Final Winter Harvest

The worst (best?) part of growing a happy garden is that it grows A LOT of food. That's awesome especially when you can put it all away for another day, but putting it up is often quite time consuming. I finally went out a couple weeks ago and harvested the last of the collards and cabbage. I thought i'd post a little tutorial for how to freeze collards since they can be a very prolific vegetable.

I took a large beach towel out into the garden and broke off all the collard leaves and stacked them in the towel so they would be easy to carry into the house,

Fill the sink with cold water and  swish the leaves around in there. I had to drain and refill the sink several times because it had just pollinated a few days before I harvested so all the leaves were covered in yellow tree pollen.

I stacked them all on the towel to drip dry while I cut out the woody core of each leaf.

Fold each leaf over with the rib to the top. It should naturally want to fold up this way some.

With a knife cut the rib away from the leaf

Should look something like this when you open it back up. You don't have to fold the leaf, but I only have to make one cut that way rather than two.

All cut and neatly stacked. The cores went out into the worm towers or compost pile

Now I roll up a portion of the stacks at a time and rough chop the leaves.

Submerge in boiling water for 1-2 minutes until nicely wilted. Strain the leaves and pack in freezer bags.

My final harvest plus what I had already put up amounted to 6 stuffed full quart bags of collard greens. Now you can have braised collards with bacon all year long! Or creamed collards, or if you leave the leaves whole, collard wrapped meat balls. Yummy!

Cabbage keeps a really long time in the refrigerator but I put up two of the heads in the freezer by cutting them in quarters (leave the core intact) and blanching for 1 minute and then bagging them. Collards can take blanching longer but cabbage doesn't take very long to cook so you only want to blanch just long enough to stop the maturing enzymes. Next year I might try canning the greens instead of freezing but I was tired and my feet hurt and I had a cranky baby so the freezer was just faster.