Preserving the Harvest

Roots and Refuge Podcast

Jessica Sowards

Home & Garden, Leisure

5 • 646 Ratings

🗓️ 29 May 2024

⏱️ 70 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Hey, y'all! Welcome to episode 65 of the Roots and Refuge Podcast.

With the garden season really getting underway now, it's the perfect time to start planning how you'll preserve your harvest. Food preservation is a major task on the homestead, and today I'll share my thoughts on various methods to help you make the most of your produce.

Drying/Dehydrating: Ideal for fruits, herbs, and creating seasoning powders. While not suitable for all produce, it's perfect for herbs, jerky, and cherry tomatoes.

Freezing: Best for preserving nutrition but comes with drawbacks like texture changes and a reliance on electricity. It's great for meats and convenient for many vegetables.

Canning (water bath & pressure): Produces convenient and ready-to-eat products. Canning is a great entry point for a new homesteader. Remember to water bath high-acid foods and pressure can low-acid foods.

Curing/Smoking: A valuable, albeit niche skill that offers variety and uniqueness. It requires time and learning but adds great value and diversity to your pantry.

Fermenting: Offers health benefits and unique flavors. It does require refrigeration after initial fermentation and may not appeal to everyone.

Long Storing: Best for dry goods and things like onions and squash, this method is hands-off and crucial for long-term storage without electricity. Organization is key to keep stock rotated.

Freeze Drying: Provides high-quality, long-lasting products but is costly and time-consuming. It's great for novelties, seasoning mixes, and preserving leftovers.

These methods together ensure a well-stocked pantry throughout the year, even when the garden isn't producing. I hope this information helps you to dive into each technique and find the best preservation strategies for your homestead.

Thanks for joining us on the Roots and Refuge Podcast, where we explore the art of homesteading and mindful living. 🌱

If you’d like to join our Patreon page, you can get early access to all our podcast episodes and monthly live Q&As with Miah and me (including past lives). Visit our Patreon Page to learn more and check out past episodes of the podcast on the website.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, darling, welcome back to the Roots and Refuge podcast.
0:12.2	I am your host, Jessica Sauerz, my friends call me Jess, and I hope you will too.
0:16.4	If you are new around here, I'm so glad you're here.
0:18.9	And if you're not new, I'm glad you're back.
0:21.1	Here on my podcast, we talk about all things, food growing, homesteading, raising animals, growing
0:27.6	gardens, preparing, preserving, enjoying that food, as well as just trying to live a little more
0:33.3	mindfully in relationship with each other and with the earth. So today, I want to hop in and kind of give a bird's eye view of a topic that may be
0:43.2	rolling around on many of your minds since it is springtime and we are going into the height
0:49.1	of the growing season.
0:50.1	I want to talk about preserving.
0:53.0	So this is the kind of topic that you could probably talk for an hour,
0:58.2	really outlining all of the how-to, nitty-gritty details of one particular type of preserving.
1:04.5	You can go as deep into this as necessary or as you want.
1:14.6	There are entire books that are dedicated to, for instance,
1:23.4	dehydrating food, canning food, freezing food. Now freeze dryers becoming more common for at home use. And I'm sure if there aren't already books out about freeze drying food and recipes
1:29.5	and methods and maximizing that, I'm sure that they will be soon. More than just diving very deep
1:37.0	into one particular topic, I want to kind of talk an overview about food preservation because this is part of homesteading that a lot of people don't really
1:50.6	fully wrap their head around. You will spend as much time, if not more time preserving food
1:57.4	if your goal is to grow the majority of your food, then you'll spend doing anything else.
2:02.9	Like, I mean, milking animals, growing gardens, all of the different things that go into homesteading.
2:08.5	Food preservation, in my experience and opinion, is the most time-consuming homesteading thing that I do especially when you do the from the bird's eye
2:18.0	view I mean I guess if I broke it down I probably spend more time milking goats or milking cows
	...

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