If you want to grow a large vegetable garden to save money it makes sense to save the excess for the out of season months. What’s the best way to accomplish this and have nutritious, tasty foods, freezing or canning?
If freezing do you need to go the vacuum seal route of are plastic bags OK?
Personally, I go with freezing. If you eat the stuff within six months to a year securely closed plastic bags or containers are adequate, vacuum sealing is, in my opinion, an unnecessary expense unless you routinely let stuff sit a loooooong time. I use plastic bags and just squish out the excess air. Ziplock “freezer bags” are available which are slightly heavier than the usual zipping bags, and do seem to protect the food better. They also have a spot on which to write what it is and the date frozen (you will want to do this, trust me). I do find blanching before freezing gives best results. I come from a family that freezes, which has a lot to do with my choices. The downside is that a power failure can wipe out your stash of stuff. The upside is that this preserves some of the vitamin C in foods (although not all).
However, there is nothing wrong with canning, particularly if you already have the equipment and know how. It must be done properly for health reasons, but assuming you can follow instructions reliably that is something well within the capability of most human beings. The upside is that properly canned food stays good on the shelf and does not require space in your freezer or power to maintain its preservation. The downside is more equipment required.
I will note that some foods are better one way than the other. Potatoes, for instance, are much easier to home can with good results than freezing them. I really do prefer frozen greens over canned. So, ideally, if you had a really big garden, you’d do both.
I will also note a third option: dehydration/drying. I am not so skilled at this one, but I am learning. I’m intending to dehydration some of the vegetables I commonly use in stews and soups as multi-hour simmering is an easy way to rehydrate things, and dehydrated, although not quite as nutritious as canned or frozen, do not require power to maintain, are shelf-stable if done properly, and take up a lot less room than canned. For some items, such as herbs, this is a traditional means of preservation.
So a lot of this comes down to your equipment (what you have and are willing to buy) and personal preference.
I’m sure canning will cost you more. Canned stuff is nothing like what you started out with, while freezing comes close. Most stuff will cost you more to can than to buy it in the store. I make pickles I can’t buy and jellies. I buy the rest. I do make fruit leather since last year and you freeze that after making it to keep it longer. Dehydrating is cheaper than buying the dried fruits for snacks if you grow the fruit. I can’t say that the vegetables are that great reconstituted after dehydrating for storage. Commercial packers use freeze drying.
another preservation method is root cellaring, keeping cool and dry.
the food item often determines the best method. some foods can be done multiple methods, depends on amount to preserve and how you want to use it later.
freezing can preserve tastes and keep texture though at a constant energy cost and is very space limited both for area that can be used and the volume of the food doesn’t reduce. sealing tight and freezing fast and keeping deep frozen are important issues.
canning often requires cooking which can affect taste and texture and nutrition. it reduces the volume of many food items. it takes more time to do than freezing. it has a one time energy input. you can spread the storage to a large area.
Is ‘canning’ what we call ‘bottling’ here in Australia? Or do you really use metal cans at home?
We freeze and bottle (in glass jars using heat). It depends on what product which we use. Apricots and peaches and things we will use for desserts, we tend to bottle. We make jam as well.
We freeze vegetables, especially tomatoes. That is the huge money saver, and they tend to ripen in a massive splurge. We freeze heaps of bags of tomato (just chopped and boiled a bit) and then use it as the base of soups, stews and pasta. Tonight, for example, it was some bacon, onion, garlic and a few herbs from the garden, done quickly in olive oil. Add the tomato. Then add the pasta. Our own tomato goo has so much flavour, that’s all we need.
We also had fresh asparagus. It’s late winter here. No asparagus tastes as good as that which was picked only minutes before, with a light steam. Add nothing. You can’t buy it! Once you have an asparagus patch going (takes a year or two) then it is free every year, just comes up all on its own. We don’t freeze or bottle it because it tastes so heavenly, we just have asparagus every night for weeks!
in North America canning is bottling for the most part.
The term “canning” predates the use of metal cans. It was done with glass bottles initially, and the term still applies to the method, regardless of the container material, at least in the U.S.
Why would you do either to potatoes? Whole potatoes will last year-round without any sort of preservation needed.
I vote for freezing, too. But if you don’t have a lot of freezer capacity, or if you live in a place prone to electricity outages, canning has its advantages.
Thank you for the explanations of ‘canning’. Fascinating. The brand which dominates the bottling is Fowlers’ Vacola (which we use):
Fowlers Vacola kits
Is this basically the same as you guys use? Now I go searching, i do find the term ‘canning’ used on some Australian sites. I’d just never heard it. We tend to bottle fruits mostly.
Potatoes and pumpkins we cool store in the dark, and they last much of the year as long as we choose the right varieties for this area.
In the US, the jars used for home canning are often called Mason jars and Ball is a common brand.
As you are talking about cost, you need to consider both the one-time prep costs, and the storage costs, which will continue until you eat them up.
Freezing has lower prep costs. Many items can be frozen directly, several need to be blanched or parboiled before freezing. Canning requires the food to be fully cooked, and requires boiling water to sterilize the jars.
Freezing has higher maintenance costs. You need electricity to run a freezer continuously. Canned food has minimal maintenance costs; basically keeping it from freezing is sufficient.
So for cost comparisons, it depends on the efficiency of your freezer vs. the efficiency of your stove, and the time you intend to preserve the food before eating it. My guess would be that freezing is cheaper for short-term storage (50-75 days) while canning is cheaper for longer-term storage.
P.S. Drying is another food preservation method. And if you can do it without spending energy (‘sun-dried’) it’s very cheap.
Most people are running the freezer regardless of throwing in a few quarts of beans, so the freezer costs them no more then they already are paying.
I must thank astro for starting this thread. My husband has just come out of hospital after a bad infection which got into his knee joint. 3 operations, lots of pain, all that sort of stuff. He can’t walk again yet and may never get full use back. Bad times, and he’s (understandably) not having a good time.
For the first time in decades, he decided he couldn’t start a veggie garden this season. It is part of his identity - he always has a big veggie garden. I was talking to him about this thread, and it was enough to convince him to let me start it under his direction, so he will have it when he can use his leg again. We had a lovely day, winter sun, damp soil, clearing out one of the beds, and planting.
Then we made a nice discovery. Last year we had summer from hell, which led to the Victorian bush fires which came very close. We thought that, like the rest of the garden, the carrots had shriveled in the extreme heat. When I cleaned up the weeds, we found they had regenerated and there was crop there! We picked some baby carrots to thin the line, and froze them. He was so cheared up by the day’s activities. All because I was telling him about the comments in this thread.
Apparently not where I live - if I keep them in my apartment they go bad after awhile. I have no root cellar, and the water table is so high here they even if I could dig one it would require a sump pump continually. If I leave them in the ground they can survive the winter but I can’t dig them out of the frozen ground mid-winter, which although preserves them also makes them inaccessible to me.
Not letting the garden sit idle is a good thing. It takes a lot more effort to restore a bed left idle. I worked at the garden as therapy when I could hardly do physical work. The first year I restored a whole 2 by 8 feet of flower bed after a whole summer one foot at a time. The next year I manged the whole length, about 16 more feet and had planted purchased plants set in holes in the spring cut in landscaping material laid on the old garden bed. The next year I managed a lot more, so don’t give up.
Be sure to plant containers of plants he can work on. You can set the pots on a table to work on weeding and trimming them. You set them back down where you want them and move on. A few (20) of these to pamper is good for the restricted mobility person. I do recommend a drip irrigation system if you have a large number of pots.
Harmonious Discord: I assume this reply is for me and it is terrific advice. I hadn’t thought about the containers. I will start thinking about ways that he can do some gardening, other than by proxy. I was just so pleased that he changed his mind about giving up on the garden. I agree that gardening is great therapy. I have a garden as well, but the veggies are his!
With a timer and drip irrigation for containers you don’t have to worry about forgetting to water or taking days off away from the house. Don’t take on too much of a garden, so it all gets neglected. Smaller and manageable is better than large and all weeds.
Window boxes he can reach may be something you have never had. I didn’t have any until I found it hard to move around.
<irrelevant hijack>
Incidentally, the same company (or more precisely, a spinoff of it) also made the optics for the Hubble Space Telescope. They started making aeronautical instruments during WWII as part of the patriotic effort, and from there moved on into aerospace.
canning of food that spoils with oxygen needs to be vacuum preserved which involves cooking or blanching.
food can also be preserved in acid or pickling or sugaring and not be fully cooked though the jars are sterilized and heat used to create a vacuum.