Canning, Drying, Freezing, and General Preserving the Harvest 2025

Preserving the fruits of the harvest.

Freezing our first flush of sweet peppers.



The bell peppers are the easiest to dice.


Vacuum sealing is the superior way of freezing.

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Total in the bags are 34ibs and 6oz of diced sweet peppers.

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Been doing a bunch of freeze drying tomatoes and some cantaloupe.



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13 quarts medium-hot salsa.

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Canned 11 more quarts of medium salsa, need to grow some yellow or orange paste tomatoes, so I can color code the spiciness of the salsa.
Freeze dried tomatoes (blanched and peeled and just diced raw) and some watermelon, which turned out very good (concentrated the sweetness to candy levels).



Been doing a lot of green beans and still in the middle of it.


Have been very annoyed with the fortex pole beans; they don’t like to climb, and they only grow 4ft tall with most all the beans in the bottom 2ft. One thing very unique about them though is one out of every ~50-75 beans are abnormally sweet, like sweet enough to make you say woah. It is probably a exclusive couple of plants that are the super sweet, but I got beaned out when sampling down the row to see if I can find the plant with the sweet beans.

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Nice harvest @KS_razerback

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Been chopping a lot of corn lately and bagging it, done 6 bags so far…




Kind of goes in this category.

plums coming in. friend’s tree in high gear so i made plum butter. there’s more on the way too, labor day we are having canning day at my other friend’s house and doing all the stuff. they have a huge grape vine so we are planning juice and jelly from that, beans from my place since they’ve produced a lot, pickles, jam.

plum butter; cling stone is evil i think, so much work


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Is freeze dried better than a standard dehydrator? What’s the up and down sides?

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It has very minimal oxygen exposure, like bananas or apples don’t brown or alter the nature of the flavor much. The food doesn’t shrink, it stays in about the exact same shape before dehydrating with the water removed (you can’t make raisins in it).

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