I do not know why the question was asked. But.....If it is going to save me about 100 bucks off my 350 buck winter bill it will give me more money to buy more plants and pay the water bill that I have use to keep them watered. LOL!!!! But from Al's response, although I did not understand it, I might still be able to save on my food bill if I stand close enough to my plants at the proper time I can get some water, glucose, and fat (well maybe I will skip the fat) I have enough of that on my butt. I am amazed of the knowledge on the Houseplant forum.

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

Hello...to put pix on here open a free Photobucket.com account, upload your pics to the site from wherever you store them on your PC using their upload facility, copy and paste the 3rd line of info (the HTML tag) that appears under the uploaded pic when you move the cursor over it into the message box on GW, click on the preview facility to check all is ok. Hope this helps! Interesting question BTW, hope someone responds. Gill.

Yes and no. It only works with fresh picked produce, not something pick and then stored improperly or bad growing conditions. It won't 'save' something like your strawberries already starting to go off and soft. Those bruised soft spots in berries are best just rinsed, maybe in a bit of lemon in the water, or citric acid, then frozen immediately. Pick through your berries and use the best unblemished ones fresh. Often market growers that only sell once a week might just be picking a few days before selling and not storing them properly. Or THEY should be soaking, and drying, for a longer shelf life. Maybe doing their own trial and error research for what works best for them and their customers. Might be different every year. Written articles like that get running around the web in small translations without the full study. Difficult to apply it so black and white, 5min, 30 seconds, etc. Why were they testing and for whom? The big farm suppliers that grow varieties for travel instead of flavor? It mentions they have been testing for years but says they are still unsure why and still in study. I just think with so many varieties of each fruit or vegetable...different growing conditions or just a bad year for what variety was chosen, has more affect on your shelf life. And when it was picked and how it was stored before selling. Having grown hundreds of edibles over 20yrs of gardening, it is still a guessing game every year on methods of storage. Last year i could only harvest raspberries in the evenings just before sunset and after very hot days. The berries were hot, very hot when picked but also dry. Right into the fridge they lasted a week easy. Only rinsed just before eating. If i picked on a weekend early morning they did not last as long. Probably too much moisture. Damp foggy mornings. Same with tender salad greens. Picked late in the day hot, rinsed hot water...(no choice as the garden water is warm/hot). Spun dry in a cotton pillow case, looking sad and limp. Into the fridge still in the pillow case....lasted two weeks fresh. Never thought that would work. It worked last year. It was picked naturally warm, not forced 'warm'. I also came across the article a while ago and just made a mental note to try different methods rather than rely on what i had always read. For my climate, watering early in the day while still damp from misty fog and picking later in the day extends shelf life. Local, fresh, and in season for your area always has the best flavor but is sometimes picked very ripe. Or over-ripe. One of my local farm stands does just that. Everything is over ripe or rotting. They get annoyed if you touch anything. (i don't shop there but try once a year and leave empty handed) Still best to buy fresh and eat fresh in season or freeze while still fresh. If the method works once in a while, it might just be chance and circumstance. Life is not too short to clean your produce properly and add a bit of vinegar and dry them well before the fridge. Or use lemon or citric acid on cut fruit so it does not brown. Just buy the best looking and don't rely on a packaged sell/by use/by date. I had two sad limp heads of red leaf lettuce that i thought was headed to the compost but soaked them in ice water....ice under the colander. Forgot and soaked over night. Perky and fresh the next morning. Wrapped in a wet thick cotton tight weave towel, (not wet terry cloth). Just damp and into the veg bin in the fridge. Crisp and fresh for sunday's ball game. Stupid expensive and seldom buy salad in the winter months except for maybe arugula.