peas planted!

Wednesday, August 29, 2007

storing garden vegetables

I usually don't store many vegetables from my garden, but this has been a pretty productive year. I suppose I often give up on garden work by mid-summer, but this year I have been keeping at it. (Good job, Kathy!)

So far if have stored:
frozen green beans
sun-dried tomatoes
basil pesto
dried soup peas

On my list to do soon are:
tomato puree
frozen roasted chile peppers
dried red chiles
frozen stuffed chiles
frozen grated zucchini
dried pinto beans

Basil pesto: Maybe my most important garden crop. I like to make sure we have pesto to last all season - until next years crop is ready. My recipe is here. This year we used a short cut and froze it partially prepared.

Peppers: I have MANY chile pepper plants this year and in this post and this post the comments list many contributed suggestions on how to store them. I will definitely use these.

Zucchini: I plan to experiment this year with freezing grated zucchini. (Got to do SOMETHING with it.) I have read that this works well for baking winter zucchini bread.

Dried field peas: These are the easiest! Just let them dry in the pod then shell and store at room temp in baggies. I harvested about a cup (1/2 pound) of Capucijner soup peas this year. The pictures are here. I will probably wait for cold weather to make soup with them.

My pinto beans are just starting to bud. Hopefully I will have a nice crop of shell beans, too.

1 comment:

  1. I've been reviewing last year's posts trying to do some planning for the next few months. Did you try drying the zucchini and how did it turn out?
    Thanks!

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