How does your garden grow?

Many of us in my small rural community have gardens. I grew up on a farm and was taught about canning and freezing food to help save on the food budget and to cook food without all the preservatives that you find in processed foods. I love to can and am so thankful that my mom taught me how by requiring us to participate in the process. Some vegetables we prefer to can and some we prefer to freeze. Some vegetables like squash I do not like to can or freeze, but they grow faster than we can eat them. So over the years I have tried to figure out how to preserve them for consumption later in the year. Freezing them only makes them lose their texture and are too mushy for cooking the way that I like to cook them and I do not like them canned.

However, this is the way that I have found I can freeze them and eat them later. Yellow squash I have discovered, can be cooked just the way I like them and put them in freezer bags to eat later. I am the only one in my house that likes yellow squash, so I just thaw out a bag when I want some and all I have to do is heat them up and they are ready to go and still taste fresh like I just cooked them.

Zucchini squash we pretty much just like to stir fry, so freezing them for that purpose doesn’t work for us. However, we do like zucchini bread so any excess zucchini that we can’t eat fast enough gets processed for future zucchini bread. All I do is finely grate the zucchini like I was going to make zucchini bread and then I put them in freezer bags to freeze. I usually measure them in cups and write how many cups are in the bag so I can figure out how many to thaw based on how many cups I need. You can also do the flip of this and completely make the loaves of zucchini bread and freeze them instead. However, freezing the grated zucchini allows you to use it as you find other recipes to use zucchini in. It just gives you more options throughout the year. I don’t know if anyone else has thought of this, but I just wanted to share in case you had the same problem I did with them producer faster than we could eat them.

If you don’t have a garden or the space to plant one. You can also consider buying produce in bulk at packing houses and canning and freezing without the hassles of growing a garden. Just an idea!