I think it is just a matter of personal preference.

My mom liked canned green beans. My grandmother liked them better frozen, so I grew up eating both kinds. My personal preference is frozen green beans, and that preference is shared by my DH and DS. I freeze them an hour or two after picking them and then when we cook them, they taste as good to me as fresh ones although the texture isn't exactly the same.

With tomatoes, I don't usually freeze, can or even dehydrate a single variety at one time. All my batches of tomatoes are mixed batches, so the overall flavor is a blend of many varieties.

With many canning batches, it takes many pounds of tomatoes for one canning batch so unless you have a lot of plants of one variety and they all have ripe tomatoes at once, you won't necessarily have the 15 or 20 lbs. of a single variety as required to make a batch of tomato sauce or stewed tomatoes. For example, to make one batch of stewed tomatoes (which will give you about 3 quarts or 7 pints of finished product), you need 4 quarts of peeled, cored, chopped tomatoes, or about 24 large tomatoes.

The tomatoes that taste closest to their fresh-from-the-garden flavor are the ones I dehydrate, store in freezer bags in the freezer and then rehydrate by soaking in warm water for a few minutes before eating them. Although their texture isn't the same as fresh tomatoes, their flavor is and they are so good that I can hardly stand it. Having them to eat all winter long is such a treat. Frozen tomatoes that are turned into sauce or salsa after thawing are the next closest, and canned ones come in last. About the only tomatoes I can are those turned into salsa....and I made about 115 or 120 jars of salsa in 2010 because we eat a lot, give a lot away as holiday gifts and contribute quite a few jars to local fundraisers for volunteer fire departments and other types of charity fundraisers. For pasta sauce, I'd just as soon run the tomatoes through my tomato strainer and then freeze them in zip lock bags and thaw them as needed when I want to use them to make pasta sauce, pizza sauce, chili or a tomato-based soup or stew.

We have three freezers---four if you count the freezer compartment of the refrigerator in our kitchen---and I consider them essential. Of course we do have a lot of money tied up in them, but we can unplug one once it is emptied out and not use it again until the next big harvest season, and I completely fill them up most years. Buying a freezer is a long-term commitment, but it pays off. I put hundreds of pounds of organically-grown, home-grown produce into the freezers every year.

I'll use sugar snap peas as a quick example. We harvested 35 lbs. 9 oz. of them last spring. We probably ate 5 or 10 lbs. fresh and froze the rest. At the time, fresh organic sugar snap peas were going for prices ranging from $3.48 to about $3.78 a pound at our local stores IF you could even find organically grown ones. Would I have gone to the store and purchased 35.5 lbs at that price? No, never. Thanks to the bountiful harvest, though, we had all we could eat fresh and then froze enough to last us for months. Clearly, for us, the freezer was a good investment.

It is the same thing with fresh fruit. When fresh fruit is in season, I both can and freeze a lot of it. That allows us to have our own organically-grown fruit year-round. I also watch for good deals on fruit in the stores or farmer's markets and buy and process a lot of it when the supply is high and prices are low. If we want a peach cobbler, we thaw out a quart of frozen peach slices put up in the freezer last summer and make it the way we like it....where we can control how much sugar is or isn't added to the fruit and we don't have to use any additives or preservatives other than the citric acid added at freezing time to keep the peaches from browning.

Freezing or canning your own allows you to "skip" most of the preservatives, artificial flavorings or dyes, etc. that are added to many canned veggies and fruits. It gives you a lot more control over the quality and purity of your food. That's why I like doing it.

In a good year, a packet or two of corn seed will give me a couple of hundred ears at least, and sometimes more, to freeze or can. Granted, there are times you will find ears of corn 5 for $1.00 or 10 for $1.00 in a local store, but that corn wasn't just picked that very day like mine in the garden is, and likely it wasn't raised organically.

In every case, I have found the flavor of home-raised veggies to be superior to store-bought no matter how I process them....whether we eat them fresh or if we can, freeze or dehydrate them first and eat them later. Potatoes are a case in point. You may wonder how much difference there is in the flavor or a fresh potato from the garden versus one from the grocery store, and the answer is that there's a huge difference. Since potatoes hold a long time in commercial cold storage, by the time you buy them at the store, they can be months old. Even the potatoes we store for months in the root cellar will taste better and fresher than those purchased from the store. It is the same way with onions and even with garlic.

When we go down to the metroplex and shop at Whole Foods or Central Market, my DH is always grinning ear to ear. Why? Because when he sees what they charge for the same organically-grown produce we have at home, he realizes how the garden does pay off big time after all. Or, he'll look at a little half-pint jar of jelly very similar to what I make at home and that jelly will be between $4 and $7 a jar, and he thinks of the hundreds of jars at home in the jelly closet. He's a thrifty Yankee so it took a few years to convince him that growing and preserving our own food was worthwhile, but once he could see how much similar organic food cost, he was sold on the idea.

Eggs are another home-grown food we love. There's nothing in the store that compares to fresh-from-the-henhouse eggs from free-range chickens who are allowed to eat not only hen-scratch but also bugs and green plants. Their color and flavor are vibrant and yummy compared to the pale-yellow grocery store eggs.

Clearly, for us, home-raised and home-preserved is preferred. However, it does take a tremendous amount of time and effort to put up a lot of food. Last year when the fruit trees produced 350 lbs. of fruit over about a 3-week-period I thought I would go crazy trying to process all of it in a timely manner....but I got it done and Tim even helped on the days he wasn't at work. Our summertime schedules are built around getting the havest brought in and processed, but I wouldn't have it any other way.

Dawn

Dawn you amaze me.

Helen,

I can't help myself. I like to eat, and I prefer healthy, organic food, so growing it ourselves is the best solution.

When we lived in Fort Worth, we were shade-challenged and had a tiny garden in one or two small areas that got about 6 hours of sun a day.

When we moved here, I intended to have a bigger garden, but never dreamed it would become the big old thing it is today. I spent a lot of time and effort on ornamentals the first first few years here, while gradually enlarging the veggie garden. Now the ornamentals get a lot less attention and the veggies and fruits get a lot more.

I never intended to turn into a canning, dehydrating and freezing maniac either, but once all the fruit and veggies were producing heavily, I had to figure out what to do with all of it.

Now, the more we raise and process ourselves, the happier we are. Also, the more tired we are. If I wasn't gardening and canning 8 or 9 months out of the year, I don't know how I'd spend my time anyway, but probably I'd waste a lot of it.

Dawn

We prefer frozen for many things but I'm the anti-Dawn when it comes to green beans and tomatoes. I much prefer canned green beans to frozen. I can tolerate frozen but I just don't enjoy them very much. Of course, fresh is the best, no contest. Tomatoes, when I can't have fresh (and grocery store fresh doesn't count!), I prefer canned as well.

For most everything else, such as herbs, peas, corn, etc, frozen wins hands down. We have a HUGE deep freeze, plus another smaller deep freeze, in addition to the fridge-top freezer. Since we usually raise quite a bit of our own meat as well, our freezers are never empty and have paid for themselves many, many times over. I do believe we'll need to buy yet another freezer or two this year as we're stepping up both our meat chicken and freezable veggie production. They're not cheap but they pay themselves off very quickly.

Dehydrating is great for many herbs, summer squash, and a number of other things. I find the taste is usually altered quite a bit but still just as good -- just in a different way. I've only played with dehydrating tomatoes a little bit and didn't care much for them. But, after Dawn's teasing us all winter long about her dried cherry tomatoes, I'm determined to give them another, more serious try!

Diane

Before I had a freezer, I canned green beans, corn and fall greens, but quit after we got the freezer. I think the trick to eating frozen green beans is to cook them without any added water. Just thaw them in a cast iron skillet, add a dollop of butter, a bit of garlic pdr, salt and pepper--or Adobo seasoning--and cook over low heat. There will be some water thaw out of the beans. When it is gone, the beans will brown just a bit in the butter. My kids used to call these "fried green beans." We love them.

I don't make jams or jellies. I come from a family of diabetics so limit sugar, but do freeze a lot of fruit, both my own and some bought in season.

I freeze herbs, cilantro, dill, parsley. Drying wipes out the flavor, IMHO.

The only things I can are pickles, sauerkraut, and applesauce. I dill pickle okra, green beans and jalapenos, but not cucs. I buy them.

I dry fruit--apples, pears, peaches--and a few veggies. Okra dries well and flavors soup. I have tried drying tomatoes but must have stored them wrong as the weevils got into them.

I too have 3 chest freezers. We put a whole grassfed calf into one every year, about 50 chickens into another one and lots of veggies and fruits into the third.

I freeze spinach/lambsquarter mix, asparagus, broccoli, cabbage, sugar snaps, green beans, okra, corn, tomatoes, crowder peas, beet/carrot/apple juice, strawberries, blueberries, cherries, peaches, apples, pears, elderberries.

We also prefer to drink raw milk, so DD buys us four gallons at a time and brings it to us--along with cheese and cream--and we empty a pint out of each jug before we put it into the freezer.

A freezer is also handy to take advantage of specials at the store. I was raised on Puget Sound so love Salmon. When daughter or brother run across a sale on wildcaught Salmon, they buy and we all stock up.

I was a newlywed when DH and I bought our first freezer. It was a HUGE 28 cubic ft chest. I can remember so clearly looking at it and saying, "I'll never fill that up. Let's get a smaller one." When it went out after 36 years, I couldn't replace it with one that size. Twentytwo cubic foot was the biggest one I could find locally. That original chest now stands upright in a corner of the garden as a storage cabinet. The one I added to it 15 years or so later--bought used--has also been replaced and is also an outdoor storage cabinet.

Dawn and Dorothy,
Very nice post... tons of the knowledge in your posts.

I love to keep chicken and ducks in our backyard as a pets. But i a not sure whether City of Norman will allow? Where get such information and permit issues?

Dorothy, RAW MILK! very nice. Where we can buy raw milk? We consume lot of whole milk, I always buy our diary supply from the Braum's but never knew that we also buy raw milk.

Chandra, There is a raw milk dairy in Claremore, only 15 miles from my daughter's house. I don't know if there are other raw milk dairies in the state or not. Braum's is the next best, because no growth hormone. I use Braum's milk to make yogurt and when I run out of raw milk.

Concerning ducks as pets. Have you ever raised them? We did years ago and their droppings are more liquid and smellier than chicken droppings, so neighbors might complain.

Chandra, Roosters are loud and not normally good pets. Hens lay eggs, so what would you do with those? Well maybe you could barter with the neighbors for some help in the much bigger garden. LOL