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Whether you grow your own vegetables or take advantage of farmers markets, you need a way to preserve and store that food for several months. Stocking up in September & October, when the harvest is plentiful is a great way to do it. Prices are lower and there are a lot of choice veggies available.
Below, I’ve linked up some of our best posts on preserving food, take a look!
Here are 4 ways to preserve and store food:
Storing some food is a great way to save money. Prices are definitely going to be higher all winter long, because of the lower local supply and the same high demand. Starting your own stockpile of food is a way to save some money and start to feel more in control of your own personal food supply.
You can freeze some veggies. Every summer, I freeze a one year supply of shelled green peas. And why not? They taste fresh all winter long and don’t take long to make. Plus, it’s guaranteed rocking time in the late afternoons – someone has to shell all the peas!!
You can can some veggies. Want to water bath can some Pickled Beets? How about pressure canning some Green Beans?
You could dehydrate them (or most of them) if you like. You could store a few boxes of root vegetables down in the cool part of your basement.
But what do you do if you live in a rancher home? If you have no basement, you have to start looking at other option.
You could look at building a small insulated and vented room in a corner of your garage. Another option is to have a root cellar. If you don’t have room for food storage inside your house, an outdoor root cellar is a great way to go.
Built right into the ground, you can store all kinds of root vegetables inside. Mother Earth News has several plans for outdoor cellars and they range from the super simple to structured cellars.
You need to live in an area where there are cold winters. You also need to put in some time digging and setting up the root cellar.
I have seen pictures of outdoor root cellars but instead of being boxed in with wood, the builder instead drops an old deep freeze in the ground. This is a great idea and would really work well. We use old freezers here down at the barn to hold animal feed.
We don’t care if the freezers work or not. And we are keeping a few old freezers out of the landfill. Come to think of it, that’s where we got the three we have. A great way to recycle!
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