There’s a funny moment that can happen in a successful garden. You’ve spent weeks watching, watering, tending and waiting. Then suddenly, the question changes from “When will I have something to harvest?” to “What am I going to do with all of this?”
Maybe there are zucchini on the counter, herbs that need to be cut again, greens filling the refrigerator, or tomatoes ripening faster than you can eat them. Having too much fresh food sounds like a wonderful problem to have, until something you worked hard to grow ends up wilted in the back of the refrigerator.
The good news is that enjoying more of your harvest doesn’t have to mean spending an entire weekend canning. There are many ways to use a garden harvest besides canning or freezing, including quick pickling, fermentation, making broth, creating infused vinegars, making quick jam, and simply finding new ways to cook vegetables while they’re fresh. Sometimes the biggest shift is simply expanding your idea of what a harvest can become.
What if those extra vegetables became quick pickles? What if your herbs became a flavorful vinegar? What if the scraps left after dinner weren’t waste at all, but the beginning of tomorrow’s broth? Once you start looking at your harvest this way, a whole lot of possibilities open up.
Want to see some of these ideas in action? In our free Enjoy Your Harvest series, our expert teachers take you into the kitchen and demonstrate practical ways to use, enjoy and preserve fresh food.
Register free for Enjoy Your Harvest
Start with a different question about your harvest
When we think about preserving garden food, canning and freezing are often the first things that come to mind. Both are useful, but they aren’t your only choices.
Instead of looking at a basket of produce and immediately wondering how you’re going to preserve all of it, try asking:
• What do I want to enjoy while this is fresh?
• What could I turn into something I’ll enjoy later?
• What am I growing that I’m not using as fully as I could?
That last question can lead to some pretty fun discoveries. A cucumber doesn’t have to become another cucumber salad. Herbs don’t have to be sprinkled over dinner tonight or dried for later. And you don’t need a bushel basket overflowing with produce before it’s worth trying something new. Sometimes a small harvest is exactly the right amount for experimenting.
What can you do with your garden harvest besides canning?
Not every harvest needs to become a big preservation project. Sometimes you simply need a few more ideas in your back pocket.
A pile of cucumbers or other crisp vegetables might become quick pickles. Cabbage can become sauerkraut or another fermented food. Extra fruit might be just enough for a small batch of quick jam rather than an afternoon of canning.
Then there are possibilities you may never have considered. Kale can become kale powder. Beets can become beet jerky. Fresh herbs can flavor an infused vinegar. Vegetable scraps that normally head for the compost pile can become the beginning of homemade broth.
And sometimes the answer isn’t preservation at all. It’s simply finding a completely different way to eat something while it’s fresh. Anyone who grows zucchini knows how quickly the excitement of the first one can turn into, “Oh look…another zucchini.” Turning it into something unexpected, like zucchini fries, can make a familiar harvest feel new again.
That’s the shift we’re really after. You don’t need to learn how to preserve everything. You need enough possibilities that when you walk in from the garden with something in your hands, you have more than one answer to “What am I going to do with this?”
How can you preserve garden produce without spending all day in the kitchen?
Start with the harvest you actually have. How much did you pick? How much time do you have? And most importantly, what will you and your family actually eat?
This is where having more options makes such a difference. A handful of fruit doesn’t necessarily call for a major canning session. Extra herbs don’t have to be dried simply because that’s what you’ve always done. And vegetables don’t have to be preserved at all if there’s a delicious way to enjoy them while they’re fresh.
The best way to use more of your garden harvest isn’t one particular preservation method. It’s having several options and choosing the one that fits what you harvested, the time you have available, and the foods your household actually enjoys.
That can also take some of the pressure out of harvest season. When you’ve planted a seed, watered it, worried about it, protected it from pests and finally watched it produce food, letting any of that food go to waste can feel especially disappointing. But trying to save every tomato, leaf and zucchini can take some of the joy out of it, too.
The goal doesn’t have to be making sure absolutely nothing ever reaches the compost pile. You might eat some tonight, try something new with some, save some for later, and share some with a neighbor.
And yes, if you’ve grown zucchini, you may eventually start leaving bags of it on people’s porches. We understand. 😄
What you do with your harvest can change what you grow
There’s another benefit to experimenting with different ways to use your harvest. What happens in your kitchen can start influencing what happens in your garden.
Discover something you love making with fresh herbs? You might decide to grow more next year. Find a new way to use kale that your family actually likes? Suddenly another kale plant sounds like a pretty good idea.
And if you discover that nobody in your house wants to eat quite as many beets as you planted this year, well…that’s useful gardening information, too.
Over time, you start learning not only what grows well in your garden, but what earns its place there because you genuinely enjoy using it. In that way, enjoying your harvest isn’t really the end of the gardening process. What you learn from this year’s harvest becomes part of planning the next one.
Ready to see what else your harvest can become?
Reading that kale can become powder or that garden vegetables can become quick pickles is one thing. Sometimes you need to actually see someone do it before you think, “Okay, I could try that.”
That’s why we created Enjoy Your Harvest.
Instead of just telling you about different ways to use fresh food, our expert teachers take you into the kitchen and show you. You’ll see practical demonstrations featuring quick pickles, fermentation, homemade vegetable broth, herbal vinegars, quick jam and creative ways to use vegetables you may already be harvesting.
Whether you’re bringing in baskets of produce or picking a handful at a time, learning a few more ways to use what you grow can help you enjoy more of the food you worked so hard to grow.
And that’s really what harvest season should be about: not the pressure to save every last vegetable, but the pleasure of turning what you grew into food you’re excited to eat and share.
Come see what your harvest can become.
