 Good morning. I'm Megan Humphrey. I'm the executive director of Hands and the mission of Hands is to get food to seniors who are low income. So we have workshops like this great Hands in the Dirt with Charlie and also some of them with Vermont Community Garden Network. We have Hands in the Kitchen, which is a series of nutrition education workshops with Chef Robin Burnett. We are planning also another holiday dinner, which is the delivery of about a thousand meals and gift bags all over the county on Christmas Day. So that's great. And then finally we have partnered with Heineberg Community Senior Center and lots of other organizations and volunteers in doing support buddies, which connects volunteers with seniors who might be isolated and or need food. So those are our programs and we want to do a shout out special thanks to AARP Vermont, CCTV Town Meeting TV, Gardener Supply, by Hannaford Red Wagon Plants and certainly to you, Charlie, for all of your help for so long. So we're really looking forward to this final one in this series, sadly, but I guess that also means that summer's ending, which is always hard for me. Anyways, we're looking forward to this morning's thanks so much. Thank you, Megan. It's great to be here. It's always fun to do these talks for hands. And yeah, thanks for everyone who's been following along all year. We've done maybe eight of these, I think going way back to March or April, once a month, covering different topics that are out there in the gardening world. And of course, today's topic is preserving the harvest. It is September. And I know a lot of people have, well, I guess it's one of three things probably either things didn't grow well so they've been done for a while. Things grew really well. And you kind of stayed on top of it as much as you can, or things are growing so well, you don't know what to do at all. And that's kind of the third one is why I'm here and that's to preserve it so that you can enjoy it. My wife, Wendy and I have been doing that for many years at our house. And it's great to be able to pull out some food that you have stored either fresh or frozen or canned or however you did it. In the middle of the winter to make a soup to make a stew to make whatever it is. And you have that freshness of the garden that's still there. And it's a nice way to save a lot of money too, especially if you have a big garden you can see we haven't bought vegetables, all season, all year from the store because we just have so much coming out of our garden and we still have it because it is staying warm, as it often does in September and in early October. Okay, so putting food by you know I'm not going to claim to be an expert on this I've certainly done a number of different types of techniques and have the knowledge about the vegetables of course that we're talking about and some of the herbs we're talking about. But as you'll see as I go through here I will list some other resources that will be good for you to check out to because I can't really go vegetable by vegetable how to store this one how to store that one. It's been a long time so I'm going to try to break it down and really kind of look at the different ways you can store the produce that you've got in your garden, either in your home in the garden or preserving it in some way. So the first way to do it of course is to storing it indoors. And so certain vegetables, oh you can store indoors, especially if you have a basement. If you have a seller of some type, even if it's just an old if you live in an old house and you have an old dirt seller which are the best kind. You can store a lot of different vegetables down there because of the temperature being low and the humidity being the right level for a lot of these vegetables to make it through the winter. So I'll be talking about that I'll be talking about storing them in the garden. If you have a garden in your backyard or in your side yard wherever you're growing things, you may be able to store a number of different vegetables that will be in the soil right through the winter. In fact, some of the vegetables like, for example, parsnips taste better if you harvest them late winter. So often we won't even harvest those in the fall we'll wait till late winter because they sweeten up a little bit. So I'll talk about how to do that and be successful with it. And then we'll talk about some of the more traditional ways to preserve the harvest you be talking about canning and freezing and drying those vegetables in some of the herbs to sell let's jump into it. So first of all storing indoors. You can store a number of different vegetables winter squash being one of them pumpkins of course being another one indoors and that is kind of a big group that does pretty well being stored in a basement somewhere or even a cold room, you have so if you don't have a basement maybe in a window or in a apartment somewhere, even if you have a cold spot in your apartment underneath the kitchen sink where there's cold air comes through or maybe in a back room somewhere where it stays cold. You can actually rig it up to have a place there to store things like winter squash and crops like root crops to they'll actually store pretty well especially if you use a special technique and I'll talk about that in a minute. Let's go through the different root crops that you can store. First of all, potatoes, and as I mentioned the key with storing any vegetables indoors is knowing what temperature they'll store best that and what humidity they need. And one of the things you can do is get one of those thermometers that has humidity indicator on it to so temperature and humidity, and put it in the basement or put it in a cool room or a place where you're thinking of storing and see what kind of temperatures you get this fall and winter. And if you can keep the temperatures below 50 degrees. That's going to be great because that's going to open up the whole world of different vegetables if you can keep them down closer to 40 degrees that's going to open up an even a bigger world of vegetables you could store indoors. And if you can keep the humidity anywhere from say 50 to 90%. That's where most vegetables are going to do their best. So, each vegetable has a different condition and actually if you do a little plug for an old book I wrote a number of years ago vegetable gardening for dummies. And in that book towards the end of it I talked about storing vegetables and I have a whole chart about what humidity and what temperature would be the best for each one of the vegetables so I'll talk a little bit about it here for some of the ones I'm going to mention. So for potatoes, for example, potatoes love temperatures down closer to freezing 32 to 40 degrees or so, and they like the humidity to be pretty high up to about 90%. Now that being said, we have a basement at our house, and the temperatures there stay about 50 degrees and the humidity is probably more like 50 or 60%. They do okay you know they, they will store well for a certain period of time depending on the variety I'll talk about that at the end of the segment here, segment here about how different varieties store better than others. And the only thing that really happens to your potatoes if they kind of come out of dormancy and start growing is they'll start their eyes will come up and they'll start sending shoots out. They're actually okay to still eat. They just may not taste as good and they get kind of wrinkly and dried out nearly. So finding the right varieties is one of the things to do and also keeping them cool as cool as possible and with that high humidity is another way to store potatoes. We store our potatoes right through the winter and then usually by mid winter I'd say February, March, that's when they start sprouting. The ones that are going to sprout they'll start sprouting, but that's still you know it's still probably about six months of storage which is pretty good for potatoes. Onion and garlic like it a similar type of temperature of 32 to 40 that range, but they don't like it really humid they want it more like 50 to 60 degrees. Just so you know, most basements are in that 40 to 50 degree range concrete basements, 40 to 50 degree range with a humidity about 50 to 60%. So onions and garlic actually do really well there. And again, it is dependent upon the varieties that we have we grow storage onions that are meant to store for months indoors, red ones and yellow ones. So onions do really nicely and they can last pretty easily and of course when they start sprouting you'll know it because a little shoot starts coming up. And usually at that point they're pretty much done you can just compost them. For garlic, they like the similar kind of conditions but I have one little tip I can give you about garlic which is kind of fun that I learned a number of years ago. And that is that you can store them a little bit longer by putting them underneath a turned upside down clay pot. So get a big clay pot put your garlic underneath it turned it upside down in the basement and leave it there. For whatever reason maybe the clay breeze a little bit but holds more moisture I'm not quite sure what it is. They will last longer in fact I tried it one year I left some untreated and some under the clay pot and the ones on the clay pots lasted longer. When garlic is kind of done for what happens is it shrivels up. So you get these bulbs and you look beautiful and you squeeze them they just squeeze into dust. So that will often happen come, I would say mid to late winter. But with this technique using the clay pot I've been able to store garlic in our basement, even into the summer from last year's crop which is pretty outstanding because most onions and garlic they last four to six months perhaps. And now we're talking about more like eight months for them. So playing around with a different locations and different techniques and using some of the things like these upside down clay pots is kind of a fun way to see what works for preserving them. Now carrots, if you put them in the refrigerator they're going to last a couple weeks maybe in the crisper you know, especially if you put them in a perforated plastic bag with a little moisture in it. But if you really want to get months of carrots stored in a basement area or stored in a cool room. The best way to do it is get one of those plastic containers you get like at the home centers. And put some sand in the bottom of it moist and sand sand it's just kind of damp not really wet but just damp, lay your carrots in there. Cover them over with another layer of sand and then you can put beats in there you can put parsnips in there. You might even try the potatoes in there for that matter. Because they all kind of like that nice cool voice conditions. So you put them all in there and then you put it in a cool place again at somewhere around 40 degrees will be best for carrots. If you store them in sand or I guess you could probably use sawdust and which shavings would work okay too. Excuse me. It's just really about having a material that's going to hold moisture but also breathe a little bit. So things are not going to be drying out. You can put them for up to six months. You can have fresh carrots up to six months in your basement so that's kind of a cool way to store root crops, like carrots and beats and parsnips. The winter squash are a little bit of a different character they like it warmer they like 50 to 60 degree temperatures. They like that average humidity that you'd get in a basement that 50 to 60% you know most houses in the winter are really looking at humidity down in 60% so you want to find a spot in your house especially if you burn wood which dries out the air a lot, which is going to have a little higher humidity and that will be a good place to put your winter squashes your butternuts, acorns, butter cups, delicatas, pumpkins, you know the old, the old techniques that farmers used to use in Vermont because they were lived in leaky farmhouses is that they would store their winter squash and pumpkins under their bed. So it's out of the way. Usually the bedrooms were pretty cool they kept them cool so the temperatures are cool and then the humidity was high because there were bodies there exuding moisture, and they stored for a pretty long time. Now with the winter squashes you can get them to last for a month or two depending on the squash up to six months depending upon the squash you, you have there depends on the variety you have and it depends on the conditions that where you're trying to store them. So using a varieties here are the best types if you wanted to take a look at this and I'll leave it up for a little bit as I talk about it. So you can write some of these down. This is also being recorded and it will be on the hands website and CCTV will play it back as well. So for winter squash Hubbard squash and butternut are probably the best ones. These are the ones that will store the longest, and another tip with winter squash and pumpkins to get them to last long time is that before you put them in storage, wipe them with a diluted 10% bleach solution just take a rag or sponge and wipe them off wipe the skin off, let them dry and then put them in storage. That bleach solution will kill any bacteria or fungus that's on the skin that might lead to rot. If you have any rod on any of your winter squash those are the ones you want to eat first, because that rot will spread and eventually wipe out the whole squash so cut that piece off and then use that one first. Whereas the other ones that have their stems attached and they're in good shape, and if you've cleaned them up those are the ones that could last up to six months and Hubbard and butternut will last that long. For carrots there's a number of different varieties some of them are old varieties like Danvers and impurator, and others are newer hybrids like Balero that are meant for long term storage and you can use that sand technique that I mentioned or just putting them in bags in a cool place. They'll last for a couple months for sure just in bags but up to six months in that sand storage unit that I was talking about. Let's winterkeeper is a beat that has the perfect name for this beat I've grown this one before. It's a big beat doesn't get woody even though it gets big, and it lasts a long time in the winter so that's kind of nice. Beets don't generally last as long as carrots and parsnips but they still will last a number of months. For potatoes, Kennebet, Katahdin in all blue, Kennebet and Katahdin are very familiar old Vermont varieties. And they last again up to four to six months in storage. All blue is an heirloom that many people start growing now and I grow it. And this is one that I'll see all my other potatoes in the basement in late spring, sprouting out and the all blues still haven't sprouted they're still okay to eat so it's kind of a nice one to have if you like those blue potatoes. And then finally, onions that are good ones, Cobra, Red Wing and Stupgarder. I grow Cobra and Red Wing and those are the ones that last sometimes even into the early summer, depending upon the situation so if you have the right situation as far as temperature and humidity and the right varieties you can literally have fresh vegetables from your garden that will last you up until spring and maybe even early summer. Now how you store them of course the old fashioned root cellar would be great if we all had something like that. There are modern versions of it where people build them like this one with their humidity controlled and temperature controlled I have a friend down in the Montpelier area that has one that each room within the root cellar has a different humidity and temperature so he has of course you know apples in one room and potatoes in another and winter squash in another that kind of thing, very high deck, but he loves it and he and his wife grow a lot of their own food so it's really made a lot of sense to do that when they were renovating their house. So, but as I mentioned though you don't need to have a root cellar to make this happen it could be just a regular basement or even a cool room in your house, as long as those temperatures and humidities can be maintained roughly where you want them. Another way to store your vegetables is in the garden literally in the garden in soil right through the winter and the way to do that is to get the right kinds of plants that you're protecting so anything in the broccoli family are cold tolerant brussel sprouts cauliflower cabbage, the hearty greens like spinach arugula kale I always grow these greens and know they're up now and they're growing in our garden they're small. They may not get to mature this fall but that's okay because if I protect them they'll over winter and be ready early in the spring is a nice early spring greens crop. And of course the root crops anything that's in the soil carrots beets and parsnips are the three main ones that you can protect and these you can protect right through the winter. Whereas the broccoli family ones you're really protecting them maybe till the really coldest days of January, the hearty greens you can protect through the winter and the root crops as well. So how do you protect those root crops well the simple way to do it is you cover them with an organic material so we use hay and straw. You can get chopped up leaves make sure they're chopped up and not whole leaves because those will matt and they'll rot out the root crops, you can use untreated grass clippings. Any kind of material like that wood chips even sawdust shavings wood shavings those kinds of materials, you want to put a big pile over it though so we put for the hay or straw foot or too deep layer of material over that bed. When I do it is after it's gotten cold so the soil has cooled down but before the soil has actually frozen you don't want the soil to freeze. It's not the freezing that harms the root crops that are in there it's the freezing and thawing. So as that ground thaws out either in the winter from a thaw or in the spring. That's when this the root crops get mushy and they rot. So, wait till you know early late October early November whenever it seems to be appropriate, then you put your material on you can use, I use these velcro straps there and some boards to hold it all in place. And literally with root crops I've gone out there, and it gets buried in snow of course which is a great another great insulator. But I've gone out in January February dug through all of that find some carrots and find some parsnips pull them out. And they're taste great they're ready to eat you can make put them in soups you can even even even eat them raw, because they say pretty fresh. The beats I like I was mentioning I don't have as great success with those lasting too long but it's still worth doing to get them right up and through the holidays. For extending the cabbage family broccoli cauliflower cabbage type of crops into the fall and maybe even into the winter, you can put row covers over them. So this is a mesh that I use for mostly for insect control. But what you want for temperature control is something like the remake material this is one that's the standard remake floating row cover. It'll protect plants down to 28 degrees. There's another one called the winter blanket, which will protect plants down to 24 degrees. And that's assuming you have plants that will be killed at freezing. So if you have a winter blanket on there and you have hoops over it and you have your arugula and your spinach underneath it, or you have some cabbage underneath there, or some broccoli or cauliflower. You can be amazed how long that they will last, especially if we have a warm fall which we tend to be having more and more of the summer kind of creeps into September now, and fall creeps into November and December. So you can maybe even get to the holiday season in New Year's, having some of these crops that are worth growing out there, even some of them like Brussels sprouts, I've picked frozen Brussels sprouts and still cook them and they still taste fine. Again, the key is not to let them thought but pick them frozen and then just cook them immediately. So those are some ways to store vegetables fresh in your garden, but most people think of preserving as canning freezing and drying so let me cover those topics next. For canning, I love to can and we do a bunch of canning of different things. Mostly I can tomatoes, my wife, Wendy does, she's canned some grape juice there and she'll, she'll make pickles and jelly beans and things of that nature. The nice thing about canning is even though it does require some equipment and some time to do it and you have to do it right to make sure it's safe. But once you have a can of tomatoes that's done properly, it can last well over a year. In fact, we're still eating tomatoes that we can last summer. We still have some jars left this year and when we pop them open and use them, they taste fine. Because they've been sealed in such a way that they really will last a long time and they hold a lot of their nutrients better than freezing and drying wood. So what to can this is really my short list based on what we do. There are a lot of different things to can and as they talk about canning freezing and drying. There are resources which I'll show you in a minute that'll talk about all the specifics. I'm not going to get into how to can beans, how to can squash, you know, all of that. But we can tomatoes based on my Italian heritage and canning tomatoes with my mom. Cucumbers, like I said, making pickles and beans like dilly beans, little onions, baby onions are really fun to can and peppers are nice to can, especially hot peppers. So those are all the types that we will can, depending upon the year that we're having. But like I said, there's a lot of other ones you can can too, but these are pretty simple to use. Here's some of those resources that I was talking about. And again, I'll leave this up a little bit so you can write these down. The National Center for Home Food Preservation is a USDA site, a website, and you can just search for that and put it in your Google search. And you'll find it and that has all kinds of information on preserving canning, freezing, drying, preserving them in different ways, dehydrating, you know, all of that. One of the go-to books I've used over the years is the Ball Blue Book. That's from Ball Canning Jars, which is what we normally use. Speaking of canning, if you're interested in canning, one of the tips I would give you for it is make sure you buy canning lids early in the season, or in fact, stock up on them if you can. Because if you go out there now and try to buy canning lids, and I know this, because we just checked, they're not around. The hardware stores or grocery stores, no one has canning lids. They're all sold out. So anyway, the Ball Blue Book goes through all the different kinds of vegetables and fruits and herbs and hot to can them, freeze them, dry them. As does Putting Food Buy. Oh, by the way, the Ball Blue Book has just been updated maybe four years ago, so it's fairly current. Putting Food Buy is a book by Beatrix Vaughn that's been a classic, still in our bookshelf. That one is a little older, but I still refer to it every once in a while. Just kind of check, yeah, how long should I boil my tomatoes, that kind of thing. So these are good resources to have when you're thinking about how to can beans, or how do I freeze corn, or how do I dry my basil, that kind of thing. These will be good resources for all the individual plants you have. As far as my canning tips, I'll give you a few, talk about canning with Angelina, my mom. In fact, I didn't really can, she just did all the work, but I was hanging around watching her. For some reason, she always seemed to pick the hottest, most humid, Connecticut day to can tomatoes, because you know canning tomatoes is in a hot water bath. So you have a big pot and you fill it up with water and you boil that water, so it gets really steamy. And she always liked to do it that way. She would can pints or quarts, you know if you have a lot of produce quarts are a good way to can or preserve a lot of them quickly. Often I will do that kind of at the end of the season just because I've got tons of pints already and I just want to use those tomatoes I have. So you can put a lot of them in there. You want to get fresh lids of course every time you don't want to reuse lids because just by opening that lid you're creating a little indentation so it won't seal properly. So next time around, clean your jars wash them out really well before using them, and then gather everything together so then gather your tomatoes I usually try to wash the tomatoes a little bit. And then of course peel not peel them but cut them to take out any blemishes that they have chunk them up and then really squish them into the jars my mom was really adamant about that she would really press them in there and get a bunch of tomatoes in. And she would put basil leaves in that was another little tip that she often would share she'd throw some basil leaves in to add a little flavor to the sauce, and then seal it and then put them in a hot water bath for the appointed time I think it's 40 minutes for pints and 45 minutes for the quarts. And that's pretty much it. One of the tips about putting them into the big pot of water is that don't put them in when the water is boiling so don't go from a jar that's at room temperature. Put them in to boiling water because that will crack the jar so put them in as the water is heating up. And so they get accustomed to that warming water and then when they get to the boiling point so they'll already be adjusted to it. Put salt in them that was another thing, half teaspoon of salt in the pint and a teaspoon in the court that helps preserve them as well. So that's pretty much it for canning, and then you pull them out store them and like I said, they last for over a year and you can preserve a lot of other kinds of vegetables this way as well. I'm just really familiar with doing tomatoes so that's the one I kind of come back to. Another way to can or other way to preserve is to freeze and we have a chest freezer in our basement and we're freezing fruits, rhubarb, peppers, basil is go around there you can see what's on the top there. We're freezing juices we're freezing all kinds of stuff and freezing is really nice because you can really preserve a lot of different produce that way. Now the things that freeze well for us and this is again a personal experience I know other people will freeze beans and freeze summer squash and freeze things like that and and have a good success with them. We just haven't done that or if we've done it we haven't had great success. So freeze and well for us and why we do it is that these are easy we don't even blanch these. So we'll chunk up tomatoes and put them in bags and freeze them. Oh, that was the last thing back to the canning I knew it would come back to me. Speaking of tomatoes when you're canning tomatoes don't worry about slipping the skins off. That's something my mom always would spend a lot of time putting the tomatoes in the hot water bath and then the pool bath and slipping the skins off and then canning them. So many of that we put them in skins and all, and when we're ready to use them in the winter, we pour out that jar into a blender, and it's pulse the blender a little bit that'll break up all the skins you'll never know when you're making that sauce or put it in a soup that there were skins there it's a real easy way to get around doing that whole slipping the skin thing. Anyway, back to freezing. I knew I'd remember if I just get another moment back to freezing the produce so tomatoes freeze well peppers I love to freeze peppers like the ones here. Because I will cut them and stuff them and then I will bake them in the winter and they make a great stuff pepper. If you bake them when they're still frozen stuff with whatever materials you want to put in there. They make a great stuff pepper sweet corn we buy locally and we chuck the take the ears off or the kernels off the ears. I guess that's how you say it we scrape them off right and put them in bags and just freeze them we don't again we don't blanch it we don't do anything we just freeze them raw. Winter squash is another one if we have a lot of butternut squash or Hubbard or whatever squash it is. We will peel them will chunk them up and freeze them and finally leaks is another one that we will freeze, because it freezes really well and leaks are another vegetable you can leave outside into the winter. Because even when they're frozen I've taken a frozen leak, brought it inside threw it in a pot and made potato leek soup from it and it was great. So those are the ones that we've had experience with and we like to freeze because they're easy and we like the flavor of them when we're using them. The traditional freezing process though does call for blanching so if you're freezing beans, for example, or some of these other vegetables. You may have to blanch them blanching means boiling them in water for maybe a minute or two, just enough to kill any kind of bacteria that might be on them, and to kind of stop them from stop their process. Then you will put them in cold water to stop them from cooking too much dry them out and then put them in the bags and freeze them so if you're trying that out if you look in a lot of the directions that are out there. That's usually what's included in a lot of these vegetables is doing a little blanching beforehand. Another way to freeze or can is to process the vegetables first and then freeze or can them and we do that of course with pesto pesto is a great thing to make you can can it we've done that you can freeze it we've done that. It's nice to have pesto in the winter when you break out some pasta and you've been busy all day and you really just want to have a quick dinner. In January or February it's nice to take some pesto out of the freezer or crack open a lid of some pesto and have that fresh garden taste in this from back from the summer. So, as I said you can can it but we the way we freeze it is we freeze it in ice cube trays which is a cool way to do it. So you just make your pesto put them in ice cube trays freeze them, then after they're frozen pop them out of the trays put them in plastic bags and then you've got these chunks of pesto. And so when you're making a soup or if you want to make some pasta whatever you just throw a couple of those in the pan or in the pot, and you're all set ready to go. I know a number of people who will chop up herbs and do a similar kind of thing, have kind of an herb blend that they will take and just throw in a soup pot. So they have it there and using ice cube trays is a simple way to do it doesn't take up too much space, because you're taking them out of the trays and then putting them in bags salsa is something you can. I've never frozen salsa but I'm probably sure you could do it. You freeze tomato sauce so why not salsa, but canning it is a nice way to use up tomatoes and tomatoes and and onions and making those all really readily available through the winter. Also juicing if you have a ton of produce and you have access to a juicer. It's a great way to use a lot of carrots that you're otherwise would just kind of rod or just never get to use, make juice out of them. But there's more things you can juice you can juice cabbages celery apples parsley cucumbers you can juice a whole bunch of things a lemon to make lemon juices and beat juices and cucumber juices and tomato juice. Her mother-in-law used to make what she called her a homemade V8 juice, which was tomatoes and a bunch of vegetables and she'd make a juice out of it can it and she'd have it all winter long. Actually Wendy still remembers it fondly like cracking it open in January or February having that fresh taste of the garden in the juice. So what you do is you make your juice and then you can can it or you can even freeze it to for that matter, and have that juice ready in the winter when you want it. You can also ferment vegetables and this has become much more popular it used to be an old fashioned way of preserving a lot of vegetables and it's kind of come full circle for a number of reasons. One is very easy to do, and to it's also very good for your gut it's a very good probiotic for your digestion. It's very simple to do and I've actually done this with our niece showed us how to how to ferment vegetables and it's very easy. You can chunk it up or maybe you cut it up into shredded and however you want to do it, and you can use cabbages you can see from this previous slide cabbages beat celery all kinds of different materials. You pack it in really tightly into that jar with some salt to put some salt in there and then you fill it up with water, you make sure it's submerged, then you cap it and you seal it you're not canning it you're just sealing it and leave it out room temperature for a couple weeks. Another thing is that an anaerobic process happens where lactobacillus which is actually a good guy it's one of those microbes that are good guys starts breaking down the vegetable that's there, creating that pickling kind of effect like kimchi would be or sauerkraut is another fermented vegetable. And so then after a couple weeks after that happens and you put it into the refrigerator and you can store it there for a month or two, just taking it out as you needed to have a little snack with it, mix it in with salads mix it in with other kinds of vegetables. And as a probiotic because of that lactobacteria is still active. It helps with digestion and any kind of intestinal distress you might have. So fermenting vegetables is a really nice way to do that. And I know that city market in Burlington often will have classes on how to ferment vegetables and so you can look around and often community centers co ops places like that may have classes in the fall where you can learn how to do these things hands on to do a lot of fun. So, another way to do it and the final way I want to talk about is drying so you could if you live in the Southwest, just chop up your hot peppers and put them out in the sun and they would dry. We don't have that weather conditions that make it that easy to happen here because it's so humid and rainy. Things would mold before they would dry, but you can dry them on the plant so what I do with some of our hot peppers we have them growing in an unheated greenhouse is I just leave them on the plant and I will just leave them until they actually dry on the plant, then bring them in continue drying them indoors, especially once we start using wood heat that dries things out in the atmosphere in their house. That dries them out like crush them and I have them as a crushed red pepper sprinkle for the whole winter. In fact, I still am using the ones from last year, even though normally drying anything about six months or so into it loses a lot of its pungency. It still tastes great. I don't know, maybe I just gotten used to them, but when the new crop is ready this year I'll throw out that one composted and put some fresh dried peppers in there. So, you can dry the vegetables when most people think of drying herbs when you're thinking of drying different plants and Mediterranean herbs like rosemary, oregano, thyme, sage, all our lavender are all great herbs to dry. So this time of year you're going to have plants that are pretty woody so hopefully you've cut back some of those plants a little bit so that they have some new growth because it's a new growth that's going to have the best oils the best pungency best flavor to them. So cut some of those stems, hang them like they did here upside down, it could be indoors or in a shed somewhere where it's bright, but not direct sun, the airy it's really needs to be airy and let them really dry out really get crunchy. Then you just break them up, put them in a jar, seal that jar, and then watch it for a couple days. If they're not dry enough that jar will have condensation on the inside and then you know that you can't continue drying them that they will mold. So, but if they seem like they're okay after you put them in a jar, then you can just store them and again as I said up to six weeks or six months, excuse me, six months of drying them is what you're looking at. You can dry basil a lot of times we dry basil we actually freeze basil leaves I think I showed you that in that freezer, but we take individual basil leaves put them on a tray, freeze them and then throw them all in a bag that's a great way to have basil flavor in the winter we need to take a handful of leaves and throw them in a soup or throw them in a pasta whatever you're making. And if you really want to get it to dry and you can always get a dehydrator and that is an upfront cost of course, but dehydrating vegetables in a dehydrator is easy we have a sister in law who does that and she's always sharing her zucchini chips with kale chips and all kinds of other things in tomatoes you can have roasted or dried tomatoes that are really nice to have it in sauces and sandwiches and things in the winter. So, there are other ways to do this you can drive them in your oven, but it takes a long time and you have to have just the right oven to do that so again, it's kind of thing you want to do a little research for before you go out there and try to out some of these different techniques. And the store dry storing all these dried herbs like I mentioned about six months is usually longevity for most of these types of herbs or any kind of dried vegetables that you have. After that they're really kind of losing a lot of their nutritional quality and also some of their flavor. So hopefully this is giving you a good idea of how to store some of the produce you have in your garden whether it be root crops or winter squash, whether you're storing them in the house or storing them in the garden, even extending the season like on Brussels sprouts and broccoli things like that nature and some of the greens, or if you're canning freezing and drying them. So thank you all for coming I appreciate you supporting hands and supporting all the things that we've been doing this summer with all the different classes, including this putting food by class, and hopefully next summer you'll be better gardeners, you'll have more productive gardens, and we may even be back so stay tuned and thank you all very much.