Some methods work better for certain crops than for others.
For starters, the yellow summer squash gets made into a pureed soup and frozen in quart containers
Yellow Summer Squash Soup
1 Tbs. butter
2 cups onion, chopped
4 cups yellow squash diced
2 cups chicken broth
salt and pepper to taste
Saute onions in the butter over medium heat until the onions are translucent, a few minutes. Add the squash, the chicken broth, and salt and pepper. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat. Cover and simmer until the squash is tender, about ten minutes.
Let cool slightly. Puree with an immersion blender. Serve hot or let cool to freeze.
This soup should NOT be canned, which is why is gets frozen. Not all foods can be safely home canned, hence the squash soup getting frozen. This is because you aren’t guaranteed that the heat has gotten all the way to the middle in a thick soup. This is also the reason that you don’t put macaroni into the chicken soup or beans into the chili when canning it. You add these starchy items after you open the can as you are heating the soup for dinner. Look for USDA-approved recipes (all the recipes in the Ball Book are USDA approved).
Realize, of course, that if the calamity is a grid-down event, you won’t have the freezer for food preservation unless you are off-grid. Tomatoes, tomato sauce, tomato soup, and pickled beets can be safely canned in a hot water bath. Low acid foods such as yellow beans, Swiss chard, and vegetable soup, get canned in a pressure canner. This is the only way to get the temperature over the boiling point to ensure you have killed any microbes that could be present. These canning methods will work so long as you don’t have an electric stove.
Cucumbers are pickled in brine in 3-gallon crocks, as is the sauerkraut. If you have two crocks for the sauerkraut, you can be eating the kraut from the one while the other is fermenting so you will have a continual supply. The active cultures that formed during the fermentation are killed if you can your sauerkraut, so you want to try to keep it fresh. You can store it in the crock, but you must keep removing the scum that will probably form on top.
Root vegetables can be stored whole and without much fuss so long as certain conditions are met. Carrots, parsnips, rutabagas, and beets go into damp sand under the Bilco door off the main basement. This is my cold room. It stays between 30 and 40 degrees and about 70% humidity all winter and into the spring. If I know the temperature overnight is going to be single digits to below zero, I leave the door to the basement open a little. I use plastic “milk” crates from the hardware store and line them with weed barrier fabric, which allows air movement but keeps the sand inside. You will need to dampen the sand from time to time. I keep old cider jugs filled with water in the basement near the door to the cold room for just this purpose (and to flush the toilet if the power goes out).
The vegetables mentioned above get layered under damp sand. It doesn’t matter if they touch a little; just don’t cram them in. I use play sand from the mason supply center and cover the crates with a layer of plastic (the bags the sand came in) to prevent the water from evaporating too quickly. Potatoes go in large plastic bags with holes punched in them, sorted by size and type. These bags go into large cardboard boxes on shelves in the cold room. Onions and garlic go into mesh bags that hang from the floor joists in my unfinished, unheated basement. They don’t like it quite as cold as the other root vegetables.
