In all the hustle and bustle of us shutting down our gardens so late this year, we weren’t able to fully cover some of our favorite harvests of the year!
We are definitely some of those “weird people” that actually like Brussels Sprouts. Not just growing them, but eating them as well. They are definitely a bit challenging to grow in our short growing season, but we’ve figured out how to make them work consistently every year across several different varieties. If you’ve following us, you know we throw out those critical tips when they are needed!
Again, we use blanch and freeze for our Brussels sprout preservation methodology. They take quite well to freezing, allowing pretty much every preparation you might use for them once preserved. There’s no known “safe” canning methods for Brussies, so freezing is one of your few preservation options.
One of the “tricky” things about this preservation method is your blanching times vary based on whether you get small, medium or large sprouts. So, you have to do a bit of sorting based on size prior to blanching. These sizes will make sense to anyone that grows them, you’ll look at them and say, “Yeah, that’s clearly small” and “Wow, this one’s large” and oh, “In between, that must be medium!”
One of the things we’re quite happy with this year is that we’ve finally “right sized” our Brussels sprout harvest. In years past, we’ve overgrown them and had way more than we would ever need. Over the years, we’ve refined the number of plants we grow and have pretty much dialed it in. It can take years to fully tune a garden, so don’t feel bad if you’ve over or under grown some things this year. The learning curve in gardening is much larger than people give it credit for.
Brussels sprouts are one of those crops where our cold climate and short growing season align “just enough” to make it work exceptionally well! We’re happy for that, this is a ton of nutrition for not much effort overall!
