good morning this morning i thought i'd do something
a little different than my usual in the garden video
and that is because i've actually spent the majority of this week in the house
trying to preserve as much of the harvest as possible before the frost
comes and i suspect that many of you who are
gardening are preserving a lot of your own food as
well so today i thought i'd share with you my top
three tools for preserving the harvest i'm going to finish picking these beans
for canning and then let's head into the house
so my top three preservation tools in no particular order are
first my dehydrator now the dehydrator and the tool i'm going to show you next
are of perhaps particular importance right now given that many folks are
having trouble finding canning supplies and these two methods can be used to
preserve food without having to can anything so there are many many
dehydrators on the market from relatively quite cheap to quite
expensive i splurged years ago and got the
excalibur dehydrator some girls go for purses i go for
dehydrators whatever floats your boat but this has been well worth the money
so i've got the nine rack excalibur dehydrator and
it's got these mesh tray covers as well as i bought these um i think they're
silicone they do get stained with wear but
these work really really well especially for like i said fruit leathers for the
kids and you can dehydrate pretty much
anything i typically use this for herbs i dry
tomatoes onions zucchini carrots pretty much any fruit and vegetable you can do
meat jerkies now how i will store my dehydrated food
typically is just in these glass mason jars i usually try to find
like the desiccate packets that are in supplements or some
other dried foods and save those and pop one in
the jar with the food you can see here i've got
dried onions and then here i've got a batch of dried tomatoes
i'd love to be able to do sun-dried tomatoes but in our climate it just
would not work so i have to rely on the dehydrator
and here's another example i'm in the process of dehydrating a bunch of
zucchini when this gets full i'll pack it into
glass jars as well preservation tool number two
is my vacuum sealer so this was actually gifted to me and i'm very very thankful
for that because i kind of hem hawed around about buying one of these
i just wasn't sure if i was going to end up using it very much
and this has become definitely one of my go-to
tools for preserving foods now i use this to vacuum seal many fruits and
vegetables and then throw them in the freezer
and it's kind of my if i don't have time to get things done this is what i go to
because it's very fast a word of warning however do not try to
do really juicy fruits and vegetables in this
because the vacuum sealer will want to suck up all the juice and it doesn't
work well so what i do for berries is
actually lay them on a cookie sheet freeze them first and
then vacuum seal them which works really really well
and i use this thing for blanched green beans cauliflower
peas broccoli edamame pretty much you name it
right now i'm doing peppers because we are just getting
an onslaught of peppers ripening in the garden so
this is one of my very favorite quick and easy ways to preserve peppers
so the way this works is you get these vacuum seal rolls i think you can get
the pre-made bags too but this is a little more economical and
they will come in rolls like this you can get a wider size
as well and this allows you to just cut the size that you'll need for the
amount that you're vacuum sealing you just cut it as
straight as you can you lay this edge on the ceiling
strip shut it
hold it down until the green light goes off
and it creates a seal on this end so now you've got a baggie that you can fill
so with peppers all i do is chop them up kind of at a dice or whatever size
you typically would use them people i've heard of people doing strips like for
fajitas but it's whatever is easiest for you
you then just fill up your baggie
and you want to leave a little room at the top because you're going to need
that space to do the vacuum sealing then
you just put that inside the vacuum sealer
that down
and voila it sucked all the air out it's giving you a nice seal and that
stuff will keep in the freezer much longer without freezer burn than if you
just throw it say in like a ziploc baggie preservation tool number three
is a canner now this is not just any canner this is a life-changing canner
so i have my traditional big water bath canner that i use all the time
this has replaced my pressure canner so for years i had one of those great
big cast aluminum heavy-duty pressure canners to
be honest the thing intimidated the heck out of me
so my dear sister happened to mention this
contraption to me and i immediately searched one out the beauty of this is
that it's almost foolproof and it doesn't require the
constant um diligence that a traditional steam
canner does where you're constantly checking the pressure
and the temperature and making sure everything is all right this you
basically put your items in you start it it will beep at you when it
has reached pressure at which point you close the pressure gauge
it will do the pressure canning and beep again when it's done
and that's basically it and i have had really good success with this
i've been able to do all those items that i was freezing in the past which is
like my non-acid foods corn green beans i can
pressure can leftover soups it is smaller than a traditional pressure
canner so you can only do four quarts at a time that actually works
really well for me because i'm able to slip in a batch
of canning here and there rather than devoting like a whole afternoon
to doing canning and overall i have used this thing a ton this season already
now if you find yourself in the market for one of these as i said it is a
pressure cooker canner be sure you look
for that a traditional pressure cooker or like an instant pot
is not set up to do pressure canning so don't get an instant pot and think
that you'll be able to pressure can with it look for a pressure
canner cooker and just as an aside if you're worried about having 7000
different contraptions in your kitchen which i
totally understand this um is also like i said it's also a pressure cooker
you can also use it like your slow cooker
and for a little preservation bonus i've got two more
preservation tools and they are perhaps the cheapest and easiest you'll ever
find and may already be in your kitchen
cupboards so these tools are vinegar and salt
that is all you need to pickle a large majority of the produce that is coming
out of the garden you can do a quick pickle with vinegar
and you can do a long pickle or like a fermented pickle
with salt i think most people are familiar with like a refrigerator pickle
or a quick pickle but i've got long pickled hot peppers
cucumber pickles this is a kohlrabi pickle
of course i've got sauerkraut downstairs but pickling is an
excellent and ancient technique of preserving the harvest
now if you've not done pickles before and find yourself a little overwhelmed
i highly recommend this book it is the pickled pantry
by andrea chesman and every recipe that i've tried from this so far has been
excellent and she explains how to do both quick
vinegar pickles and long or fermented pickles
and be sure to let me know do you have any additional tools that you use for
preserving the harvest that you've found really useful
drop a line in the comments below and if you find content like this helpful
please consider subscribing to my channel growfully with jenna
thanks for watching and i'll see you next time