Preserving Summer's Bounty: A Quick and Easy Guide to Freezing, Canning, Preserving, and Drying What You Grow: A Cookbook (Rodale Garden Book) - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Susan McClure is a trained botanist who has written articles on gardening for numerous publications and authored several previous books. She lives in Valparaiso, Indiana.

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Preserving Summer's Bounty

Surefire techniques and great recipes for keeping the harvest!

"Preserving Summer's Bounty takes a giant step ahead in preserving advice. This up-to-the-minute guide pays tribute to your grandmother's techniques for 'putting up' vegetables, but what I like best are the quick and easy modern methods using the microwave, the freezer and more. These fast answers should lure even the busiest among us into storing the precious harvest of the garden."--Marian Morash, Author of The Victory Garden Cookbook

"Preserving Summer's Bounty is a treasure trove of sage advice and enticing recipes. It's a delightful book that will let you enjoy your garden's harvest all year long."--Carol Hupping, Editor of Stocking Up III

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CHAPTER ONE

A Guide to Harvesting Vegetables, Fruits, and Herbs

YOU'VE GOT your own garden, and that's great! Gardening provides fun, exercise, and, best of all, produce that you can use in hundreds of ways. You no longer need to be captive to the whims of the market--you can grow what you like best and eat it harvest-fresh, chemical-free, and untouched by additives. You can enjoy your favorite kinds of corn or beans as well as unusual things, such as Japanese pears or heirloom 'Moon and Stars' watermelons.

Growing your own produce lets you take charge of the harvesting process. Pick fruits and vegetables when their quality is at its very best and they have reached the right stage of maturity for eating, canning, freezing, or drying. Then, you don't have to lose any time getting the food from the ground into safekeeping.

Sometimes you can organize the garden so that produce will ripen when it is convenient for your use--and sometimes you can't. Most people can't control when their apples, berries, peaches, and pears will be mature. Once planted, fruit trees and berry plants will bear their fruit year after year when the time is right. You're at their mercy and must be prepared to harvest just when the pickings are ready if you want to get the fruit at its best.

Growing for Harvest

Vegetables are a different story. Because most are annuals and bear a certain number of weeks after they are planted, you can plan your garden to allow for succession plantings that extend the harvesting season and furnish you with a continuous supply of fresh food. This means that you can eat fresh vegetables over several smaller harvests if you wish (and the weather cooperates) and be able to preserve small batches as different waves of vegetables ripen.

Time your harvests so you pick each fruit and vegetable at perfection. Zucchini (top) that has been left on the vine too long is unfit for anything but puree. Tender young zucchini are perfect for fresh eating sliced in salads or stir-fries and make delicious pickles. Beets (bottom) left in the ground too long become tough and woody, but baby beets are at the ideal stage for canning, freezing, or pickling.

By planting three smaller crops of tomatoes instead of one large crop, you won't be deluged with more tomatoes than you can possibly eat and process at one time. Or you can space your three pea plantings ten days apart in early spring, and you'll have three harvests of peas and plenty of time to plant a later crop of something else in the same plots after you pick all the peas.

Plant vegetables that don't keep well, like salad greens, at least twice. Start with early lettuce about a month before the last frost and follow it with cauliflower. After the onions are out of the ground, put some fall lettuce in their place for September salads. If corn is one of your favorites and you've been waiting out the long winter for the first ears to come in, by all means, eat all the early-maturing corn you want. But make sure that you plant enough late corn for freezing later on.

Harvest as late as possible in fall when you grow vegetables that keep well in underground storage--crops like cabbage, potatoes, root crops, and squash. You won't have to worry about keeping vegetables cool during warm September and early October weather. Green and yellow beans, planted in early May, can be followed by cabbage in mid-July for a fall harvest. You can leave some vegetables, like parsnips and Jerusalem artichokes, right in the ground over the winter. So plant some late crops of these vegetables specifically for this purpose.

AN HEIRLOOM HARVEST

When you are looking for new crops for your garden or orchard, don't overlook heirloom fruits and vegetables. These are plants that have been passed down for generations by families and cultures around the world. Many have special qualities like different flavors, unique colors, or extra-long storage capacity. Most are open-pollinated, which means that the harvest time will vary somewhat and you will have fresh produce over a longer period of time. Browse through the small sampling of cultivars that follows to get a brief taste of what heirlooms are all about.

Heirloom Vegetables

. Beans, green: 'Blue Coco' snap bean, which originated in pre-1775 France, has purple pods and grows well in hot, dry weather.

. Beans, lima: 'Cliff Dweller' lima bean, from the ancient Apache culture, tolerates heat and drought and produces light-colored seeds splashed with dark highlights.

. Beets: 'Chioggia', an early Italian beet, is striped with alternating rings of red and white flesh.

. Carrots: 'Oxheart' carrot, introduced in 1884, grows short and thick, which makes it good for heavy soils and root-cellar storage.

. Eggplant: 'Turkish Italian Orange' eggplant, from Turkey, produces small, round, red-orange fruit that is mild and prolific.

. Lettuce: 'Oakleaf' lettuce, which originated in the 1800s, has handsome oak-shaped leaves with wavy margins. 'Rouge D'Hiver', a romaine lettuce from nineteenth-century France, has bronze leaves and solid heads. It thrives in cool and warm weather.

. Pumpkins: 'Small Sugar' pumpkin, a favorite of American pioneers from 1860, is sweet, firm, and tender, perfect for pies or any kind of cooking.

. Tomatoes: 'Big Rainbow' tomato, a mammoth-fruited plant from Minnesota, has green, yellow, and red skin and red-and-yellow-streaked flesh.

Heirloom Fruits

. Apples: 'Black Gilliflower', discovered in eighteenth-century Connecticut, ripens so dark red that it looks black. It's excellent for drying and cooking. 'Grosse Mignonne', sold as early as the mid - 1600s, has greenish white, extra-juicy fruit. 'Sauvignac', introduced in the mid- 1800s near Quebec City, Canada, is hardy to -50°F.

. Currants: 'White Imperial', brought to America in the late 1800s, has transparent white fruit and is more flavorful than any other currant.

. Pears: 'Seckel', grown in Europe since 1790, has small brown fruit with exceptional sweetness.

. Watermelons: 'Moon and Stars' watermelon, grown by the Amish for over 80 years, has red flesh and a green rind speckled with yellow stars and a large golden moon.

Handling the Harvest

One of the biggest advantages of growing your own produce--or picking it garden-fresh in a friend's yard--is that you can handle it with care. Then everything you pick at the moment of ideal ripeness will be perfect for preserving. You'll understand how important harvest treatment is when you know a little about what happens to fruits and vegetables after harvesting.

Once plucked from the plant, fruits and vegetables stop growing, but respiration and enzyme activities (which add up to aging) continue. The physical and chemical qualities deteriorate rapidly. As a result, appearance and flavor fade, and the nutrient content decreases, particularly fragile vitamin C.

WHERE TO FIND HEIRLOOM VEGETABLES AND FRUITS

To locate the long-lost tomato your grandmother used to grow or to browse for something different to try, check out the Garden Seed Inventory, published by the Seed Saver's Exchange. This 500-page volume lists thousands of different plants and gives brief descriptions and sources for each. A good resource for finding heirloom fruit cultivars is the Fruit, Berry and Nut Inventory, which lists all cultivars of fruiting trees and bushes available today, along with where to buy them. This 500-page book is also available through the Seed Saver's Exchange.

If you want to sample heirloom apples so you can decide which cultivars to grow, you can order a boxful from Applesource, 1716 Apple Road, Chapin, IL 62628 (applesource.com).

Catalogs That Specialize in Heirlooms

You may not be able to find heirloom vegetable seeds in garden centers, but...