Welcome, so glad you're here today. Are you harvesting anything from your garden yet?

I know this time of year I'm usually getting the last of my lettuce before it starts bolting.

Strawberries are starting to come on in my area and asparagus has been pretty consistent since April.

But for the most part I haven't started to do a lot of preserving

yet. Those crops will come a little bit later, although we do freeze some strawberries. And if I get

too many asparagus, I may need to find some creative ways to do that, which I have never been able to do

before. The asparagus is just now getting on in its fourth year. But if 2020 taught us anything,

it is that we don't need to wait until our garden crops are completely full and ready to harvest

for us to start thinking about what we're going to do with the harvest. Even if you don't have a

plan for preserving, even if that's not your focus, a lot of times we end up having

a lot more harvest than we realize and we end up having to scrounge around trying to figure out

how can I make the best use of this crop that I have in excess of. And so whether you have the plan

to do a lot of preserving this year or not, or maybe you're just in kind of a wait and see, like maybe I'll get enough to preserve, this is not the year that you need to be delaying and thinking about these things.

Because as we saw in 2020 and as we're continuing to see in 2021,

there's no guarantee that we're going to have the supplies that we need,

especially if we wait.

And so today what I'm going to be talking to you about

is a little bit of my past eight years in my garden,

the preserving decisions that I made specifically when it came to the

supplies that I used from the very beginning where I was on a shoestring budget and didn't have a lot

to spend on anything to help me out here to now that I've been able to scale up just a little bit.

I'm going to be really focusing on the bare basics

...