Given the seasonal nature of the climate here in the UK preserving our harvest for the winter is very important to us in our drive towards self-reliance. We have a number of ways we store our surplus fruit and vegetables.
Bottling (canning); We make lots of jams and chutneys and bottle(can) fruit. There are lots of websites about making jam and bottling so I won’t give details here.
Drying; We use our solar dryer and solar de-hydrator to dry all of our range of fruit, see Solar drier
Freezers; We now have four! freezers which we run from our solar electricity where we can. We use these for preserving vegetables, bread (we make a large batch and freeze some of it) and our home bred cockerels when they are killed (when they start to crow!) We have added extra insulation to our freezers which has reduced their electricity use by about one third.
We also grow crops such as roots (potatoes, beetroots, carrots etc) leeks, squash and brassicas which will store though the winter.
