The best time of the gardening season is when you first get to harvest some of the vegetables that you have grown. This is the absolute BEST part of having your own garden. It is so satisfying to put a meal on the table and know that you actually grew the ingredients yourself. On top of being way less expensive, fresh garden vegetables have a much better flavor than foods from the supermarket.

There is another great way to use your garden vegetables 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? What about when you have 10 giant cucumbers sitting in your fridge waiting to be eaten and you can’t stomach the idea of another cucumber sandwich? Or flocks of bush beans that you didn’t realize should have been staggered several weeks apart? I have the solution … BUILD UP YOUR FOOD STORAGE!

Garden vegetables are some of the easiest things to bottle, freeze, dry, etc. Last year I bottled whole tomatoes, fresh salsa, and pickles. I froze bags of beans and peas. I haven’t experimented with dehydrating vegetables yet but I’ve heard it is another very good method of preservation. If you are working on building any type of long term food storage program, these home-grown items will be invaluable to you. They have no mysterious things added in, they are virtually FREE, they are much fresher and retain nutrients better straight from the garden, and they are organic! 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!

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