Well, hey there and happy August and welcome to the Beginners Garden podcast.

Today's topic has been born from what I hear from so many of you that you are interested

in preserving some of your harvest, but for whatever reason, you would like to pursue freezing

over canning or dehydrating or fermenting or other ways of preservation. For many of you, this is because

you have a small garden. And so you don't have a huge amount of garden harvest to begin with. That

would justify a huge can or load. Or maybe your harvest is coming in little by little. And maybe

if you add it all up, you would have enough tomatoes to can

tomato sauce but you don't have enough all at one time or maybe you're like me and you are

not wanting to spend a whole lot of your time this year doing some of the more time

intensive preservation methods like canning but you do want to put back some of your

harvest that you've worked so hard to grow.

So in today's episode, we are going to be revisiting a conversation that I had with Crystal

Schmidt, creator of the Whole Fed Homestead and also author of the book Freeze Fresh.

Now, if her name sounds familiar to you, you may have

actually heard a portion of this conversation back two years ago when we had her on the podcast

when her book had first released. That particular podcast episode was one of the most

downloaded podcast episodes, which showed me that many of us are interested

in freezing and not only just freezing, but freezing better and freezing our produce in a way

that we're going to have the best quality that we can possibly have. So today I'm actually

revisiting that conversation, especially the parts where she talks about freezing small parts of

your harvest because I think so many of us are in that boat where we have a little bit more than

we can use fresh, but we want to be able to put some of it back so that we can eat it in the

...