As the summer wears on, different veggies and fruits become ripe and are ready for harvest. One new experience for us starting out (which is of course obvious when you think about it) is that everything of the same kind more or less comes ripe at the same time. What to do with it?
Case in point, lettuce. It's one of those plants with tiny seeds that can be easily over planted and has a bigger reputation for being yummy than it actually is. By that we mean, even if you are a fan of salads (which we are) there is only so much lettuce you can eat in a 3-4 week period. And unfortunately lettuce is virtually impossible to preserve: you can't freeze it, drying it makes little sense, and, unlike spinach, it can't be cooked. So eating like a cow is really the only option. We ended up with way too much. Even after trying to eat it quickly and store it in the refrigerator, much of it went to the chickens, which is too bad but better than just rotting.
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| Preparing lettuce for the fridge. This is a fraction of what we grew. |
The next item that came ripe in a big way were the green onions. Fortunately, these are far easier to preserve. We have frozen them (pre-cut) and dried them out using our convection oven. That works quite well, but does make the house smell like onions for a while. Of course green onions last a while in the fridge in a plastic bag:
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| Preparing onions for preserving |
Finally, our raspberry bushes have been quite productive. We have basically done nothing to care for the plants, not even water them. They'll do well for a good pruning this fall, and the raspberries keep coming.
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| Already frozen, ready for ice cream. |
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