This week’s episode is one every gardener will appreciate, especially anyone who’s ever stood in the kitchen staring at an avalanche of peak-season produce. Growing the food is only half the story. To help with the other half — food preservation — I’m joined by Staci and Jeremy Hill, the husband and wife team behind the new book “The Preserver’s Garden.”
What I love about their approach is that they flip the script on how most of us think about food preservation. Instead of waiting for food to be ripe to decide what to do with it all, they start at the very beginning, designing the garden itself with food preservation in mind. That means choosing the right varieties, planning for volume, timing the harvest for batch processing, and matching specific crops for the preservation methods that showcase them best.
Staci and Jeremy Hill, the authors of “The Preserver’s Garden,” live in Missouri at their 11.6-acre Gooseberry Bridge Farm.
Photo Credit: Jeremy & Staci Hill
Whether you’re brand new to preserving or you’ve been canning and fermenting for years but want to get more strategic about how your garden supports it, this conversation is packed with practical insights you can put to work right away.
Meet Staci and Jeremy Hill
Nearly a decade ago, Staci and Jeremy followed their dreams and moved their family from a house in the suburbs to an old farmhouse on 11.6 acres south of Rogersville, Missouri.
Staci and Jeremy have six growing kids, so they always keep their pantry shelves full. Food preservation is a way of life for them, just as it had been for earlier generations.
“Our grandparents did this as a default — most of our grandparents, if not our great-grandparents,” Jeremy says. “Around the turn of the 20th century, most people grew their own food and they planned what they were going to grow.
“Whether that was meat, chicken, cow, dairy, eggs, produce — everything,” he continues. “You planned what you were going to need for the year, and you planned ahead. In the 20th century, a lot of amazing things happened. Technology and communications and travel skyrocketed. What went by the wayside, in that, are some of those traditional skills. And the ability to go to the grocery store and just get your food, while being a marvel, it removed people from that knowledge set.”
Jeremy says people are so far removed from the lifecycle that comes with producing your own food, and that’s what they hope to be able to introduce people back to.
“The thought that if we can get people that we’ve never encountered to think about things differently and maybe change a little bit of that behavior is really exciting to us,” he says.
Staci and Jeremy have been married for 21 years and have been growing food all that time.
“ I grew up in the country,” Jeremy says. “My grandparents canned their food, grew a lot of their food.”
Staci, meanwhile, grew up in the suburbs, with no gardening beyond a couple of tomato plants.
They had been gardening for a number of years and growing their family when they decided that they wanted to learn how to preserve food. By that time, it was too late for Jeremy to learn that from anyone in his family. So they had to start from scratch and seek out resources.
Three of the main drivers for preserving food were saving money, having clean food and taking on a challenge.
Jeremy loves a challenge. For example, when he grew 100 pounds of tomatoes in a season, next he wanted to grow 200, and then 500. “So a lot of it’s just good old-fashioned stick-to-itiveness,” he says.
When they lived in the suburbs for a number of years, gardening was not accessible on the scale they desired.
“We started out way back with just like one raised bed — one little 8-foot stretch of tomatoes or squash or whatever,” Staci recalls. “Then we got a little more into it and started with a community garden plot at a local park.”
However, that became frustrating. “We had to drive there,” she says. “Nobody wants to drive to their garden.”
Deer browsed in the community garden, and the garden was divided into organic and conventional gardening areas — but the paths right next to the organic plots were sprayed with chemicals.
They tried raised bed gardens on the side of their hilly suburban property, but that was very limiting in terms of the amount of food they could grow.
“So at that point, we were still buying a lot from the farmer’s market, and we would buy like those bulk boxes of canning tomatoes,” Staci says. “So we were learning those skills even though we could only grow four tomato plants.”
They now live near a large Amish and Mennonite community that offers a produce auction, so when they want more produce than they have grown, they know where to find it, and affordably and in bulk quantities.
Having an abundance of tomatoes and no one to share them with — everyone around them grows their own tomatoes — they looked into canning. It only took a Google search for them to realize it wouldn’t be that hard to get started.
“ Water bath canning tomato sauce is easy,” Jeremy says. “And then you’re just one little hop, skip and a jump away from salsa and tomato soup. And that’s without even getting into freeze drying and some of the other things.”
Even before they learned canning, they learned how to properly freeze produce so it will last in the freezer.
“You can make tomato sauce and freeze it,” Staci points out. “It’s just: make it in your crockpot till you like it, and throw it in the freezer. And it’s a good baby step if you’re afraid of canning.”
They froze green beans — blanching them then bagging them before putting them in the freezer — before they learned how to pressure can and freeze-dry beans.
Staci and Jeremy have six kids, so they always keep their pantry stocked with healthy and delicious food. Photo Credit: Jeremy & Staci Hill
Gardeners Who Can
It’s hard to know how much to grow for canning projects if you have never gardened before. How many tomatoes, zucchini or green beans plants you can grow can be limited by factors such as pest pressure where you live.
Jeremy advises thinking about an individual dish and working backwards when planning a garden.
“ If you want tomato sauce, you need to consider growing tomatoes, oregano, basil — thyme, maybe, if you’re feeling spicy,” Jeremy says. And if you want to grow your own salsa, he adds, grow different kinds of peppers plus cilantro
“There are different things that you can combine,” he says. “Not all of those are seasonal items. They don’t necessarily grow together.”
That means planning ahead by freezing cilantro so you’ll have it when your tomatoes are ready.
Decide what you intend to eat and preserve before planning your garden so you can grow the crops that fit your recipes. Photo Credit: Jeremy & Staci Hill
Maximize Yield
When you plan on canning a lot of food from your garden, you will need your garden to be very productive.
“A lot of it has to do with the varieties you’re growing and knowing your garden and your abilities,” Staci says.
Heirloom green beans will grow a reasonable amount, but varieties made for market production will have a lot more beans on a plant, she notes.
The Hills practice succession planting and companion planting to maximize their yields.
Staci grows cucumbers between tomato plants because cucumber beetles have a hard time finding them. They will find the cucumber plants eventually, but Staci buys enough time to get an adequate crop for her needs.
And then they grow onions and basil in between so no space is wasted, plus onions and basil have the benefit of repelling pests.
They save their tomato suckers and have planted them as late as the Fourth of July and still got mature fruit from them before the first frost in fall.
Succession planting helps to yield an abundance of food from a vegetable garden so you can preserve all you’ll need to get through the year. Photo Credit: Jeremy & Staci Hill
Food Preservation Misconceptions
“Right now, all of your food probably as a general rule comes from a grocery store or a farmer’s market or someplace you’re buying it,” Jeremy says. “You’re trading money for food.”
He encourages people to consider that they are trading their time for money in order to buy food.
“What if you think of it as cutting out the middleman and you just trade some of your time for your food?” he says. “Your yields are going to be higher, and you’re going to get a lot more out of it, not only from a production standpoint, but from a self-worth and feeling good about what you’ve done standpoint.”
For the food that the Hills are really passionate about eating, they always have two years’ worth on the shelves, so in case there is a growing season failure, they can catch up.
Freezing
Of all the ways to preserve food, Jeremy says freezing is the easiest.
“ Many of your vegetables can be frozen. Some have to be blanched first in order to maintain quality,” he says.
Figuring out what can be frozen and what requires blanching is a quick Google search away, Staci points out. “Nobody can keep all that in the brain all the time. Just look it up.”
Blanching involves either boiling water or steam.
“You cut up vegetables and you blanch them by exposing them to that water or steam for a set amount of time,” she explains. “And that time depends on how much you put in the pot, but also what vegetable it is. So like potatoes go a lot longer than beans, and you’re basically cooking it just a tiny bit to deactivate enzymes in the food that would break it down over time. So you’re stopping that process, and it allows it to keep more of its nutritional value and flavor in the freezer. Because things will still break down in the freezer if you don’t do that. It can also affect the color. Like with potatoes, if you don’t blanch them, they will turn brown when they’re either frozen or dehydrated.”
Vacuum Sealing
To prevent freezer burn, which is caused by oxygen, Staci and Jeremy vacuum seal food before it goes in the freezer. Vacuum sealing gets all of the oxygen out.
“You can just throw things in a regular zip-lock bag, but if you get all the air out, it will last significantly longer in deep freeze — years,” Staci says.
Vacuum sealing isn’t just for frozen food. Grains that are completely dry can also be vacuum sealed. Staci and Jeremy also use mylar bags with oxygen absorbers.
They like to order Mylar bags, oxygen absorbers and vacuum sealer bags from Wallaby, Pack Fresh USA and For Jars.
Dehydrating
“The Preserver’s Garden” shares the history of food preservation, including why people began dehydrating food thousands of years ago.
“ Jerky is a treat, and it’s a snack now, but that was how people preserved meat a long time ago, just by necessity, because salting and dehydrating were the only way you could keep your kill fresh for months or even years,” Jeremy says.
Fruit leather is another example of preservation by dehydration.
“A lot of kids love their fruit roll-ups,” Jeremy notes. “You can make your healthy ones that don’t have any added anything just by taking some fruit and mix it up — bananas, strawberries, blueberries, whatever you’ve got.”
Throw the fruits in a blender, make a puree, then lay it out on a sheet with parchment paper and put them in the oven with just the light on and let it dry out.
“It will go a little faster if you turn it on low, but it depends on how low your oven goes,” Staci adds.
An oven temperature of between 110 and 120°F is the aim. Any higher will cook the fruit, which is not what you want.
When the puree is dry, roll it up on the parchment paper and cut it into pieces with scissors. When the kids are hungry, they can unfurl the rolls and enjoy.
Their book also recommends drying food inside a parked car on a sunny day. You can purchase a dehydrator, but they wanted to give options that don’t require spending money.
“You can do a lot of this stuff without the equipment with what you already have in your house,” Jeremy says.
Dehydration can also be employed to make dried herbs and onion or garlic powder. Tomato peels and cores can be dehydrated and blended into a powder for making tomato paste or ketchup.
Salting
Salting is a preservation method used for meats like bacon, but salt can also be used for what’s grown in a garden.
Basil salt, jalapeño salt, “pizza” salt and onion salt are all examples of herb salts or flavored salts you can make with what you grow in your garden.
Mix the herbs with salt and dry it in the oven or dehydrator — or just leave the mixture on the counter.
“The salt is doing the work of drying,” Staci says.
“ Once you start making these salts, you’ll never stop,” Jeremy adds.
Herb growers can easily make flavored salts. Photo Credit: Jeremy & Staci Hill
Fermentation
“In fermentation, you’re trying to remove the bad bacteria, but replace it with your own,” Jeremy says.
Making yogurt is an example of fermentation. For vegetable gardeners, there’s making sauerkraut or kimchi with cabbage and pickles with cucumbers.
To ferment cucumbers, cut off the ends to avoid an enzyme on the blossom end that makes cucumbers bitter. Put the cucumbers in a saltwater brine for three to five days, depending on how warm your house is. When they taste like pickles you’re happy with, move them to the fridge to pause the fermentation process.
Canning
Water bath canning is for high-acid food, such as apples, peaches, pears and tomatoes. Water bath canning involves getting the food up to about 212°F — the temperature at which water boils.
Pressure canning brings the temperature in the jar up high enough to kill the bacteria that cause botulism. The temperature range is 240 to 250°F.
Botulism is the main danger of failing to adhere here to safe canning methods. That bacteria can’t grow in an acidic environment, so the pH level of food is important when water bath canning. Recipes have safety mechanisms built in, like adding lemon juice to a tomato recipe just in case the tomatoes are not naturally acidic enough, Staci points out. And you can buy a pH meter to determine if a recipe is safe.
Modern pressure canners are nothing to be intimidated by, the Hills point out. Modern canners have safety valves to avoid disasters.
“We’ve experienced the safety valve,” Staci says. “It works.”
Canning is a safe and effective way to preserve food when safety protocols are followed. Photo Credit: Jeremy & Staci Hill
Freeze-Drying
A freeze dryer requires an upfront investment. They are not cheap.
Jeremy says it’s an appliance that sits on a table and is loud — not something you want to use in your kitchen. It is a pressure-sealed chamber that freezes food very quickly at around -30 or -40°F. Then it sucks all the air out of the chamber.
“ Then it brings the temperature up very slowly, and as the temperature comes up, the water that’s in the food sublimates and it actually sticks to the outside of that chamber,” he says. “So when you open up, after the cycle’s over, you’re going to have the food that’s freeze-dried like you’re used to seeing, and there’s going to be a layer of pure ice around the outside of the chamber.”
“The Preserver’s Garden.: How to Grow a Garden for Fermenting, Canning, Pickling, Dehydrating, Freeze Drying, & More” by Staci and Jeremy Hill covers the many ways to made food last and how to plan an garden with food preservation in mind. Photo Credit: Jeremy & Staci Hill
If you haven’t listened to my conversation with Staci and Jeremy Hill on food preservation, you can do so now by scrolling to the top of the page and clicking the Play icon in the green bar under the page title.
Do you use any food preservation methods? Let us know about your successes in the comments below.
Links & Resources
Some product links in this guide are affiliate links. See full disclosure below.
Episode 168: Preserving Your Harvest with No Special Equipment, with Theresa Loe
Episode 179: Plant Partners: The Science-based Benefits of Companion Planting, with Jessica Walliser
Episode 250: Mastering the Art of Succession Planting, with Meg Cowden
Episode 326: An Introduction to Modern Homesteading, with Jill Winger
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joegardener Online Gardening Academy Beginning Gardener Fundamentals: Essential principles to know to create a thriving garden.
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GGW Episode 406: Abundant Harvest
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“The Preserver’s Garden: How to Grow a Garden for Fermenting, Canning, Pickling, Dehydrating, Freeze Drying, & More” by Staci and Jeremy Hill
Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. I receive a commission every time you purchase a product through an Amazon affiliate link. Some product links in this guide are affiliate links. However, none of the prices of these resources have been increased to compensate us, and compensation is not an influencing factor on their inclusion here. The selection of all items featured in this post and podcast was based solely on merit and in no way influenced by any affiliate or financial incentive, or contractual relationship. At the time of this writing, Joe Lamp’l has professional relationships with the following companies who may have products included in this post and podcast: Milorganite, Soil3, Territorial Seed Company, Cool Springs Press / Quarto Group and Dramm. These companies are either Brand Partners of joegardener.com and/or advertise on our website. However, we receive no additional compensation from the sales or promotion of their product through this guide. The inclusion of any products mentioned within this post is entirely independent and exclusive of any relationship.
