10 Ways to Keep Farm Fresh Fruits and Vegetables for the Winter Months

Peach apple compote (image via Morit Chatlynne/personal collection)

The taste of farm-fresh fruits and vegetables can bring you back to summer even in the dead of February. Here are 10 tips and techniques for keeping the bounty of the harvest through the winter months.

Preserving food predates farming. People found what tasty bits they could in the summer and tried to keep as much as possible to get through the cold months. Like a lot of food culture, that fell by the wayside during the latter half of 20th century. Vegetables came in cans, or frozen in bags or blocks. The produce section was for iceberg lettuce, bananas and red (not) delicious apples. Farmers markets were mostly to be found in California and Florida. CSA stood for racism. But now it stands for extremely delicious fresh and local fruits and vegetables. Yay progress!

The bounty of CSAs (community supported agriculture) is both a blessing and, well, if not a curse, a challenge. The blessings are obviously excellent produce and supporting small farmers. The main challenge is the bounty itself: sometimes you end up with more than you can eat in a week. What do you do with the surplus? And can you stretch out those blessings to keep you warm in the cold, sad, CSA-less winter months? Yes you can. In fact, my husband and I have been buying extra fruits and vegetables at the farmers market stand (same people as our CSA!). We plan to have plenty of summer-fresh pasta sauce in the freezer to keep us until the 2017 harvest.