New Uses For Home Grown Garden Vegetables
Saturday, May 30th, 2009The 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. Presenting your family with a side dish or meal made from homegrown vegetables feels so satisfying and rewarding. 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.
I want to talk about another GREAT use of your garden vegetables that a lot of people don’t 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 8 giant cucumbers all perfectly ripe but you get sick at the thought of eating another cucumber sandwich? Or flocks of bush beans that you didn’t realize should have been staggered several weeks apart? I have the answer … 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. My mom recently passed on her food dehydrator to me so I’m anxious 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 have more vegetables than your family can eat this season, try out some of these preservation methods and add some veggies to your food storage. 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!














