Harvesting and Preservation Made Simple

Easy Steps for Beginners to Harvesting, Canning, Dehydrating, & Preserving Food in Your Own Backyard Homestead on a Budget

De: M. L. Woodruff

Narrado por: Azure Elizabeth

Save money and eat healthily all year round — learn how to preserve your homegrown food without special equipment or skills!

As a gardener, you relish planting, cultivating, and harvesting your own crops. But what to do with excess produce?

About one-third of all food produced worldwide is lost annually, totaling 1.3 billion tons! Don't waste your efforts or money.

Discover food preservation techniques to reduce waste and grocery bills.

This guidebook teaches:

• Harvesting, canning, pickling, fermenting, freeze-drying, dehydrating, and food storage
• Proper harvesting methods and choosing the right foods for preservation
• Canning, pickling, and other preservation methods explained
• Creating pickled vegetables and retaining food's nutritional value
• Effective food storage techniques for longer freshness

Food preservation is simpler than you think! Enjoy fresh, homemade, preserved food year-round.

Ready to enjoy your garden's bounty? Click “Add to Cart” now!

©2024 Better Minds, LLC (P)2024 Better Minds, LLC

Overview of Harvesting and Preservation

As the title states, this book is all about preserving your harvest in a variety of ways, like the standard canning methods as well as less common ones like fermentation, freeze drying, and dehydration. The book actually starts by telling you how to best harvest fruits and vegetables from your garden so that you don't damage the plant or produce as you remove it. Each section describes techniques and challenges and provides recipes. I'll admit I am often leery of canning and fermentation recipes in books like this. I certainly recommend talking with the canning expert at your county’s extension office before using recipes from unknown sources or at least get one basic standard canning and recipe book by a trustworthy source so you can better understand the processes, what can go wrong, and how to prevent possible problems that could lead to food spoilage or other harmful bacterial growth, creating health consequences for those who eat your preserved foods. The author does not include any PDF with this audiobook. Audible allows this, and I think it's crucial for a book with recipes and lists like this one. If you want to use either, taking notes and having to pause and/or rewind the audiobook continually will be burdensome.

This is the second book in the author's Backyard Homestead on a Budget series, and some flaws I heard in that book were magnified in this book. The narrator is almost too chirpy and upbeat, and the repetitive phrases meant to spur you into action got tedious after a while. At times, I felt there was no substance, only sizzle, to these meant-to-be-motivational, meant-to-inspire-comfort-with-something-new phrases and brief digressions. I swear, at a certain point, I felt that if I heard the phrase “fermentation station” one more time, I would simply have to turn off the audiobook! Never good for a book. The narrator also occasionally mispronounces words, even ones I consider relatively common. A narrator should know how to pronounce every word she will say in an audiobook!

The book does provide an overview of various methods of preserving your harvest or haul from the farmers' market. Some are directly actionable, but I recommend adding other resources if preservation (or a particular method) is new to you, from classic preservation texts to YouTube videos. It's an important and cost-saving skill, but you want to go about it correctly and really know your stuff to do it well and safely.