STORING AND PRESERVING PRODUCE
It can be hard to eat fresh food before it goes bad. Proper storage and preservation techniques can help you stretch the life of your produce and make it stay fresher for longer so you get the most for your money.
Storing
This guide from Half Your Plate in California provides plenty of storage tips and tricks to get you started: Home Storage Guide for Fresh Fruits and Vegetables
Our friends at Garden City Harvest also have a few pointers in their blog:
Putting up your food for the summer
Bad Goat equals good dust (using sawdust for winter storage)
Freezing
Freezing can be a convenient method to preserve your produce. All you really need are some freezer-safe containers or plastic bags.
These guides from MSU Extension explain it all:
Freezing Vegetables ; Freezing Fruit
The National Center for Home Food Preservation offers more information, as do our friends writing the Garden City Harvest blog.
Drying
Drying foods is another easy way to make them last longer and it doesn’t require a lot of additional materials – you can dry foods in your oven, in the sun, or with a food dehydrator (tip: you can borrow a food dehydrator from the MUD Tool Library)
These MSU Extension guides explain it all:
Drying Vegetables ; Drying Fruits
The National Center for Home Food Preservation also offers more information about drying foods.
Canning
Canning can be an economical way to preserve food, but does require an investment of time (learning the proper process and preparing foods to be canned) and tools. There are lots of guides for canning on the internet, but MSU Extension and the National Center for Home Food Preservation are trusted sources to start with: