With spring upon us, many are planning a vegetable garden! However, I (Litsa) am only planning on enjoying the spring & summer harvests of fresh produce! I’m preparing lunches and dinners around last year’s harvests so that my freezer is empty & ready too—-as I remind myself about all that I’m learning about saving more at the grocery store each season.
In the summer, I lean towards visiting the local Farmer’s Market twice a week to cash in on fresh produce that I can freeze for our family’s meals. Additionally, my mother-in-law allows us to come after her garden’s surplus. Thus, our freezer stays full of fresh vegetables all year long. However, last year I learned to taste test before buying out local gardener’s stock.
My mother-in-law grows Peaches-N-Cream corn, a tricolor corn that is sweet as sugar on a cob. No butter or salt is needed! Just a cob of fresh corn!?! Thus, when I found a surplus of this corn at the local farmer’s market, I bought ALL of it! Then, the bagged corn was shucked over conversation along with the corn that my mother-in-law had given us. All of this delicious corn was mixed in with the bad crop of corn from the farmer’s market. When we cook corn, I never know if it will taste like “bland dry wheat” (the bad batch from the farmer’s market) or sugary, cream peaches corn (my mother in law’s corn)!?!
Lesson learned!
Taste the produce first—buy a small batch and get the gardener’s name/number. IF you like the crop, buy more. And if you are storing or freezing produce from two sources, label it accordingly so if you do get a bad batch, you will know who it came from when you bought it.
So whether you are growing or gathering, get ready for stockpiling fresh produce!
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