As you start your vegetable garden this spring, consider planting more than you’ll need and preserving the surplus you get. With the economy looking bleaker and bleaker and food prices rising, more and more people, homesteaders and city folk alike, are getting into the habit of stockpiling food – either with produce from their backyard garden, or those bought from the supermarket.

Same way with meat and fish. Is your brood of chickens, quails, rabbits, goats, sheep and farmed fish growing too fast? It’s time to cull. Is there a sale at the grocery store, farmer’s market, or nearby poultry? Why not buy some and stock up?

Aside from immediate consumption, there’s at least a dozen ways to utilize excess food. We can enjoy them ourselves or share them with others — fresh, cooked or preserved. With the rise in unemployment, the homeless and needy people multiplying in our streets, there is simply no reason why food should go to waste.

1. Sell or give away

Fresh fruits and vegetables are easiest to manage, as they don’t require laborious, time-consuming processing like butchery. After picking, the most you need to do is brush off the dirt (as in the case of root crops like potatoes and carrots) and wash, and they’ll be good to go. Set aside what you need for yourself – for consumption and preservation – then let others benefit from the rest. You can sell them at your doorstep or garden entrance, or see if there’s a farmer’s market in town and find out if you can join it. You can give some away to friends, relatives, neighbors, a church (they might know needy families who could use them), a food bank, soup kitchen or a homeless shelter. Websites like Feeding America and Ample Harvest have a list of food pantries that you could contact in the different states. Or check local laws if you could hand out fruits or salad packs directly to the homeless yourself.

If you find that you’ve planted much more than you can even harvest, sell the produce right off your garden. Put up a sign outside to let people know what’s available, so they can drop in and pick what they want for themselves. Or you could solicit the help of your neighbors, and split the harvest with them — that way you can get free labor, and they get fresh produce for themselves.

2. Process or preserve

There’s a variety of food preservation techniques that you could do with fresh produce – freezing, canning or drying. Start with the tomatoes, as they’re the most fragile. Jar them and make soup, sauce, puree, salsa or ketchup. Roast or sun-dry them and chill in a bottle with olive oil and use later as pesto sauce, vinaigrette, a spread for breads, stuffing for peppers and eggplants, or for brushing on baked fish or chicken.

Fruits and vegetables can also be turned into smoothies, desserts, cakes and casseroles that you could make now, then freeze and enjoy at a later time…..more here

Source: www.offthegridnews.com