Archive for the ‘Harvest’ Category
Harvest Time Means Preserving
There is a natural and continuous rhythm to the growing, harvesting and preserving seasons. Late autumn and early winter are busy with the selection and purchase of seeds. But as you leaf through the seed catalogues, pay attention to the varieties that are better for freezing, or bottling, canning or drying. If a part of your harvest is going to be preserved for later use, choose the seed varieties that will match your favoured methods of preserving.
Growing your own food, gives you many advantages over those who are limited to getting their food from the supermarket. Not only do you have a greater choice of fruits and vegetable varieties but you can harvest them when everything is at just the right stage of maturity for eating, canning, freezing, drying or underground storage.
Winter is a period when many fresh ingredients are at their most expensive and many are less readily available. This, of course, is the best time to enjoy all the fruits of your labours – both the growing and the preserving parts.
There are a variety of ways to store food for consumption days or months later. In these days of instant everything, many of us yearn for the results of more traditional ways of preserving food such as pickling, bottling and canning, curing, smoking and drying.
As preserving techniques evolved, people were able to utilize the abundance of a good harvest, deal with animals killed a long way from home and bring together the elements of different cultures to enjoy products as varied as pastrami, marmalade, salt herring, piccalilli, salsa, beef jerky, chutneys, pickles, cured meats, etc., etc.
Although traditionally, the end of summer/early autumn was the time for preserving what had grown during the summer, today we have the advantage of being able to utilize fruits, vegetables, meats etc. that are cheap and in abundance at any time of the year. We can make sausages, gravadlax, pickled herring, Limóncello, jams and jellies, flavoured vinegars, compotes, fruit butters, fruit leathers and fruit syrups whenever we have the time.
As the growing year proceeds to harvest time (and at other times as well), we will be bringing you posts on canning, freezing, and drying whatever is in season, plus recipes that use what’s available and what you may have a glut of as well as discussing the jobs that need doing in the garden.
