Selecting perennials well comes down to a lot more than just choosing what it is you want to plant and harvest. It’s equally important that you choose foodstocks that you can store well for the long haul.
This is the second of a three part series on selecting perennials. Parts one and three can be viewed by clicking HERE and HERE.
Imagine if you will
It’s December. You’d love to have your spouse’s favorite – cobbler – for dessert; or give the kids something sweet and healthy to carry with them for a snack. Some raspberry tea would go down pretty good, too. The grocery stores have nothing to offer you. Maybe they don’t have fresh food; maybe they do but you’re out of funds. Good on you for having the foresight to have plenty of perennial food sources; it was a great comfort all summer; but nothing’s ripe now.
So you pull out a jar of canned peaches for the cobbler, fix up the kids’ bag with some fruit leather and a handful of nuts, and squeeze a few dried raspberries to crumble them into your tea. Problem solved, because you also had the foresight to plant perennials that were easy to store.
Storing food… eating the fruits of your labor (and, of course, your plant’s labor)
There are lots of ways to store food of course, but they’re not all created equal. When selecting perennials, this is an important thing to keep in mind. If you hate making jelly, for example, some fruits are not for you.
Frozen is tastiest and easiest, but requires reliable power constantly, and a lot of freezer space to make a considerable store. It’s not a good prep. Pressure canning is a better bet since the results store long term at room temperature, but it’s very fuel intensive and the equipment is somewhat failure prone.
The best prep perennials then are the ones that store well with low-tech preparation. The blue ribbon goes to those things that are happy if you give them a dark spot in a cellar. Nuts last well — more so if you can seal them with vacuum and oxygen absorbers, but pretty good all by themselves. Some varieties of apples and even pears will last for months, properly stored.
A key part of Selecting perennials involves education ahead of time. Read about your varieties before you pick; it’s often part of the information available. Apples and grapes are particularly easy to make compact, high trade value storage products: cider and wine.
Runner Up?
Runner up goes to those things that dehydrate well. Apples seem even sweeter after drying, good either to the leathery or crispy stage of dryness. (Sprinkle some cinnamon on those slices before they dry for an extra treat.)
Blueberries are tasty dried, but they’re a bit of a pain as I find I have to squish them to split the skins to get them to dry well and they lose their flavor if you let them go too long and get hard. Strawberries dry nicely, and if you have a slicer for boiled eggs the strawberry prep is much quicker.
Not every method works for all plants, though…
Don’t trust peaches, raspberries, or blackberries. They dry very easily … but will not rehydrate well. No cobbler from dried peaches for you! They do work pretty well eaten dried, for example in fruit leathers.
Water bath canning is also fairly low tech, needing only plenty of heat, really big pots, and a supply of jars that re-use well but lids that often can’t be re-used. We have a Lot of canning lids stored; they take very little room. Not all foods may be water bath canned safely, but peaches and pears can … There’s your cobbler!
If you’ve tried other preservation methods that did, or didn’t, work well, it would be kind of you to share what you know in the comments.