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Harvest and Preservation
Harvest timing and handling
Pick in the cool of morning; handle like eggs — bruises rot first. Leafy greens cut-and-come-again (outer leaves, plant keeps producing); beans and zucchini picked small and often to keep plants productive; tomatoes at full color (or before first frost, ripening green ones indoors); potatoes after tops die back, cured 1-2 weeks dark and airy for storage skins; onions and garlic when tops fall, cured until necks are papery; winter squash when rinds resist a thumbnail, cured warm for two weeks, stems left on.
Root cellaring without a cellar
Storage crops want specific climates: potatoes and most roots — cold and humid (4-8 °C; a cool basement corner, insulated garage box, buried barrel/bin, or in-ground clamp under straw and soil); onions and garlic — cold and dry, hanging in mesh; winter squash — cool-room dry (10-15 °C); cabbage — cold and humid, outer leaves on. Check stores every couple of weeks and remove anything softening — one rotten potato takes the box. Carrots and beets keep beautifully layered in boxes of barely damp sand.
Fermentation: preservation plus nutrition
Lacto-fermentation needs only vegetables, salt, and time — no energy, and it adds vitamins and probiotics. How to make sauerkraut, step by step (the master recipe for all vegetable ferments): shred cabbage, 2% salt by weight (20 g per kg), massage until brine flows, pack into a jar below its own brine with a weight, loosely covered, at cool room temperature 1-4 weeks, then cold storage. Same method: carrots, beets, turnips, green beans, cucumbers (add a grape or oak leaf for crunch). Cloudy brine and sour smell are correct; surface white film (kahm yeast) is skimmed; anything fuzzy or foul is discarded.
Drying
The oldest, cheapest method: herbs hung in bunches; fruit, tomatoes, mushrooms and thin vegetable slices dried in a dehydrator, low oven with door cracked, or sun (dry climates) until leathery-to-brittle; store airtight and dark. Dried tomatoes, fruit leather, and dried mushrooms concentrate flavor as well as shelf life. Blanch most vegetables briefly before drying to preserve color and vitamins.
Canning, briefly (safety-critical)
High-acid foods (jams, fruit, pickles in vinegar, tomatoes with added lemon juice or citric acid) are safe in a boiling-water bath. Low-acid foods (plain vegetables, meat, broth) are only safe in a pressure canner following tested recipes exactly — see the food-storage chapter's botulism warning. When in doubt: freeze, dry, or ferment instead.
Freezing and the grid question
Freezing preserves quality best but is hostage to the grid; treat the freezer as the short-tier store and keep the deep tier in dried, canned, fermented, and cellared forms. A full freezer holds safe temperatures roughly 48 hours unopened (24 half-full); grouping frozen bottles of water inside buys more. If power fails long: pressure-can, dry, brine, or cook-and-share the thawing meat before it warms above 4 °C for more than a couple of hours.