How to Cheaply Preserve Food WITHOUT a Garden

Contrary to popular belief, you don’t need a garden in order to preserve food at home through canning, dehydrating, pickling or even freeze drying.

Now of course, the ultimate dream is to grow an abundant garden and preserve as much as you can from that garden.

However, sometimes your garden may struggle. Or maybe you live in a space that simply provides enough edibles for everyday eating.

For those us living in the south, we can pretty much have a year-round garden, especially with the help of a greenhouse. For those in the far north or with harsh winters, growing year-round isn’t an option, therefore the need to preserve food for the winter months is essential.

Regardless of where you live, it really never hurts to have your own preserved food on hand. You know how and when it was made and you know all the ingredients; can’t go wrong there!

So while preserving from your garden is cheap and ideal, it’s not the only way to preserve your own food.

Here are some ways that you can cheaply preserve food without a garden:

Frozen food – frozen vegetables and fruits are far more affordable than fresh and can be used straight out of the bag with little processing. Vegetables and fruits can be dehydrated in various ways. I also can frozen chicken (let thaw first). Fruits can be made into jams and jellies. Click here for my fav dehydrating book.

In-season produce – I recently canned a bunch of corn because it’s in-season and $0.24 an ear. Can’t pass that up! I don’t have enough space to grow my own corn, but buying it in-season I was able to get 7 pints of corn canned and I can certainly do more. Look to in-season produce.

Local farms and community gardens – even if you don’t have a huge garden right now, look to you local community gardens and local farms. Go berry picking, pick your own veggies, you may even be able to volunteer or get a job at a local farm in order to get some of those veggies and fruits for a slight deal.

Foraging – I forage for mesquite beans to make mesquite bean flour and mesquite bean jelly. I forage for prickly pear to make jams and infuse foods with it or even dehydrate the cactus pads. I’ve foraged all kinds of berries when I lived in Alaska and could dehydrate, can or turn into preserves in various ways. Look to your local wild edibles!

Take it slow – I preserve about one thing a week, sometimes even just one thing a month. You don’t have to do everything at once. Normally when it’s harvesting time, people are in the kitchen preserving everything at once to get ready for winter. But if this isn’t the case for you, you can preserve year-round!

Grow indoors – finally, while this isn’t preserving, you can grow a lot of things indoors. Like herbs, microgreens and sprouts. You can even get a hydroponic indoor tower system. There are so many ways to continue to have fresh foods even without a huge garden.

Do whatever is in your means.

Morgan
Morgan is the founder of Rogue Preparedness. She has been a prepper for over a decade. She's a wife, mother of two daughters and is homesteading off grid. She teaches people how to be prepared for emergencies and disasters.

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Comments

  1. This is great! I canned fresh raw pineapple because it was under $2 a pineapple at Walmart. Cost compared 8oz Tidbits to the 8oz jars I canned: more than HALF the cost! And so so SO much more flavor! Loved every aspect of this article. Thank you for your words 💕

    1. That is fantastic!!

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