A full freezer
Our
freezer is now officially full. I like to stack my
produce in careful columns --- all of the squash in one
row, all of the greens in another --- but over the last week, I've had
to overcome my compulsive arranging and fit in food willy-nilly.
Not counting sauces, chickens, and fruit, we've got over 28 gallons of
vegetables in our frozen larder!
It's a good thing the
freezer is full because we're totally out of freezing containers.
We buy them in bulk on our visits to Mark's family in Ohio, and I guess
I didn't expect such a bumper garden crop this year. Just as the
freezer started bulging at the gills, we rounded up the stray
containers that had been pressed into service holding screws or chicken nipples
and put them back into the food chain. Even then, we ran out of
containers just a few shy of filling every last gap in the freezer.
With no more space in
the freezer and nothing to freeze the excess in, we're now just eating
out of the garden. I feel like I've been given a gift of time ---
a whole free day a week that I used to spend processing the bounty.
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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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Since I was on vacation in Maine from 10/1 to 10/11, I am just now getting around to reading all I missed!
The picture shows a lot of round containers. They take up much more space than square ones. You might want to consider either purchasing square containers or using plastic freezer bags. I like the bags as you can squeeze out most of the air and store them flat until frozen then tuck them into places where you cannot put a container. They themselves also take up much less space. They also are reuseable if you wash them well and nothing has punched a hole in the bag.
That sounds like a great trip!
I never thought I'd fill the freezer, but as I neared the end, I did start thinking about how square containers would have given me more food space. The trouble is that, once you get a stock of reusable containers, it's hard to change systems!
I figure the two of us can't possibly eat more than the amount of food we have put away before spring, so there's no point in adding in food that will only go to waste. I considered canning some things, since they would last longer than a year that way, but I didn't seem to make it past the considering stage.