Plant relationships have evolved together to help maintain ecosystem health, and this is especially true under the soil. We can practice companion planting to grow more resilient gardens.
At its core, companion planting is the practice of planting different plant species together for their mutual benefits. It’s all about understanding a plant’s needs and gifts so we can help them share resources and boost harvests.
*This is part of an award winning article originally published in Fall 2025 Northern Gardener Magazine*
Companion Planting Benefits
Harvest from companion planted garden
Healthier Soil
Suppressed Weeds
Balanced Pests + Diseases
Increased Beneficial Insects
Increased Harvests
Modern companion planting focuses on planting biodiversity. Beware simple companion planting equations of A + B = C. Nature is too sophisticated and raucous a partner to play by such simple human inventions. Luckily, scientific research continues to increase and begs to be put into action in our gardens. However, each garden is made up of infinitely diverse relationships, so observation in your own space is always best.
It is so satisfying to see a garden overflowing at the end of the season, but it can definitely get overwhelming when everything ripens all at once! Let’s get you preserving vegetables like a pro, without all the work.
Instead of letting your hard work go to waste, you can easily save that harvest for the winter. I go over the 5 most common backyard garden vegetables we grow. And combine that with the absolute best, beginner-friendly ways to preserve garden vegetables.
All the different ways of preserving vegetables, from dehydrating, freezing, fermenting, water bath canning and pressure canning – all slow down respiration or deterioration in the plant cells in different ways.
And each food has its favorite way.
Preserving Zucchini & Summer Squash
We’ve all been gifted a baseball-bat-sized zucchini that we didn’t know what to do with, or have that one plant that just won’t stop…
The Best Way to Preserve:Shredding and Freezing.
How to do it: Grate your zucchini using a box grater or food processor. Squeeze out the excess moisture with a clean kitchen towel, measure it out into portions you use for baking or cooking, and freeze it in bags. As winter drags on, you will have the perfect pre-measured amounts ready for baking zucchini bread, dropping into soups, or mixing into pasta sauces. This is my favorite way to thicken soups and sauces.
Preserving Bell Peppers
Peppers are fantastic because they require almost zero effort to save before the first frost hits.
The Best Way to Preserve:Freezing
How to do it: Unlike most vegetables, bell peppers don’t need to be blanched (scalded in boiling water) before freezing. Just wash them, chop them into fajita strips or dice them, spread them on a baking sheet to freeze solid (called IQF or Individual Quick Frozen) and then dump them into a freezer bag. They are perfect for winter stir-fries, soups, and fajitas. If you’re feeling fancy, roast them first for extra flavor.
Preserving Tomatoes
Tomatoes are the crown jewel of the summer garden, but they turn mushy fast. The method to preserve depends on how much time you have.
The Best Ways to Preserve:Freezing or Canning.
How to do it:Freezing – If you are short on time, just wash whole tomatoes, core them, and throw them straight into freezer bags. The skins will slip right off when they thaw! If you have a weekend afternoon, cook them down into a simple marinara sauce or diced tomatoes, I love saving this for the winter when I want to spend more time cooking. You can freeze the finished sauce in freezer bags or freezer containers.
How to do it: Canning – if you don’t add in any seasoning while roasting, you can make them shelf stable by processing and canning by water bath canning.
You can dehydrate halved cherry tomatoes too, just know the skins and seeds will stay with those more than in a sauce
Preserving Cucumbers
When cucumbers start producing, they don’t stop. Since they are mostly water, they do not usually freeze well, however my friend Crystal has cracked the code on freezer pickles.
The Best Way to Preserve:Pickling.
How to do it: You don’t even need special canning equipment for this. You can make “refrigerator pickles” by slicing them up and packing them into jars. A basic recipe is: 1 cup water, 1 cup vinegar, 1 tbsp salt, 1 tbsp sugar + spices. Bring to a simmer, then pour over sliced cucumbers+ refrigerate. They will stay crunchy and delicious in the fridge for months. If you want them to last on a pantry shelf, you will need to give them a hot water canning session, follow trusted recipes from the National Center for Home Food Preservation.
Fermenting pickles is another way to preserve cucumbers while adding to the nutrient value. For this kind of pickling, you’ll mix salt and water (always about 2 cups water to 1 Tablespoon of Kosher/Sea salt. Here’s a link to my basic fermented pickle recipe.
Freezer pickles from Crystal at Wholefed Homestead – this recipe is only available in her book, Freeze Fresh and it is so worth it!
Preserving Green Beans
Green beans give you a massive yield, because they are a low-acid vegetable, you can’t safely can them in a regular water bath without a pressure canner.
*Remember you can leave them on the vine to fully mature and dry giving you dried beans, and or seeds for the next season too.
The Best Way to Preserve:Blanching and Freezing, Water Bath Canning or Pressure Canning *Sorry, I couldn’t choose just one way.
How to do it:
Freezing: The easiest is freezing! Snap the ends off, leave them whole or chop them into bite-sized pieces, and steam or boil them for just 3 minutes. Immediately dunk them in ice water to stop the cooking, dry them off, and freeze them in freezer bags. This keeps them bright green and snappy.
Water Bath Canning: Dilly Beans are a great option Adding vinegar and pickling Green adds enough acidity to make water bath canning a safe and shelf stable option. Follow my recipe for delicious crunchy dilly beans.
Pressure Canning: You’ll want to have a LOT of green beans to make preserving this way worth it. But the results are shelf stable beans that last for years and taste like my childhood. They are a little softer than frozen, but also keep more of their flavor this way.
Other Options for Preserving the Harvest
Some vegetables do well with cold storage in your refrigerator or in a cool pantry once cured. For root crops, just make sure to let them dry enough to brush off most of the dirt then get to curing them for long term storage.
Curing + Storing
Potatoes:
Place them in a dark, cool, and well-ventilated area (45 to 60°F) with high humidity for 1 to 2 weeks. Store them in complete darkness inside breathable containers like burlap sacks, paper bags, or ventilated boxes in a cold, dark basement or root cellar, or sometimes an attached garage- kept at 38°F to 45°F while using over winter. These want the coolest and dampest of the root crops.
Onions:
Spread them in a single layer in a warm, dry, and well-ventilated spot out of direct sunlight for 2 to 3 weeks. Then cut off withered tops and store in breathable containers like mesh bags, wire baskets, or wooden crates in a cool, dark, and dry area around 45°F to 55°F.
Squash:
Leaving at least 1 inch of stem while harvesting, lay them out in a warm, dry, and well-ventilated location (75 to 85°F) for 1 to 2 weeks. Store in a cool, dry, and well-ventilated space like a basement or cool spare room between 50°F and 55°F.
Cold Storage
Finding the right spot in your refrigerator for carrots, beets, apples and cabbages can help you keep them for months rather than weeks.
Preserve Vegetables Your Way
By understanding how different foods lose freshness we can reduce food waste and eat more food we preserved ourselves! But preserve vegetables the way you know you and your family will enjoy them the most. I hope these ideas for preserving vegetables help you enjoy more local food all year long!
Yep, we’re using zucchini in place of apples – and it works! While this is technically a mock apple crisp, I think I’ll start referring to this as Zapple Crisp. 😉
I admit, I was VERY skeptical of this recipe at first. I mean, zucchini can’t do everything… but it makes an outstanding substitute for apple chunks in this crisp. It really does come down to texture and spices. And this mock apple crisp using zucchini hits the sweet spot.
Only after I told my son it wasn’t apples and that he was in fact eating zucchini did he realize it. And as I had all my taste buds fired up, I could tell that there was a little less apple zing the first time, so I added more lemon juice the second time, and I think that this is about as close to apple crisp without the apples as you can get. Of course, all the warm fall spices MAKE this what it is, and the flavors are like coming home.
I know August can feel overwhelming for organic gardeners, because pests and diseases have likely found your plants, weeds are growing faster than anything else and weather can throw up roadblocks to the most dedicated gardeners.
Faced with all the August garden tasks, many of us feel like throwing in the towel – because we’re also having to harvest, cook with and preserve all the abundance that we planned for.
This time of the summer is when the pace of modern life (kids’ sports, fun events, friends and family) and trying to ‘get it all in’ before school starts again collides with spending time in the garden. It is a reminder of how farmers ad people tied more closely to the land and seasons have probably always felt- but for them it was a matter of survival to harvest and preserve as much as possible.
For almost all of us today, that is not the case.
So, let’s take a breath and lay out a plan so that, come mid-winter we can look back on this time with pride, over a meal with veggies from the garden.
Catnip (Nepeta cataria) sometimes called catmint as it is in the mint family, is probably best known as a stimulant for cats, inducing euphoria and friskiness. Interestingly, its action in humans is exactly the opposite.
While I’ll add a few flowers to a general calming tea, or an herbal bath sachet, one of my favorite uses for this plant, flowers and all is in an Herbal Bug Spray.
As you start growing more of your own fresh produce you realize pretty quickly that early spring lettuces bolt by July and leave you longing for something green, crisp, and light to add to your salad bowl during the hottest part of summer.
But there are some obvious reasons to skip buying lettuce at the grocery store.
In nature, pioneer species (like lichens, crabgrass, or dandelions) sacrifice themselves to build the future. They break down rock, fix nitrogen, and accumulate organic matter. When they die out because other species move in, they leave behind rich, deep topsoil so that forests, prairies, and other stable climax communities can thrive.
America’s expansion on the continent has flipped this script, at least so far.
But I see change happening and hope rising all around me as people realize the they are part of nature.
Between unpredictable grocery prices and supply chain hiccups, it’s easy to feel a bit powerless when walking through the supermarket aisles. But what if the ultimate security system wasn’t something you bought, but something you grew? Growing your own food doesn’t have to be complicated, and you don’t need to grow everything. Just start with something!
Taking back your power starts with planting a few plants, using whatever space you have.
Understanding soil temperatures, rather than just the calendar dates, allows gardeners to get planting earlier by matching seeds to ideal soil temperatures for seed germination. Especially with local unpredictable spring air temperatures, this can make or break a garden season.
Let’s dig into soil temperatures for early season success.
A recipe with two ingredients a little time in the dehydrator with a big pay off: rhubarb sour candy from the garden!
These taste like if Sour Patch® had a kid with simple ingredients + kept the fiber. I like the big flavor coupled with the little chew. I get to help out at our local elementary school, and the kids go crazy for them every year!
It is a great, simple way to use up some of the rhubarb and not make yet another crisp… but if you’re looking for tips on growing rhubarb or other recipes, I have you covered.
