Homegrown Garden Vegetables for Food Storage

If you are anything like me, you’re favorite part of gardening is when you actually begin to harvest some of your vegetables. This is the absolute BEST part of having your own garden. Presenting your family with a meal or side dish made from homegrown vegetables feels so rewarding and satisfying. I’ve noticed that the fresh vegetables from my garden tend to taste better than grocery store fare as well plus you can save a lot of money by using your own home grown produce.

There is another fabulous way to use your garden veggies that people don’t often think about. What do you do if you have a monster tomato plant and you have 30-40 tomatoes all ripen at the same time? How about having 10 giant cucumbers all perfectly ripe but you can’t stomach the thought of eating another cucumber salad? Or you accidentally planted all your garlic at the same time and have WAY too many all ready to harvest at the same time? I have a wonderful solution … BUILD UP YOUR FOOD STORAGE!

Garden vegetables are some of the easiest things to bottle, freeze, dry, etc. Last year I bottled pickles, fresh salsa, and whole tomatoes. I froze peas and beans. My mom recently donated her food dehydrator to me so I’m excited to learn how to use that method of preservation now as well. If you are working on building any type of long term food storage program, these home-grown items will be invaluable to you. The benefits of preserving homegrown vegetables are: they are organic, they retain nutrients better, they only use natural preservatives, and they are FREE! How can you beat that?

So if you are looking to build up some food storage, consider taking your excess garden vegetables and preserve them using some of these methods. And maybe, just maybe, next year you will find yourself planting extras of certain items so that you can have enough to stock up your food storage shelves even more!