The very first thing our landscape designer asked us when we told him we wanted to put in a food forest was, “Do you have somewhere to keep the harvest?”

The thing about food forests is… they produce a lot of food. Usually all at once, or, if you’re lucky, in waves.

But it’s easy to drown if you’re not prepared to “put it up.”

Last year, our 30-year-old apple tree put out about 300 pounds of usable fruit. This year, we’re on track to get 100+ pounds of peaches from our 5 peach trees.

I shared a photo of peaches I’d picked today, and my friend Nneka asked, “But what do you do with them all?”

So let’s talk about preserving fresh food!

When I first started learning how to do simple water bath canning, I realized that these types of skills, the kind that let you preserve the harvest without the use of a deep freeze, could have been lost in a single generation.

(And please don’t misunderstand — I definitely use my deep freeze. I’m just talking about other preserving methods right now.)

I know for a fact that my grandmothers canned things. I knew my great grandmother Carter when I was a young child and she had a basement that was still filled with canned fruit and veg — even though she was blind and almost 90 when I knew her.

But my mother? She might have been taught how to make jam or can fruits and vegetables at one time in her childhood, but she never did it when I was a kid. She didn’t have to; we were a lower middle class suburban family subsisting on TV dinners and Hamburger Helper! And neither of my grandmothers were canning their own food by that time, so it’s not something I learned.

Making jam, canning fruits and vegetables, making pickles, drying things, baking your own bread — all of these were skills I ended up teaching myself or learning from friends. And they’re skills that could have been, and are being, lost — in just one generation.

I had some practice with preserving food long before we put in the food forest, and my friend, Butter, is a veteran at preserving food who taught me that water bath canning didn’t have to be scary. So now that I’m dealing with my own plenty (estimating we’ll have 100 pounds of peaches this year, 300 pounds of apples last year, etc.), I have my preferences for how I like to preserve the harvest.

Here’s the other thing: We started small, and we continue to be pretty small when it comes to preserving food.

I’m not like those homesteaders you see on Instagram with an entire room full of canned produce. I have a shelf in my garage that has to house ALL of my food storage, an extra freezer in the garage, and a small corner of a shelf inside for jams we might use soon. That’s it.

There may be a time when we do more, but for now, my food preserving helps us not waste what we grow, and supplements what we eat throughout the year.

If you’re looking for the easiest way to preserve some fresh produce, freezing is probably it. But it’s not difficult to learn to water-bath can or dehydrate foods to expand your options.

For most fruits, I do like to make jams, and while we eat some in my family, I give a lot of them away as gifts, especially at the holidays. If you make a lot of jams, be sure you’re prepared to eat a lot of jams. This jam muffin recipe, for example, is one of my favorites in the winter, when fresh fruit is scarce and you have lots of jams to use up.

I have canned fruit before, like sliced peaches in juice or water, and while they keep beautifully, I find that my family is more likely to use frozen fruits. The one exception here is applesauce.

I have tried to dry some fruit, but unfortunately I haven’t had great luck — I think I don’t get them dry enough and they ended up getting moldy. My friend Butter, however, has successfully dried many, many gallons of apple slices and pear slices that kept for years in air-tight 5-gallon buckets — and were favorite snacks of my daughter and extended kiddos.

When freezing, I like to spread the fruit out on parchment paper on a rimmed cookie sheet and freeze solid before transferring to ziplock freezer bags. If you don’t take that extra step, you end up having a solid block of fruit and having to defrost an entire bag at a time when maybe you don’t need a whole gallon of fruit at once.

(A note: You absolutely can use reusable bags to freeze fruits and veg; I have and would again, but I don’t have enough of them in my collection that I want to have them out of rotation for so long in the freezer. So until I invest in more re-usables, I use plastic freezer bags; and we generally re-use freezer bags several times before we recycle them.)

We have also successfully stored whole apples in our garage for the entire winter. Our garage isn’t insulated, but it is attached to the house, so it stays relatively warmer than the outside, and only freezes hard maybe once or twice a winter.

The key to storing apples is to separate them and ensure air flow. The best way I’ve found to do that is to put them in between layers of paper and store them in open containers. I’ve found that laundry baskets from the dollar store and heavy cardboard flats from Costco work pretty well.

The apples we’ve stored have been Fujis, which are not really storage apples, so they aren’t great to just bite into and eat — but they are fine to cook with. We have several other varieties of apple trees now, so maybe some year we’ll have enough to try storing a different type.

So far, for the most part, I like to freeze vegetables or make pickles.

Like many modern families, my family isn’t super keen on canned veggies, so it’s never seemed like a great use of my time and energy to can them. Of course, if things changed and I didn’t have access to my deep freezer, canning would be my go-to.

The only thing I do can, when I have an abundance, is tomatoes. My friend Butter discovered that you can put whole, unpeeled plum tomatoes for sauce into the freezer as they ripen. Then, when you’re ready to can them, the skins slip right off when they defrost and the tomatoes are no worse for wear if you’re going to can them or make them into sauce anyway. Plus, then you can do the sweaty work of canning when the weather is cooler — win/win.

I’ve also put up salsas, both red and green, and those keep beautifully.

I typically wash, chop, and freeze my hearty greens raw. Greens like Swiss chard and kale grow really well for me, so we always have lots, and I just put them into freezer bags and use them throughout the year. Butter prefers to blanche hers before freezing, so they take up less room. Either method works.

I don’t have a lot of experience with storing cabbage, carrots, or potatoes, and minimal experience with squash. But my experiments storing apples in my garage lend me to believe these would also do OK in the minimally temperature controlled garage. We stored winter squash two years ago just out in the open and it did fine for several months (and then we lost a couple to rot).

I do love a good pickle, so I make pickles most years. I like classic dill cucumbers, but I’ve also done “dilly beans” (pickled green beans) and I love pickled okra, so I would definitely do that if I ever decide to grow okra.

I dry the wild garlic I forage from the park near my house in the garage for several months, and then I just store the heads in my pantry like I would any garlic from the store.

So what am I doing with all of our peaches?

Well, so far I’ve made two batches of jam, one peach-cherry, and one just peach “preserves” (which, to me, is just chunky jam). That used up maybe 4–6 pounds of peaches so far, as I only made small batches (about 2 pints each).

I like to can in small batches because a) it means I’m not doing it all day and b) if something goes wrong, I haven’t wasted bushels of fruit and pounds of sugar.

I’ve frozen about a gallon bag full of peach slices so far. I only have room in my freezer for a small tray to sit flat right now, so I’m doing those in small batches as well. My tray holds about four sliced peaches at a time.

Last week we had peach shortcake for dessert, and today I made a peach pie for family dinner tomorrow.

I’ve been eating about four a day (!!!) all by myself, and my daughter has been eating maybe one a day. (Believe it or not, my husband doesn’t like peaches!)

And I’ve given away probably 25 pounds to friends so far.

I’ll probably make one more batch of preserves (maybe peach ginger?) and then freeze as many as I can. I’m sure we’ll eat a bunch more fresh. And if it gets to the point that I’m worried I won’t be able to deal with the rest before they go off, I will give them to friends or donate them to the local food pantry, FISH.

And that, was actually the ultimate goal of our food forest: to have enough to feed us, feed our friends, and donate the rest.

Seems like we’re well on our way.