Storing Your Crops & Garden Class Insights

Our deep freeze bursting with berries

Raising food in your backyard or on your homestead is pretty straightforward, right? 

You put seeds or starts in good soil and weed regularly, keep the critters away, and voila! Homegrown fruits and veggies! But finding the best ways to store your garden bounty can feel pretty complicated. 

And as it turns out, food storage was a popular discussion in my recent Community Ed workshop, “Grow a Homestead-Style Food Garden.” 

Most people who take the workshop are getting started with a backyard food garden. But in this recent class, about half the students had larger plots of ground to manage—anywhere from a few acres to a couple of dozen. 

Some folks with those acreages had established orchards and berry patches. And being harvest-time, for most of the students, storing their crops was top of mind. 

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about food gardening in my 17 years on our homestead, there’s an easy rule of thumb:

Plan to grow only what you can comfortably eat or store. 

Now, having a good sized garden, I totally get biting off more than you can chew. In our early days, because we had so much room, my husband John and I planted 25 fruit trees: apple, pear, Asian pear, apricot, and plum varieties. 

25! For a two person family!

Then there were the two kiwis (the female never bore fruit, so sayonara) and three grapevines (took out one that got too huge as well). And let me tell you, we had a time trying to store or find homes for all that fruit. It was almost a relief when many of those trees developed blight or scab and we had to take them out too.

Then there’s all the berries we raise: blueberries, strawberries, marrion berries and other cane berries. 

However, the nice thing about homegrown produce is that if you get it in the fridge right after picking, it lasts far longer than the fruits and vegetables from the grocery store. So for a quick overview of crop storage, let’s talk…

Managing Fruit Storage

Luckily, storing berries is pretty basic: whatever you keep for fresh eating goes in your fridge. As for “putting up” your extra berries, you can freeze them or make jam. 

Whatever you do, berries should be eaten or processed within a few days of picking. 

Tree fruit in the fridge has a bit longer shelf life. The secret is to pick it just at the point of ripeness. (If you wait until the fruit is falling off the tree, it won’t keep nearly as long.)

Plums and Asian pears will stay nice for a couple of weeks, apples in the fridge will stay fairly crisp maybe three weeks or so. After that, depending on the variety, apples tend to get a little soft or mealy. We have a “Florina” apple that is a good storage apple—and will keep well for a couple of months.

If, like John and me you have a second fridge, hopefully you have enough fridge space for your harvest. Again, try to produce only what you can comfortably deal with!

Too much of a good thing!

The Asian pear tree above is a classic case of simply producing too much fruit…which is on us. We should have pruned it and thinned the fruit far more aggressively. We ended up with more fruit than we could pick, store or put up, and pears falling all over the place. 

If you can’t manage it all, and the fruit starts to ferment, you’ll find your garden overrun with wasps. (Did we ever!) Or if you’ve just got too much fruit in your yard generally, you might get a very large, especially unwanted visitor…

You’ll find more about wasps and that visitor in my October newsletter, “Year of the Wasp(s) & a Treat for Animal Lovers” !

Managing Veggie Storage

I keep potatoes in our fridge. It’s a little cold for potatoes, and the temperature will turn some of the starches into sugars, but it works fine for me. Keep in mind that apples and potatoes shouldn’t be stored in close proximity—it speeds up apple fermentation.

Onions: once the stalks are cured and I’ve cut them off, I keep in our unheated shop. When we get temps below the mid-20s, I bring them into the house until it warms up.

Our garlic harvest—again, after the stalks have cured up and been trimmed—goes in the pantry. It’s cooler than the rest of the house, and my homegrown garlic stays in pretty good shape until mid-winter or beyond.

Carrots and parsnips: the fridge. As you’ve probably guessed, our second fridge is a lifesaver! 

Tomatoes: we have maybe one good tomato year out of three. When we have more than we can eat, I roast my tomatoes in olive oil and seasonings, then freeze. Same with zucchini: sauté or roast the extra, then freeze.

Green tomatoes, you can ripen in the house wrapped in newspaper. Or you can eat ‘em! Lots of students were big fans of fried green tomatoes. One gal mentioned her grandmother used to pickle green cherry tomatoes, which she loved.

Fall planted spinach

If you sowed greens in late summer, hopefully they’ll get growing before the cold hits. Mulch well so they can overwinter, then you can pick as needed in spring! Like other homegrown produce, your greens will last much longer in the fridge than store-bought.

I’m not sure my spinach here will grow enough for successful overwintering, but I am ever hopeful! 

Drying Fruits and Veggies

Lots of gardeners, including some of my students, dry all kinds of produce with good results! 

John and I tried drying fruit in our early years. What we found was that the drying process attracted clouds of fruit flies and other pests. And the aroma spread over our entire yard—not a good thing when you have bears around!

So regretfully, we gave up on drying. 

Root Cellars and Crawlspaces

One student asked about root cellars. We don’t have one—with the vast vole and other rodent populations around our place, we would need to install one of those concrete bunker-style models.

But I understand cellaring, with its below-ground temperature and humidity is a great option for root vegetables: potatoes, onions, carrots and parsnips. I mentioned hearing about folks keeping food in their crawlspace.

Again, we can’t do that with all the mice, but I’ve heard it works for lots of people who don’t have to be concerned with rodents. One student thought her crawlspace would work fine for her. 

If you can’t use your crawlspace or basement: Parsnips keep beautifully in their beds well into winter! At our place, I often have to time my picking for between deep freezes, but they’re still nice and sweet. I’ve found carrots degrade somewhat, left in the soil too long—plus our frequent freeze-thaw cycles makes for a lot of soil heaving. Then the top part of the carrots get frozen and go downhill fast.

Cooking Your Garden Bounty

The really fun discussions were about preparing the fruits of your labor! Someone asked, “What can you do with rhubarb besides pie?”

I suggested stewing with some frozen berries, and I’d heard roasting is good. Another person asked about parsnips—going beyond roasting or in soup. I said, “I don’t have a big repertoire with parsnips, so that’s all I do.” 

Then another student chimed in and said they’re great mashed with other root veggies. Which is actually popular way to prepare parsnips in Ireland! 

Moving beyond food storage…

Irrigation in your Garden

I had a question about irrigation. I mentioned that we have a well, and since summers are dry here in the Foothills, I’m very careful with water use. As a result, I water each crop according to its needs, rather than watering everything the same amount.

For example, blueberries are shallow rooted and need frequent watering. But asparagus has roots below the surface and I water those beds only every couple of weeks or so. My food garden is pretty spread out, with lots of landscaping features, which would make an irrigation system more of a challenge for us.

If you have a food garden that’s sort of contained, i.e., all your crops are in the same area, I think irrigation would work great.

Cardboard in the Garden

Lots of these folks with acreages had neglected garden beds and wanted to get them productive again. 

I suggested a cardboard “killing mulch” over the winter. One student, a landscape gardener, said that she totally depended on cardboard! She recommended asking your favorite stores what day their cardboard recycling gets picked up. Then just show up the day before, and there’s all that cardboard free for the taking. You’ll make out like a bandit!

Food Storage in a Nutshell

If you’ve raised too much food, and you just can’t find places to put it or people to give it to, harvesting can feel like a burden. But when you’ve been judicious about how much you produce, putting up or storing your harvest bounty will be a pleasure!

You can find me at www.susancolleenbrowne.com …and for lots of homesteady stories, visit Little Farm Writer…I’d love to hear from you!