How I Saved the Last Harvest + What I’d do Differently (No Fancy Gear Needed)

The first hard freeze is coming — and the garden season is coming to an end here on The Hometown Homestead. In this video, I’m showing how we harvest the last of our vegetables, what I’m doing differently after this year’s mistakes, and how to preserve the harvest the easy way — no special canning equipment required!

We’ll pick the final peppers, talk about what survived the frost, and I’ll show you how to freeze vegetables fast and make my favorite onion top pesto for the freezer. I’m also walking through simple garden prep steps before winter to protect your soil and set yourself up for an even better spring garden.
If you’ve ever wondered how to prepare your garden for winter, what to do before the freeze, or how to preserve late-season veggies without spending all day canning — this episode is for you. Stay to the end for our Winter Indoor Gardening Giveaway and find out how to enter!

Looking for gardening supplies? Check out my favorites at Vego Garden: https://glnk.io/vzw5/0uh

Kitchen Supplies can be found here: https://www.amazon.com/shop/thehometownhomestead/list/1LFP7HAPAUOQL?ref_=cm_sw_r_cp_ud_aipsflist_QYTSKR5P6SR10Y87SH4E

The above links are commissioned through Amazon or elsewhere. I appreciate everyone who shops with my links, as it does provide a small commission for me, at no additional cost to you!

🌱 Subscribe for more seasonal homestead living, preservation tutorials, and real-life garden lessons.

Need Vacuum Sealing Supplies or the CV12 Chamber Vac?
Check out the vacuum sealer collection from WEVAC and use my code: TheHometownHomestead to save 15% off of everything they offer!

US: https://wevactech.com/referral/thehometownhomestead
UK: https://uk.wevactech.com/referral/thehometownhomestead
CA: https://ca.wevactech.com/referral/thehometownhomestead
AU: https://au.wevactech.com/referral/thehometownhomestead

Please send business inquiries to hometown@honestinfluence.io

Camera Equipment:
Sony a7iv: https://amzn.to/4deZtCR
Osmo Pocket 3:https://amzn.to/3MY4oxj

Thank you again to @VegoGarden for sponsoring this video.

Music courtesy of Epidemic Sound: https://www.epidemicsound.com/music/tracks/a94fc25d-45af-4a56-9776-91d230e0510e/

Well, the freeze is coming. The garden is hanging on by a thread, but this is it. Our last harvest of the season here at the hometown homestead. We’ve spent months planting, watering, and watching the garden grow. And now it’s time to tuck it in for winter and make sure nothing goes to waste. I’ll show you what we’re still picking, how I’m preserving it the easy way, and share a few lessons that I learned the hard way this year. because the garden always has a way of keeping us humble. Oh, and stick around until the end because I am going to announce the winner of our indoor garden giveaway sponsored by Ve Garden. And you won’t want to miss it. [Music] The last week headed into the first hard freeze of the season is always so busy and a little bittersweet if I have to be honest with you. Our peppers are in full swing. They look beautiful and they’re doing great just in time to die off. I have a lot of gorgeous flowers blooming in the garden and of course the crocus coming up as you can see here in the foreground. All in time to be hit hard tomorrow night as I’m giving you this audio. So, there is a lot of work to be done and not a lot of time to do it. The first thing on my agenda this week was to pull all the peppers that we have out of our pepper bed and then to find a way to get it covered as much as I can. I know it’s crazy and that peppers like as much warmth as they can get. But when they are this beautiful and in such high production, I was willing to try whatever it would take this year. So stay tuned because I will be giving you updates on how long I was able to keep these alive as the season progresses. We decided to go ahead and add a frost cover specifically made for the size of bed that I have in hopes that we can keep the frost out at least a few more weeks and get one more harvest off these peppers before the season ends. Now, while my peppers were looking super great, that’s not the case for everything. So this year in specific, I am not trying to save any tomatoes. It’s actually one of the areas where I consider myself somewhat of a failure this year. Now, I know that’s pretty dramatic language. I got a lot of great harvest. I got enough uh tomatoes and peppers to go ahead and put salsa on the shelf for my family for the year. I have a lot of tomatoes thrown in the freezer where I can make some tomato sauce and other tomato products throughout the year. But I did not get the quantity that I normally do. And a lot of that is because we took on so many other projects around the house this year that my focus was not fully on the garden. So things that could not grow independently and kind of autopilot with the watering that they were getting from the irrigation system, the things that needed a little extra work from me did suffer. And my tomatoes are one of those crops. I also took one of my beds and turned it into a bed for cutting flowers, and that I would say was also a fail. I actually had plans when I first put this in to expand on my garden for next year and add a big second section that would include things like asparagus and other vegetables that I wouldn’t have to plant year after year. But I’ve decided after the flower situation, it’s probably best to just take that bed and turn it into asparagus, leaving more time for myself to get that accomplished. Less projects for my husband and my boys who put this all in for me last year, and more time to focus on the things that we actually love to eat. Now, with this being my first year of raised beds, I knew there would be a learning curve, but that is just part of it. Next year, I’m planning better spacing, more selection, and focusing in on the products that really make the biggest difference here in our house. But that’s one thing about the garden that I’ve learned over the years. It will definitely keep me humble, and I always continue to want to learn more and do better every single year. Now, the day that we brought the peppers in, which was the day prior to me cutting up the peppers here on film, the kiddos went crazy. They ate them and they ate them, and they ate them. So, the first thing I did was just wash them all, um, get them clean, soak them in vinegar, and then put them in the refrigerator so they would stay nice and fresh. The kids can then grab them at any point they want and go ahead and have bites off of them. Now, they do know specifically which ones have a little bit of spice to them. And the only pepper that I grow that has a little bit of a spice are actually banana peppers that get ripe. So, if that tells you our level of spice, that gives you a good idea of what’s going on around here. But as you can see just watching them here, they are all grabbing peppers, chewing them. They absolutely love them. So anytime that we can keep a lot fresh going on, we want to do that. But as the season starts to close and I can put away this many peppers for projects throughout the fall, which I actually have a canning project in mind for these and I cannot wait to have them already pre-prepped and ready to go. So them as many as I can put away at one time, I’m going to do it. And recently, I took the ease of this process to the next level by finding a way that my kiddos could help me cut up the peppers while I was in the process of getting them prepped and ready to be diced. This little food chopper has been super fun and also has taken the time that it takes me to process things like peppers and onions down drastically because I can employ a few helpers to get the job done. The other benefit is super even dice. So sometimes I would have smaller or larger sections. And that little chopper has taken all of that out of the way, allowing the kids to be a part of the process and having fun. Now, day three of my winter garden prep sent me back outside to chop down all of the tomato plants that were left growing in my garden. Last year, I let the frost get to them before I pull them out. And I found this was an absolutely huge mistake. If you have ever made this mistake, you know exactly what I’m talking about. All the plants get really um I would almost slimy. The stems are very weak. They explode from freezing inside and they just don’t have good structure to be able to easily pull them out of the beds or get them removed in a way that is quick and easy at all. So this year I decided that would absolutely not happen. And I did have a few beauties left on the vine. This is a pineapple tomato. If you haven’t grown them before, highly recommend them. My girls absolutely love them. And on the inside, they have like a really nice pink slash red fruit to them, so it doesn’t look super yellow on the inside once they’re officially ripe. So, just to throw out there, we really did love those tomatoes this year. So, with that said, I went ahead and pulled out all of the vines in order to get them out of the way before I had a problem with anything exploding from the freeze and getting really hard to handle. When I did that, actually, last year, my garden was in the back. It was back behind my shed and I just left it all winter. I could not bring myself to go out there and tackle the mess that was left. I know that is not ideal, but you know, as busy mom sometimes things like that just happen, but it taught me a very important lesson and is that was that I was not going to let that happen again. So, pull them all out, get them out of the way. Even if they’re just on the ground, as long as they’re not still tangled in some sort of trellis system that you’re going to have to try to unwind them from, you will be very, very happy that you took the short amount of time to get them out of the way before the freeze comes in. Now, per usual, while I was out front, I was alerted that a few of my ladies and one of the gentlemen had made their way to the front of the house. So, I had to take just a quick break to run my chickens back into the backyard where they go. But, who can blame them really? And they do make a really nice garden cleanup crew at the end of the season. So if you do have some chickens that you can let into your garden space, feel free to do that at the end of the year to have any extra produce cleaned up. The one caution is they love to dig in your beds and often will leave a mess. So just make sure to not leave them anything that is important or anything that you don’t want messed up before you close off the season. Now, as you can see, we are working this around our normal day around here. I have kiddos that are finishing up some schoolwork inside and my little one is out adventuring and we just have all sorts of things going on. But that is real life of a homestead kind of vibe and a homeschooling family. We fit it in where we have time, which is why you’re seeing this entire process over the week instead of just a day or two’s worth of work. I also find that’s much gentler on your body if you’re standing up canning for days and days on end or just spending a long time doing it. it is, you know, you’re a little sore, you have that back pain and all of those things that can come along with it. So, when I can spread that out and just give myself some grace, it always works out a little bit better. As we finished up the removal of all the tomato vines, I was uncovering quite a few onions that were popping up through the soil that I had left earlier in the spring. Some of them just weren’t very large when it was time to harvest, and I thought, you know, what’s it going to matter? I’ll leave them in there and see what happens. Well, moving into this time of year, I knew I was getting ready to lose all of the tops, and I decided to come up with a really fun project to go along with this. We’re gonna turn these beauties into a form of pesto, which is one of our family favorites and a very, very simple food preservation hack. So, I’m going to show you that here shortly. But if you do have onion tops or shallot tops or anything of the kind, actually, any leafy green can be made into a pesto. Um, it doesn’t take any time, any real food preservation skill, per se, and it is a really easy project. So, we’ll tackle that in a little bit, but for now, check out this little Marold. My little lady is just flower happy and cannot get enough. So, we always have a few little tops coming in. I’ve tried to tell her a few times, you know, more stem the better, but when you’re four years old, hey, anything that is beautiful is fair game in her mind. Now, I did have quite a few shallots. I actually left them in earlier. My zone is not appropriate for growing shallots. So, they don’t actually have a chance really to form a great big shallot like you would find or I should say a nice size shallot. They’re never really big, but I don’t have the right amount of daylight to grow them to their fullest potential. That said, even growing them where I’m at, I still get great flavor and a decent harvest. So, we’ll be using these over the coming weeks until they’re all gone. Now, I have one more crop that needs my attention before we head inside to do some preservation, and that is the cabbage. For me, traditionally, cabbage is a fail because I do refuse to use most forms of pesticides in my garden, wanting to keep everything as natural as possible. But this fall, I decided to go ahead and chat with my friends at VGO and see if I could get a cover that would prevent those nasty suckers from taking over my cabbage and killing it all. That said, this cover is for netting and a little bit of sun protection, so it’s not going to help us out through the frost. The cool thing about this system, though, is I can actually just switch out the top for a frost cover, which is what we’re going to do here. I know cabbage is frost hardy or it can get pretty cold. But we’re going to get down almost in the teens in the next two days, so I wanted to make sure that I gave it the best chance possible. So, I’m swapping out my summer cover. I’m going to put on that frost cover and I again am going to let you know how long I’m able to keep everything alive through the cold season as it comes in. I am pretty excited to see how long this lasts because these covers are way stronger than I anticipated. And they also have special features like venting and opening sides to give me a lot of flexibility in how I want to water and how I want to care for the plants as the seasons change, especially during the warmer days. You know, just because the frost is here now doesn’t mean next week it’s not going to be back in the 60s. So, with these zip sides and being able to velcro the sides up to the top, I have the flexibility of kind of having an open air style cover as well as being able to lock it down on nights when it’s really cold, which is exactly what we went out and did tonight. As an overall review of how I’ve liked moving to raised beds over inground gardening, I can say it has been really, really nice. But I will caution and say sometimes the first year of any garden setup has a little bit of a honeymoon phase. So I’m really excited to see how it continues next spring and what everything looks like. But so far this year, not only have I been able to properly protect my plants and have a great water system running through the beds themselves, but I’ve also been able to really do a good job of elevating everything up off the ground, which does help to keep certain pests like rabbits and chickens when they get out and come that way out of the fray of where my fruit is, especially if you’re talking about tomatoes. Because once you get that 18 in of elevation of the bed and then the plant grows up over the top of it, the chickens have to be pretty tall in order to go in and take a bite of those delicious fruits right before you’re ready to pick them. Now, as we turn the corner into the last day that my beautiful flowers are going to be able to grow in the garden, it’s time to cut them all down and bring them inside to enjoy them as arrange bouquets as long as we can. Take a look at these chindula. These are a strawberry chindula, I believe. I got them from rare seeds.com. So, if you’re interested in something like that, that is where these specific seeds come from. I grabbed them, some cosmos that I saw growing as well as some hydrangeas that are right outside our door. This plant has been here for so long. It’s actually really, really huge. Sometimes it does really well and other times it doesn’t. But this year has some beautiful blooms that I decided to go ahead and bring in to add to the mix. I have found that hydrangeas actually dry really well. So, if you have some outside and you still haven’t hit that first freeze, make sure to bring them in because it is so disheartening to walk outside and see them totally decimated by that freeze. Now, colulial itself has a lot of medicinal properties, so I will be preserving them just slightly. But before I let them dry out in my jars, I’m gonna go ahead and put some water in to see if we can get a few weeks worth of life out of them before I dry them upside down so I can use them for things like sav or any kind of oil that I want to go ahead and infuse for health purposes. So, for now, I’m going to use them for their beauty and for later, I’m going to use them for the benefit. Now, while I was arranging my flowers inside, it occurred to me that I need to tell you guys who won the drawing from last week’s Vego Garden giveaway. Now, if you recall, I’m giving away a whole set that includes an indoor light, an indoor growing system that helps with proper spacing, watering, and irration, as well as a winter seed packet. Now, I have to say, we planted this lettuce two weeks ago when I was announcing that giveaway, and I’ve been super happy with how those lights set on the seed setting have brought this lettuce to life. Also, how the automated watering system has kept them growing. And I am going to go ahead and start a new batch of lettuce every two weeks all winter long so that I can grow this fresh green right in our house for pennies on the dollar of what I could buy it for in the store. But without further ado, let me announce the winner of our random comment picker, Elise Galant. I’m sure I’m butchering your name, but I would just like to thank you for entering and I am super excited to see how this takes hold in your house. I will go ahead and put a comment under this specific post that you put up last week. And from there, we will go ahead and get in communication. I’ll shoot you my email, get back to me, and we will get it put out. Now, if you have heard something or if any of you have heard a comment from somebody else that you are the winner, please disregard it. It is only a lease. It will be coming direct from me. And I want to thank our good friends at VGO Garden for sponsoring not only this giveaway, but also this specific video on how to preserve our final harvest and how to make the most out of our winter garden. I will make sure to drop my Vego link down below. They have awesome sales going all the time. So, do not wait to take advantage of all that they have going on. I will say super impressed with my lettuce seeds and how they’ve done. That was the first seed packet that I’ve tried out for VGO because seeds are new for them this year. If you are interested in seeds for spring, check out one of their collections. I shouldn’t say just spring. They have an awesome winter collection, which is what Elise is getting today. So, give them a shout. Check out my website link down below and let my friends at VGO know that you saw them here at the Hometown Homestead. Okay, with all of that out of the way, let’s jump back to this onion pesto. Now, this is something that I have actually not made with onion tops before, but I can attest and you’ll see my taste tester down the road. Um, it’s great and he came back for second. So, super good as far as I’m concerned. This will work really well in what we normally eat. A couple years ago, if you would have told me that pesto would be one of the things that my kids absolutely loved, I would have thought you’re crazy. But they do love it. And I use it often when we roast chicken. So, if you haven’t ever tried oven roasted pesto chicken, highly recommend it. I like to use it on wings specifically or thighs. We like the dark meat. But that’s neither here nor there. The beauty and the flavor that you can get from an oven roasted pesto chicken is absolutely amazing. Now, the traditional way to make pesto is with basil, but it can be done with any leafy green, which is exactly what we’re doing today. All of these onion tops are just too good to go to waste. And I did go ahead and sort, making sure to keep the small tiny ones um just in a jar of water in the refrigerator so I can continually use those for the purpose of green onions. But there were just too many, especially when I added in the tops of the scallions. So, I went ahead and cut all of these off of the onion itself or the scallion. Then, I’m just rough chopping them with my kitchen scissors right into a bowl where we’re going to wash them. This is a super important step and it often is something that people will kind of overlook when they’re bringing in greens or thinking about greens. It’s not just the bottom of these plants that are dirty. So, make sure to go ahead and give them a good wash. One way to do that is to run water in a bowl and give them a good swish and then go ahead and use a salad spinner to take out all of the extra water if you don’t need water in your final product. I also like to add vinegar to my rinse water often because that helps to kill germs and bacteria and it really takes only about 2 minutes of a soap to go ahead and get that action complete which will let your food be safer for everyone and last longer. The bulk of the time that it actually takes to make the pesto is simply cleaning the greens. Other than that, all you need to do is grab your ingredient list, which is actually pretty short. You can use fresh lemons or lemon juice. You’re going to see me use lemon juice for sure because it’s easy to have on hand and it’s already partially prepped. You also need some sort of nut. Traditional basil pesto will have a pine nut, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only nut you can use. is actually one of the more costly nuts. So often people will substitute walnuts. My personal favorite is the pine nut. I usually keep them on hand. I am out. So today we’re going to go ahead with the walnuts because that’s what I have on hand. And it’s time to get this done. So I am using a double batch of the recipe, which I will link below. Um so I’m going to go ahead and add one cup of the walnuts as well as a cup and a half of shredded Parmesan cheese. The only other ingredient that you really need is some good olive oil. So, you can go ahead and thin it to the consistency that you like. Now, this is something that is definitely personal preference. So, is actually the total overall flavor of your pesto. So, make sure you’re tasting it along the way in order to adjust seasonings or flavors as you wish. If you get too much lemon oil or something of that sort, of course, that flavor can be overwhelming. So, I always recommend starting a little bit on the low side because you can add it, but taking it away is quite difficult. The first time I tried this, I did want to go ahead and make some adjustments. I actually got it a little creamier than I was looking for, but I had twice as much product or twice as much onion top as I actually needed. So, I went back and added those without adding much extra oil in order to get my desired consistency. As you can see here, my little guy got a new toy this week. He’s been saving his money and scanned Facebook Marketplace and found a hoverboard. So, lots of falls and lots of fun around our house this week. But he was able to swing back by for seconds. So, that let me know this was ready for the jar. Now, unlike other preservation projects, there is no canning actually required. Even though we’re going to put it in jars and use lids, pesto doesn’t do well stored on the shelf. So, I’m going to go ahead wipe these rims clean, put on the lids, and we’re going to put them out in the freezer. So, as far as easy food preservation comes and a great way to use up all of the final bits that are left out in the garden, I think this one is a total hit. Now, as I promised before, I will definitely keep you updated on how my how my garden does throughout this freeze and how long I can keep those peppers and cabbage still producing and growing beautifully out in the garden. But as for the fullness of the 2025 garden season, this is