Preserving The Harvest

I often get asked some version of “What inspired you to start your farm?” It’s a good question. Farming, especially vegetable farming, isn’t known as a quick way to get rich or an easy way of life. Thus, there must be some kind of interesting and complex answer to the question. I’ll save the full answer to that question for a later blog post but today I wanted to answer part of it in our work to preserve the harvest.

I grew up on a farm. My dad farms corn, beans, beef and used to grow and raise wheat, alfalfa, pigs & more. My mom was a stay at home mom and kept a HUGE garden. Every year we would work together as a family to preserve the harvest. Shelling, blanching and freezing peas. Husking, blanching and freezing sweet corn. Snapping and pressure canning green beans. Quartering, cooking and running tomatoes through the food mill. These were all normal summer tasks for my family to fill our freezers and the canning room downstairs with the seasons bounty.

I didn’t know it at the time but this was something truly special. Most families had stopped going to all this work. Most of what we canned and froze could be had at the grocery store for cheap. But, as I learned quickly once I got to college, store bought vegetables whether fresh, frozen or canned just taste terrible compared to vegetables from the garden. Plus, the time spent working together with my family was invaluable and instilled a deep appreciation for the independence that comes with the knowledge of food preservation.

So, one of the reasons I started this farm was so I could preserve the harvest. So I could pass on the knowledge of food preservation to my kids. And so I can connect with my family over the act of preserving the food we’ll eat this winter together. With any luck, my kids will want to pass that knowledge along as well!

Below is a copy of the salsa recipe I really love this year. It’s from the Ball Blue Book. You can find the recipe here: https://www.ballmasonjars.com/blog?cid=zesty-salsa