Freezing

Think of Thanksgiving dinner with all the vegetables being from your own garden. Some fresh (parsley, chives, Brussels sprouts and carrots), some from the cool spot in the basement (cabbage, onions and celery), some canned (salsa, bread and butter pickles, green beans) and others frozen (corn, snap peas and summer squash made to taste like apple sauce). Leftover turkey sandwiches taste even better with homemade horseradish, pickled peppers and/or dill pickles. This is a reality for many home gardeners. Maybe not all this the first year, but it is certainly attainable.
Houses used to have “root cellars.” These were little rooms in the basement built to keep the house heat out but not cold enough to freeze. These were used to store vegetables whole for a few weeks. Crops like cabbage, carrots, Brussels sprouts, celery, potatoes and peppers were picked right before the first frost. Some are stored as they are on a shelf, some tied and hung and others require some sort of container. Garlic and onions can be hung where it is room temperature. It is not unusual for these crops to keep until Thanksgiving in most areas of the country.
Most of our Thanksgiving guests look forward to our homegrown corn – yellow or white – your choice. We like our corn frozen rather than canned. It requires less work than canning! We also have the advantage of a large freezer. The freezer is the big expense for this method of preserving. It’s well worth it if you can make good use of it. A freezer is also good for storing meat, fruit and leftovers.

Here are a few things to consider when planning to freeze your surplus crops:
1. Harvest to freezer in three hours or less. Vegetables loose nutrients and flavor rather quickly after being picked. Have everything ready before hand. Gardening takes some planning. It’s part of the challenge. Make room in the freezer. Have freezing supplies on the table. Lineup a helper or two. Get the water on for blanching.
2. Almost all vegetables need blanched before freezing. Blanching is a quick boiling of the vegetable to be frozen. There is also a steam blanching procedure. Most of us use the boiling water method. The hot water (or steam) is required to greatly reduce the enzymes that cause loss of nutrients, color and flavor. Here is how it is done. Get a half filled pan of water boiling. Add vegetables until they are covered with water. When the water begins to boil again, dump the container into a colander in the sink or laundry tub. Quickly plunge the vegetables into a container of iced water. Hurry and get the original pot ready if necessary. Stir them around so they all cool. Pour again into the colander. Now you are ready to pack into containers.
3. There are a limited number of freezer coverings. These include freezer paper, aluminum foil, plastic wrap, vacuum-sealed laminated bags, zip lock freezer bags, plastic containers and even glass jars. Check your canning/freezing book for advantages and disadvantages of each. We use freezer bags for freezing our surplus produce, containers for leftovers and none of the others for long-term storage.

Examples:
Freezing corn isn’t a bad chore. We pick enough corn for about 25 quart bags. Experience helps here. While I’m “shucking” it, my helper (wife) is getting the water boiling. We put in about a dozen ears at a time. Meanwhile the iced water is getting ready in a big canner. We remove the corn after it boils about five minutes. We take them out an ear at a time to keep the hot water for the next batch. I cut off the kernels and my wife fills the bags. She leaves a little room for the expansion of moisture. We also freeze several ears for a treat at the Memorial Day cook out. We spread out the filled bags in the freezer until they are frozen solid. Then we arrange then in some semblance of order.
With sauerkraut, we just clean up the top mess and place the good stuff in a colander to rinse off some of the salt required for processing, i.e., fermenting. We then pack the bags from the colander place in the freezer. We do not blanch sauerkraut. It works for us.

As stated above, gardening takes planning. Winter is a good time to plan your work. The growing seasons are when you work your plan.