Stepping Up My Preservation Game

Reminder that I'm away on vacation and will return in another four or so days.

Deep in our storage/laundry room in the basement has resided a 4.5 cubic foot chest freezer that we've had for probably two decades. It has served us well though it frustrates us frequently. It has been completely full for nearly all of its life with this and that and finding the particular this that you need for your meal means a lot of rummaging around and shuffling things left and right. As you can imagine, over time, things that might have started off neatly stacked get shuffled around to where you can't find things you thought you had but can find things you had forgotten about putting into the freezer many years ago.

For several years now, I have been wanting to fix this problem and make the freezer work better for us, namely make it easier to see and access what we have and also get a bit more freezer space so as our fruit crops start becoming more plentiful, I have a way to preserve them. It is also nice to have an alternative to canning on preserving some vegetables like peas and corn for example.

So after filling up every nook and cranny in our old small chest freezer with bags of sweetcorn, I found myself at the local appliance store and within 15 minutes, made a deal on a demo model upright freezer that has over three times the capacity of our chest freezer! I was very excited about how reasonable the prices have gotten to be since I began thinking about them as a solution.

A couple days later, two strong delivery guys had it carted down the hill behind our house and slid into place next to my canning shelves down in our storage room. I let it prechill while the old chest freezer sat unplugged but closed lid nearby and then a few hours later, transferred everything into the new freezer. Everything is now easily visible and accessible.

With the way of the shelves and everything being prefrozen, nothing stacks very well to utilize all the space. That may come with time as we use up those things and add things that aren't yet frozen to replace them and those will stack together much better. But I may also measure the shelf spaces and buy some sort of properly sized baskets to help hold things better so we can put more food into it without worrying that it might avalanche off the shelf whenever the door is opened. 

But that is a project for another day, after I return from vacation.