This last few days have been sort of a blur of frenzied picking, hauling, digging, hauling and stacking garden produce in the new greenhouse, away from the freezing cold that has suddenly descended on us with a vengance.

For the last three days we’ve been picking, then going out, remembering another section of freeze sensitive plants that we missed and picking them too.

But one of the benefits of this sudden harvest is that we get to eat up all our “mistakes” and very ripe produce. Or produce that will not keep and doesn’t lend itself to canning very well. Included in this are potatoes that I’ve cut or skinned with the digging fork, bits of Swiss Chard that aren’t worth canning, tiny summer squash, big cucumbers and very ripe tomatoes.

So this time of the year we eat well. Really well, as I try to use up all those vegetables before they go bad. For instance, we have winter squash that the stem broke off while we picked it. They are prone to rotting in storage, so (Gee!) we have to eat them! Now we eat our fill of all sorts of odds and ends, joyfully.I picked half a dozen small ears of sweet corn; our very last, three large cucumbers we’d missed, two sweet onions that got stepped on during harvest, a dozen summer squash and a small basket full of Swiss chard. So for dinner tonight, we had corn on the cob, a cucumber salad with sweet onions sliced with them, fried sliced summer squash and more onions, with a sliced green pepper and steamed Swiss chard. I also opened a pint of sliced ham, and we had a harvest feast.

I smiled. Our feast was just to keep food from going bad. Gee ain’t life hard here on our backwoods homestead???

I’ve posted readers’ questions and answers below:

Blanching beans

We made a mistake on our green beans process for frozen beeans we froze them without blanching we wanted to know if the beans have been the freezer a month and we blanch them now and re-freeze will they be ok or have we lost that crop?

Daniel Leitch
Fremont, Michigan

If I were you, I’d just leave well enough alone and eat the beans relatively soon. Blanching stops the ripening process and maintains the best flavor. But I’ve frozen some vegetables withouth blanching and they turned out perfectly fine. For long-term storage, though, blanching makes a big difference in the flavor so it is recommended. — Jackie

« Read the rest of this entry »