Harvest Time: Food Preservation, Canning, Freezing, and Saving Seeds
This is part of our series retelling Backyard Farming: Growing Vegetables and Herbs by Kim Pezza (ISBN: 978-1-57826-460-5).
You did it. Your garden produced more food than you can eat this week. Now what? This chapter is all about making that harvest last. And if you end up with way too much, Pezza even covers how to sell it.
Freezing: The Easiest Method
If you’re new to food preservation, freezing is where you start. It requires no special equipment beyond a freezer and some bags.
Pezza shares a great trick for freezing individual items like berries or peas. Spread them out on a cookie sheet lined with waxed paper. Freeze them individually first, then transfer to bags. This way you get loose, separate pieces instead of one giant frozen brick. You can grab a handful whenever you need some instead of thawing the whole batch.
Some vegetables need blanching before freezing. That means a quick dip in boiling water, then immediately into ice water to stop the cooking. This preserves color, texture, and nutrients.
A couple of warnings from the book. Freezer burn is real, and it ruins food. Use proper freezer bags and squeeze out as much air as possible. And only freeze and thaw food once. Refreezing thawed food degrades the quality fast and can create food safety issues.
Canning: Old School But Effective
Canning is how your grandparents preserved food, and it still works beautifully. But it does require some specific equipment: glass canning jars, lids, rings, and a large pot for the boiling water bath.
Here’s the basic process Pezza outlines. First, sterilize your jars by submerging them in boiling water. Fill the jars with your food, leaving a little headspace at the top. Run a skewer or thin knife around the inside to remove air bubbles. Seal with lids and rings.
Then comes the boiling bath. Submerge the sealed jars in boiling water for 5 to 25 minutes depending on what you’re canning. When they come out and cool, listen for the popping sound. That pop means the lid has sealed properly. After cooling, press the center of each lid. If it gives or flexes when you touch it, the seal failed and that jar needs to go in the fridge and be eaten soon.
Canning has a steeper learning curve than freezing, but it’s satisfying in a way that’s hard to describe. There’s something about looking at a shelf of jars you filled yourself. It just feels right.
Drying: Simple and Space-Efficient
For herbs and flowers, air-drying is the easiest approach. Tie them in small bundles and hang them upside down in a dry spot. Done.
Vegetables need a bit more help. Use a food dehydrator or your oven set to low, between 125 and 200 degrees Fahrenheit. Once dried, store everything in airtight containers and keep them away from moisture. Properly dried food can last months.
Selling Your Excess
If your garden produces more than you can eat, freeze, and can, Pezza suggests selling the surplus.
Roadside stands are the simplest option. Set up a table at the end of your driveway with a price list and an honor jar. But check your local zoning laws first. Some areas have rules about this.
Farmer’s markets are more involved. You’ll typically pay a booth fee and may need insurance. But the exposure is worth it if you have consistent volume. Pezza’s advice for market selling is practical: make your display look good, be friendly and approachable, and provide recipe cards for unusual items. If someone doesn’t know what to do with kohlrabi, they won’t buy it. But hand them a recipe and suddenly they’re interested.
Saving Seeds: The Long Game
Here’s the thing about seed saving. It only works reliably with heirloom and open-pollinated varieties. Hybrid seeds are unpredictable.
Pezza shares a personal story that illustrates this perfectly. She tried growing cabbage from hybrid seeds she’d saved. Out of 5 plants: 2 produced small cabbages, 2 produced leafy plants but no cabbage heads at all, and 1 didn’t even germinate. That’s what happens with hybrid seeds. The second generation is a genetic lottery.
With heirlooms, you get consistency. Let some of your plants flower and go to seed. Harvest the seeds from the flowers or from inside the fruit. Dry them thoroughly and store them in labeled envelopes. Always label. You will not remember which seeds are which by spring. Trust me on that.
Pezza also mentions seed swaps, where gardeners trade seeds with each other. It’s a great way to get new varieties without spending money, and you connect with other growers in your area.
Our Take
This chapter is where backyard farming starts to feel like more than a hobby. When you’re preserving food and saving seeds, you’re building a system that sustains itself. Your garden feeds you now, and the seeds from this year’s plants start next year’s garden.
The canning section alone is worth reading carefully. It’s one of those skills that sounds intimidating but is pretty straightforward once you do it a couple of times. And the cookie sheet freezing trick is genuinely useful. Small tips like that make this book practical rather than just theoretical.
What I appreciate most is that Pezza treats all of this as normal, achievable stuff. Not extreme homesteading. Just smart use of what your garden gives you.