Your Freezer is Your Friend....

With garden harvests beginning to roll in, I started to weigh my options for preserving all this veggie goodness. I don't own a pressure canner (yet) and we are just beginning Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace University, so I won't be dropping $100 on one anytime soon. I DO own a deep freeze and a Food Saver! (Although my Food Saver is an older model than the ones shown here...these are pretty!)

When my carrot harvesting was complete this morning, I ended up with this:

I was pretty ecstatic, to say the least! This was my first year to successfully grow carrots!

After cutting off the tops (and giving them to the chickens) and scrubbing the carrots, I blanched them according to the directions found here.

The final yield was seven bags of carrots for the freezer!

I added a little pat of butter to some of these so we can just steam them right in the Food Saver bag in the microwave. Others I left without butter to use in soups and stews.

We did spare this carrot:

Which the girls named "THE CARROT MONSTER...MWAH-HA-HA!" They wanted to save it to show to their dad and play with it a bit! THE CARROT MONSTER gave us an opportunity to talk about how carrots solve the problem of hitting a rock under the soil. Good stuff!