The best food in the world starts in the garden and ends on your plate, perhaps after a comfortable stop in a well-stocked pantry or freezer. It never knows the back of a truck or the inside of a factory, and it holds no chemical or genetic secrets. The food you grow and preserve yourself is pure. Eating it feels comfortable and good.
This is why we garden our way through summer and can our way through fall, with the hum of the dehydrator in the background. Both a hobby and a lifestyle, provisioning yourself with homegrown, organic food brings tasty, tangible rewards that save you money, but it’s the overall wholesomeness of the endeavor that makes food gardening so special. The package deal includes healthy exercise and mindfulness practice (weeding, cutting vegetables), for which you get a supply of fresh food that is renewed each year.
This book is about growing a garden that produces tasty, nutritious vegetables, herbs, and fruits, and then storing them for year-round use. This rewarding path leads to a fuller life, but it’s a long and winding road from growing your first tomato to canning a batch of salsa. This is your guidebook for that journey.
My city mother fell in love with and married my country father, who grew a vegetable garden every summer because he liked it and thought that’s the way life should be. With four kids to feed, Mom liked the money she saved with all the produce that came from the garden, but she didn’t like the extra work involved in canning, at least most of the time. When the wild huckleberries in the woods ripened in early summer, she patiently picked the tiny berries and used them in muffins and pancakes, but she also made precious jars of huckleberry jam.
As her first assistant, I saw the time and care she took with that jam, and I knew it was not about saving money. She had devoted herself to those huckleberries by choice, and seeing that they were put to good use became a source of personal pride.
I should mention that my mother was Swedish, and that “Nothing wasted” was one of the mantras of my childhood, but this does not explain the compulsion to pick and preserve berries, which may be hardwired into our hunter-gatherer brains. As poetically stated by Wendell Berry, “Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.” In terms of things you can do to have a better life, picking berries simply works.
Growing and preserving at least some of your own food will also make you feel more secure in a wild and ever-changing world. News of war, sickness, and economic collapse loses some of its punch when you are sitting in the shade with a basket of snap beans in your lap or lingering in the kitchen to hear the last canning lids pop.
In 2010, Melissa A. Click from the University of Missouri and Ronit Ridberg from Tufts University published their examination of why people grow and preserve their own food. Their results showed complex motives, but food activism was a recurrent theme. After sorting through and analyzing more than 900 interviews with people who stock their pantries with homegrown food, the authors named their paper “Saving Food: Food Preservation as Alternative Food Activism.” They wrote: “Food preservation emphasizes connection and relationships and thus has the potential to subvert the capitalistic logic of the global agro-food industry.”
This came as a revelation to me and helped me become a better information sharer and listener. I had started lecturing on managing your homegrown food supply, and I will always remember a group waiting to hear what I had to say at the Mother Earth News Fair in Lawrence, Kansas. The room was full with people who were already growing and preserving some of their own food, and they wanted to do more of it. Many had children or grandchildren in tow. The energy was great, so we spent a lot of time talking about why we do what we do. What is it about growing and preserving your own food that makes it worth the time and trouble?
I was the only one there who had read Click and Ridberg’s paper, but the Kansas group (and many others since then) validated and expanded the reasons why we commit to growing and preserving garden food, season after season. We pantry gardeners are a diverse, freethinking crowd, but here are 12 things many of us have in common.
Sound familiar? Then it’s time we got down to business.
Homegrown Pantry is comprised of five chapters. Here in chapter 1, we will become grounded in our gardens and look at ways they can be managed to produce great food as efficiently as possible. While I hope beginning gardeners find this information easy to understand, it will make the most sense to people who have been gardening for a few years and have already gotten to know a number of different food crops firsthand. The more you grow, the more you know.
Chapter 2 provides step-by-step instructions for major food preservation methods, whether you are storing potatoes in old milk crates or making salt-fermented sauerkraut. This is where to look for simple canning instructions or for the many ways you can use a dehydrator to preserve summer produce for winter meals. Remember that practice makes perfect, and don’t be discouraged by early mistakes. With gardening and food preservation, the next season brings new chances to succeed.
Chapters 3, 4, and 5 are encyclopedias of rewarding crops for the pantry garden, with details on how much to grow, how to grow it, and the best preservation options to consider when you have a bumper crop. These vegetables, fruits, and herbs were chosen based on their popularity, how well they are likely to grow using organic methods, and the ease with which they can be preserved. This is precisely the information I needed but did not have when I started food gardening in a serious way. Of special note are the Harvest Day Recipes, which are among the fastest and easiest ways to make use of a big harvest quickly.
There are several things about the place where you live that influence the crops and varieties you grow and how you preserve them. Becoming familiar with your climate zone, frost dates, latitude, elevation, and precipitation patterns will make you a better gardener and self-provisioner, too.
As a vegetable gardener, the average dates of your last frost in spring and your first frost in fall provide reference points for when many vegetables should be planted. In general, these dates mark the beginning and end of the season for beans, tomatoes, and other warm-season vegetables that need warm soil temperatures and are easily injured by frost. Most cool-season vegetables are planted weeks before the last frost passes, and many of them stay in the garden until cold temperatures coupled with a short supply of sunshine stop their growth. Many Internet sites provide frost date calculators based on zip code, but you will get more detailed information from data collected by your state climatology service. Search “frost dates [your state]” to find the dates you need, and commit them to memory.
In the United States, the Department of Agriculture has divided the country into numbered growing zones based on average minimum winter temperatures. Zone numbers from the US mainland range from Zone 3 in the far north to Zone 9 in Florida and southern California. The zone system aids communication among gardeners in general, but it becomes hugely relevant when you are selecting trees, berries, and perennials for your garden. Garden catalogs and plant tags use the zone system, making it easier to choose appropriate plants. If you are not sure which zone you are in, the mother map online (http://planthardiness.ars.usda.gov/PHZMWeb/) has a search function by zip code.
Your latitude, or distance from the equator, determines day length patterns in your area. Locations close to the equator see less dramatic changes in day length than those that are farther away. For example, day lengths in New Orleans, near the 30th parallel, range from 10.1 hours on January 1 to 13.9 hours on July 1. Farther north, near the 40th parallel, which includes New York City and Salt Lake City, the shortest winter days last only 9.2 hours, but the longest summer days go to 14.8 hours.
Because they are solar beings, plants are much more attuned to these changes than are we humans. Especially when day lengths change quickly, in spring and fall, many plants respond by moving in or out of reproductive mode. The rapid lengthening of each spring day coaxes Asian greens and cilantro to bolt (produce flowers and seeds) at a young age, and most spinach varieties cannot hold themselves back from bolting once days get to be more than 13 hours long. In fall, when these triggers are absent, the plants have no interest in bolting and keep growing leaves. In the case of peppers, long August nights push the plants to load up with fruits.
Onions use multiple cues to form bulbs, including day length and temperature. This is why it is important to choose varieties that are right for your latitude, as discussed in Best Onions for the Homegrown Pantry.
Higher elevations usually see more intense winds and cooler temperatures than lower elevations, with first and last frost dates that may differ from nearby areas at lower elevations by 2 weeks or more. In addition to an overall shorter growing season, altitude has a huge implication in food preservation because it changes the temperature at which water boils due to lowered atmospheric pressure. At sea level water boils at 212°F (100°C), but at 3,000 feet above sea level (the elevation at my house), the boiling point is only about 207°F (97°C). Because the food is cooking at a lower temperature, my canning jars must be processed longer to kill microorganisms.
In every place I have lived and gardened, there have been predictable patterns in when the weather will be wet and when dry conditions will prevail. Average monthly rainfall numbers for your location are easily accessed on the Internet, plus you can keep records of your own observations. A simple rain gauge and an outdoor thermometer will add much interest to watching the weather.
In an ideal season, most crops will receive regular rain during their juvenile growth phase and will be ready for drier conditions as they approach maturity. You can change planting dates and watering practices to keep them aligned with the natural precipitation patterns where you live.
When you are gardening to fill your pantry, consider these three questions when deciding what to grow:
Choosing easy, productive crops is a simple matter of going with your garden’s strengths. If the crop is in high demand in the kitchen and can be stored in cloth shopping bags in the basement, you have a winner. Potatoes, onions, garlic, pumpkins and winter squash, and sweet potatoes (where they grow well) should be priority crops because they often get positive answers to these three pivotal questions.
Crops that are easy to grow in one place may be huge challenges in another, and it just makes sense to repeat your successes. For example, if your carrots are seldom spectacular but your beans are robust, keep your carrot plantings small and grow as many beans as you can eat. Your soil’s overall quality will improve over time when you use compost, organic fertilizers, and biodegradable mulches. This will change the script for crops that should grow well in your garden but fail to measure up.
When you find vegetables that excel in your garden, and grow as much of them as you are likely to eat, you will take a huge step closer to food self-sufficiency. Don’t waste time and space growing more than you need or crops you really don’t like to eat.
If your main growing season runs from May to October, your “shoulder seasons” are early spring and late fall. These are the times to grow salad greens and other veggies eaten fresh, and to enjoy early-bearing perennials like asparagus and rhubarb.
Strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, and other small fruits are easy to grow organically, but they are time consuming to pick. June-bearing strawberries and early raspberries help to open the harvest season early. They can be picked and stashed in the freezer before vegetable garden produce takes over your kitchen.
The concept of food groups is often used in diet planning, but it should be used in garden planning, too. Once they come into the kitchen, many vegetables cluster together in how they are eaten or preserved, which can lead to pantry overload or dinnertime boredom. Check out the kitchen food groups below, and strive for a happy balance within each set of similar choices.
Orange-fleshed vegetables. Carrots, pumpkins, sweet potatoes, and winter squash can be used in salads, soups, side dishes, breads, and desserts, but at some point your palate will tire of orange-fleshed vegetables and need some recovery time. This is a pity because sweet potatoes and winter squash are so easy to store. Do be realistic about how many orange-fleshed vegetables you enjoy eating, and adjust how much you grow.
Root crops. The growing popularity of fermentation has helped make better use of fall root crops — including radishes, rutabagas, and turnips — but you can still end up with a cold storage problem once you’ve eaten your fill of roasted root vegetables and hard freezes have begun. Among root crops, it’s important to grow only as much as you can store in a refrigerated space.
Leafy greens. These wonderfully productive plants will surprise you, and many stems from chard, collards, and kale will be wasted if you plant more than you can use. The situation becomes more complicated if you also grow fall crops of turnip or mustard greens, so hard choices often must be made. I suggest changing things up from season to season, so that some years you skip growing a leafy green you like. Then, when you grow it again in a future season, you will be glad to have it.
Not so long ago, a book of this type would include lengthy coverage of insect pests and what to do about them, and the crop entries in chapter 3 do note common pests to expect in your garden. But you will also read again and again my advice to keep at-risk plants covered with spunbonded fabric row cover or lightweight tulle netting (also called wedding net) as a primary means of preventing pest problems.
Using row covers has caught on in a big way at organic farms everywhere, because row covers do more than protect plants from pests. They also tame strong winds, reduce temperature extremes, and moderate light in a way that pleases most plants. Plants growing under tunnels — hoops or frames covered with row cover — are protected from deer, dogs, and the heartbreak of hail, too.
You can expect amazing results with low tunnels, especially in transitional weather. Low tunnels have a proven track record of bringing on spring earlier for strawberries and spinach, and they are the best way to grow overwintering onions (see here). In cold climates, you can go with the increased insulation of plastic covers, but setting up a sheet plastic tunnel in a windy setting can be a futile exercise. When the edges are securely tucked in, a row cover tunnel will stand steady in strong wind.
Supports. Hoops or arches can be made from any smooth, non-snagging material like wire, pipe, or welded fencing. Most gardeners use hoops made from stiff, 9- or 10-gauge wire, or they make pipe hoops from inexpensive 1⁄2- to 1-inch-diameter poly pipe (the type used for underground water lines). Both types of hoops can simply be stuck in the ground, though pipe hoops are more likely to stay erect if they are slipped over sturdy rebar stakes or into sleeves made from rigid metal or PVC pipe. You can also attach them to the outside of framed beds with metal pipe strips. Even if you don’t have raised beds, you can make wooden “running boards” for the long edges of your beds by outfitting them with tunnel-friendly holes or hardware.
Hoops should be of the right length to arch over your beds to a height of at least 16 inches. For 2-foot-wide beds, hoops should be at least 65 inches long. For 3-foot-wide beds, hoops cut 76 to 80 inches long are best. Hoops are usually spaced 2 to 3 feet apart, so you may need a lot of them. The cheapest way to go is to buy a small spool of 9- or 10-gauge wire or poly pipe and cut the hoops yourself.
For winter use, arched wire fencing can withstand heavy loads of ice or snow without collapsing (as hoop-held tunnels are prone to do).
Covers. These are usually made from fabric row cover, which comes in different thicknesses and widths, or you can use a similar fabric from a fabric shop. Wedding net (tulle) works well because it does not retain heat, but it has tiny holes that insects cannot breach. When covers are not in use, store them in a dry place protected from sunlight to make them last longer.
A low tunnel has three parts — the support hoops or arches, the cover, and the weights to keep the edges secure.
Weights. The fabrics can be fastened to support hoops with clothespins and bunched together along the edges and held in place with weights. Use whatever is handy — bricks, pieces of firewood, lengths of scrap lumber, or sandbags filled with sand, soil, or gravel.
When used to exclude insects or other predators, featherweight fabrics like tulle block only a little light and allow air to circulate freely.
Just as you keep track of planting dates in spring, it’s an excellent idea to keep records of when your major crops are ripe and ready to be preserved. Make notes on a wall calendar of when you undertake big projects, and refer to it the next year so you can plan ahead to free up time for food preservation. The crunch time will vary with climate, but it will usually coincide with the ripening of your main crop of tomatoes. Here’s a sample calendar of how preservation projects work through the seasons.
Keeping up with everything happening in a diversified garden is a taxing load for most human brains, and it gets more complicated when you’re handling food preservation, too. If food gardening had a gold medal event, it would be the marathon of planting, weeding, watering, staking, harvesting, washing, freezing, canning, and more that dominates our lives through the second half of summer.
Hundreds of small skills are involved, but here I want to share the big lessons you otherwise learn the hard way by making mistakes. The good news is that each new season provides opportunities to do better.
On any given day, you may have five things you want to get done in the garden, and you will end up doing only three of them because of lack of time. Refusing to admit this from the outset, you get busy planting, weeding, or whatever, and when the day is done, the world’s finest lettuce is still sitting in your garden, waiting to be picked. Or maybe your pickling cucumbers are blowing up like water balloons, or birds are eating your blueberries for breakfast.
These things will not happen if you always make harvesting what is ready your top priority. To streamline the harvesting process, think in terms of strategic staging. Pick in the morning when you can, and stash your goodies in a shady spot or cooler to keep them cool.
If you want to keep your garden productive all season long, you have to keep planting. Once a week, do a reality check in your head to see if anything is missing. A written or computer-based plan can help tremendously, or simply write your planned plantings on a wall calendar that you see every day. This will help keep good planting dates from slipping away, and you won’t stop planting too soon. Until your fall garden is filled to capacity, your planting is not done.
Watering, weeding, and many other repetitive tasks fall under this guideline, so it’s important to use methods that have some staying power. Drip or soaker hoses make it easy to water your crops while you attend to other things, and mulches are invaluable for keeping soil constantly moist.
Expect weeding to take up a good bit of time, even when you are armed with a dangerously sharp hoe — the most effective kind. Many evenings you will work until dark and look up to find yourself in the company of fireflies and sphinx moths. This is one of the best times to stop what you’re doing, breathe deeply, and marvel at what you can achieve by combining sun, sweat, seeds, and soil.
When you have a big harvest day, make frozen water bottles from plastic drink bottles filled three-fourths full. Wrap the frozen bottles in small towels and place them among your harvested veggies or in an insulated cooler. This trick can save a lot of trips back and forth to the kitchen.
Spring fever energizes us to plant like crazy, but no such magic compels the planting of crops that mature in late summer and fall. Use the average date of your location’s first hard freeze as a starting point, and count back 14 weeks (November 1 freeze date counts back to mid-July). Use this start date for this checklist for second-season sowing.
Experienced kitchen gardeners know that growing a great crop is only half of the story. As each crop comes in, you will still need to pick, cook, and/or store your fresh veggies in ways that preserve their flavor, nutrition, and other good eating qualities. Some crops will wait longer than others, but it’s better to rearrange your work schedule than to allow tomatoes and peppers to go soft on the kitchen table.
Which method a preservation project uses determines how much time it will take. You can fill dehydrator trays with sliced tomatoes in 30 minutes, but you may spend 2 hours canning a batch of peaches because many more steps are involved. But canned foods are worth the time because they are easy to store and ready to eat.
Run only one active food preservation project at a time, and no more than two in one day. Otherwise, you will burn out long before the race has been run. Start each project in a clean kitchen, and put away your food preservation equipment as soon as you are finished using it. Canners, food processors, and cutting equipment will clutter up a kitchen fast.
It’s also nice to have help. Peeling and paring veggies and fruits can be slow work alone. Many hands do make light work, and when you work with others, filling the dehydrator with apples or canning a batch of diced tomatoes is much more fun.
Food preservation is one area where you should never take shortcuts. You have gone to the trouble of planting, nurturing, and harvesting a crop, so you don’t want to compromise quality when the crop hits the kitchen. The pressure of the harvest season pushes us to rush, but the hurrying needs to stop when a food preservation project gets under way. Whether you are blanching snap beans to stash in the freezer or canning your family’s favorite bread-and-butter pickles, take the time to do things right. The reward is total confidence that your preserved foods are as nutritious and flavorful as they can possibly be.
When you run out of something, you go to the store and buy more, right? This is a lifelong way of things for most of us, but cooking from the homegrown pantry requires an important new habit: shopping your own store first. When you start thinking of what you will cook in the next few days, begin by surveying what you have on hand that needs attention or sounds appetizing. This way you have a menu plan that partially originates in your garden, even in the middle of February.
As long as you have crops in cool storage, visit them at least once a week and fill a box with items you plan to cook. A butternut close at hand is more likely to get made into soup. If you find that you are not using up your cold-stored foods fast enough, you can cook and freeze or dry them, or share them with others. The same goes with freezer fare. If your main freezer is not in your kitchen, move selected frozen items to your kitchen freezer once a week to keep things moving.
Keep your dried herbs in a handy place so they are at the ready for cooking or making herb teas. When soup is on the menu, look to your dried veggies, which are at their best when slowly simmered in a tasty broth.
When you have grown and stored a number of crops from your garden, it’s important to get into the habit of consuming them in logical order. Plan meals around veggies or fruits in need of attention, and take pride in your shrinking food supply. Below is the general consumption plan to follow, based on the shelf life of different stored foods. Of course you will skip around, but sticking to this overall plan helps minimize waste.