Psst… Hey you. The one who tossed those tomatoes in your freezer during harvest because you just didn’t have time to can them as they ripened. I can see that look in your eye as you start dreaming about ordering seeds for next year’s garden. You are calculating how many weeks until you can start seedlings indoors, what new varieties you might try… Well unless your pleasant little musings are happening while you chop those tomatoes, knock it off my daydreaming cabbage! (It’s me. I am the cabbage. Please tell me I am not the only one???)
It happens to me every year. There is always one thing that I have too many of too quickly, and I just can’t manage to preserve it while keeping up with everything else. Into the freezer it goes for when things quiet down. Perfectly sensible. A much better choice than letting it go to waste. Except of course things never actually quiet down and then one day you look in the bottom of your freezer and curse your past self for inflicting a giant canning project on you during flu season.
Sound familiar? Maybe your past self left something else. The seed packets all tossed willy-nilly into their box. That box or bucket that you didn’t label because you were definitely going to remember what was in it. The shed you were 100% planning to put back in order in the fall before the snow started. We all have them. (Some of us more than others but that is another story!) We are almost all really hard on ourselves about them too, aren’t we? We don’t see each other’s messy sheds or bags of produce wasting freezer space. Instead we make elaborate plans and resolve that we will magically be on top of all of this next year!
Don’t get me wrong, it is good to aim for these things. It’s easier to use that pantry or shed when things are labeled or in order. Sometimes the answer is that you find a new system that makes it happen next time, but sometimes the answer is just that life happens and you get sick during the summer harvest. Maybe the tomatoes in the freezer aren’t a task you failed to do. Maybe the ability to freeze them meant that you were able to save that harvest that you worked so hard on, and rest when your body needed it.
The internet is am amazing place, but sometimes the same site that is giving you information and inspiration about canning is also showing you daily photos of hundreds of canning jars that other people have filled and it skews your perspective. I grew a garden full of tomatoes last year. I started them from seed and tried lots of new types! I ate the best tomato sandwiches of my life, and I have a freezer full of them still to enjoy. Maybe I will pull my canning pot out this week and be reminded of the smell of summer instead of dreading a chore left un-done. Maybe what I got to doesn’t have to be perfect to be enough.
Do you have any winter chores to finish up before Spring?