away a lot of produce. I have 4 grandaughters who love "trees" (broccoli) and "Papa's corn." (Kandy Korn.)

Another way to "store" produce is alive in a cold frame. Right now I still have lettuce and spinach in the garden in a small frame. Only a few nights have gotten cold enough that I have needed to throw a quilt over the top of it. And the Arugula in the garden has had no protection and I am still picking leaves off it for salad. Leeks and perrenial onions are still out there too. I haven't dug any Jerusalem Artichokes this year, but will soon. If the gophers don't find them, they stay crisp and fresh right where they are all winter.

Good luck and come back and let us know how you do.

Tree4ok, welcome to the forum! I think you already got most of the best advice already. But I'll chip in and mention something kind of nice. We planted a lot of Irish potatoes in 2010 and due to the heat, drought & weeds I only harvested part of them. I thought they had flopped. Well, in working out there recently, I struck "the mother lode" of potatoes! And they're still good! So, some things can stay in the ground, at least for a while.

Parsnips and Jerusalem artichokes are two other crops which do well, "stored" in the ground. I dig them as I need them.

We do a lot of canning, as well as freezing. In the last couple of years we've even gotten into canning meat; and it works well.

George
Tahlequah, OK

oh yeh...."give-aways". Check back in here and I'm sure Dawn can give you the best advice on how to seek out unlocked cars in town so you can drop off surplus bags of summer squash! I took notes.

(please know that I'm really passing this along in jest!!!)

Paula

As Paula noted, I have lots of creative advice on how to get rid of surplus produce. It is harder to give away fresh produce, especially zucchini, in the summer than it used to be, because local residents wised up and started locking their car doors during the height of the zucchini harvest season.

However, you still can 'recycle' Wal-Mart bags by filling them with surplus fresh produce and leaving the bags (anonymously, of course) on the front porch of your family members, friends and even strangers.

One of our neighbors found a unique way to give away surplus squash and peppers last year....she brought them to the local volunteer fire station where we were having a garage sale fundraiser and suggested we give them away to customers as a freebie, which we did. If I'd been smarter, I would have run home and picked up a bunch of onions to give away in the same manner.

On a more serious note, some food banks accept fresh produce, but it is always best to check with them in advance. Some smaller food banks don't have enough refrigerated storage for produce so they cannot accept it unless you are bringing it to them on the same day they are distributing bags or boxes of food. That is especially true if your local food bank is small (like ours) and does regular distribution on a specific week day, but emergency distribution any day.

Also, I have found that many elderly folks who used to have big gardens but gave up gardening as their health began to fail really appreciate a bag of fresh-from-the-garden produce.

Part of the joy of raising healthy, home-grown fruits, veggies, herbs and flowers is that you can share them with others, especially when you're too busy at a time to be doing a lot of food preservation.

Thank you all for your helpful advice and being so generous with your hard earned knowledge! I hope to report back with a good harvest and hopefully some pictures! :) By chance, does anyone in this forum have a potager?

Some of us have flowers in our garden and some have veggies in the flower bed. Does that count? I think it may be Oklahoma Redneck gardening instead of a potager. LOL

My garden started out as a potager in 1997 even before we built our house on this land, but then it grew and grew and grew, and now it is more of a farm than a potager. : )

I kind of like Carol's description of an Oklahoma Redneck Garden, but the way I have always thought of mine is as a "Southern Heirloom Garden" because it includes passalong plants that I remember from my childhood like cannas, four o'clocks and hollyhocks. With some crops, I mix together flowers, herbs and veggies in the same beds, and it looks nice and produces well, but it definitely is less formal in nature than the typical potager garden. It also doesn't have a cute little fence like most potagers...it has a prison-like fence to keep out the deer.

We have a complicated garden that slopes downward from west to east and from south to north, and there are big challenges with that in terms of water runoff, soil drainage, etc., so there are times when appearance takes a back seat to more practical matters.

I am in the middle of a garden re-design/re-build and hope that when I am done, the new layout will be an improvement over the old one. It isn't that I don't like the old design, but it grew haphazardly as I kept moving the fence outward and enlarging the garden every year for several years. I want to fix the more haphazard appearance of the newer areas while also addressing drainage issues too.

Dawn