Freezer hints
We're very lucky to own
both a huge freezer and a medium freezer, which makes our food
operations much more efficient. In the summer as we become
overwhelmed by vegetables, we start to fill up the small freezer.
By late summer, the small freezer is chock full, so we unplug it, plug
in the big freezer, and transfer our wealth over. And we keep
freezing more produce, of course, until the big one is mostly full.
As the big freezer begins to empty out in the spring, we transfer
everything back to the small freezer. This year and last, by
freezer transfer time, I've realized that I froze too much of certain
types of food, so I gave them away. It's a good feeling to be
able to fill your mother and brother's freezers, then give them some
extra to pass on to their fixed income friends.
My goal is to have the
freezer pretty much empty by the time new food
starts to go in. The exception is meats --- we don't yet
slaughter many of our own animals, but Mark always keeps his eye on the
last-chance-meat-aisle at the grocery store, and when good meat is
being sold cheap he buys it all up and we toss it in the freezer.
As a result, we pretty much never pay full price for meat. I hope
that in a few years we'll be hunting and/or raising most of our meat,
but for now the last-chance-meats fit our budget.
My last piece of freezer advice pertains to what I call the Berry
Syndrome. Nearly everyone I know succumbs to this --- I suffer
from it too. You freeze a pint or a quart or a gallon of those
delicious summer berries (or sun-dried tomatoes, or whatever else is
delicious and in short supply), then you save it for a special
occasion. By freezer cleaning time, it's still there! Don't
fall into the Berry Syndrome trap --- decide that today is a special
day and thaw those berries out!
| This post is part of our Introduction to Farm Freezing lunchtime
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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