It’s Day Four of Canning Week on the site and today I’m not canning. Instead I’ll be telling you the simplest way to Freeze Basil to preserve that fresh herb flavor for use in sauces, soups, stews, salad dressings, or even to toss with pasta. 

That photo of the basket of basil sitting beneath a section of my Wee Kitchen Garden is one of my favorites from this year. The garden pick of the girl with her arms outstretched with joy is precisely how I feel every single time I visit the garden. The delight I take and the peace and pleasure of gardening, even on the small-scale of the Wee Kitchen Garden, is immeasurable.

Preserving the fruits of that labor of love, through canning and freezing, is another of the joys of gardening. And basil is one of the easiest herbs to preserve for future use! While basil is a tender herb, in that the leaves will bruise easily, the flavor of basil (if not the gorgeous color) is so simple to save.

For years now, what I have done to preserve the basil from my garden is to chop it, mix it with olive oil and freeze it using my mini muffin tins. Ice cube trays would work for this project also.

Normally, I’m pretty good about keeping the bloom heads clipped off my basil. I was so busy canning in the three weeks leading up to this harvest, I had some pretty long bloom heads. Clipping the blooms ensures that the basil will continue to grow. Once the plants bloom, they have done their job and they will die. I caught these just in time. I only harvested about half way down my plants; they will keep growing now that the tops have been taken out.

After harvesting the basil, it’s important to wash it and to pick the leaves from the stems, removing bloom heads too.

I run the leaves through my salad spinner to remove excess water, but you could pat yours dry with a towel if you don’t have a salad spinner.

Then, just assemble your tools. You’ll need:

• Food Processor
• Mini Muffin Tins (or Ice Cube Trays)
• Olive oil (I preserve my basil in Extra-Virgin Olive Oil, but use what you like best.)
• Basil Leaves (picked from stems, washed and dried)

Using the blade attachment, pack the bowl of the food processor with basil leaves and turn it on. As the basil is chopped, drizzle in just enough olive oil to coat the leaves. Turn off the processor, remove the blade and scoop the mixture into the mini muffin tins.

Because I had so much basil, I had to process it in batches.

Once in the mini muffin tins, the basil is ready for the freezer. Just a couple of hours and the basil should be frozen. Remove the basil from the tins, place into freezer bags, or containers and return to the freezer for future use. I put six of the basil disks in a bag and vacuum seal them. When I need to use basil, I’ll open a bag, remove a disk and use it for whatever application I need.

The basil disks can go frozen into soups, stews and sauces. I thaw them if I’m using them in salad dressings, or if I’m tossing them with pasta. You can thaw them and make fresh pesto with them, or you can make pesto and freeze it already prepared, using this same method.

This method of preserving basil is great because you’ll have easy access to as little, or as much, as you need for a recipe.

I hope you’ll try this with your basil!

P~

Today’s post is an update on the Wee Kitchen Garden; filled with photos of the garden’s progress since its move. It is also the precursor for Canning Week! All this week, I’ll be sharing recipes with you for canning fresh garden produce! Get those canning kettles ready! 

Earlier this year, I moved my Wee Kitchen Garden from its old location in a field down by our barn to a better, sunnier spot on a bank near the edge of our property. Here’s where I told you about that project.

Here are some photos of the Wee Kitchen Garden, the harvests and what I’ve done with the bounty from it.

I planted the Wee Kitchen Garden on the 29th of April. Here it is one month later, at the beginning of June:

There are three sections of the Wee Kitchen Garden. Sixty by One-Hundred-Twenty of Cutting Garden, Sixty by One-Hundred-Twenty of Herbs and Sixty by One-Hundred-Twenty of cucumbers and Tomatoes.

I planted a boatload of zinnia because I love them so much. They are such happy flowers and they really make me smile. I moved the gladioli and the Salvia from my other garden location. Here is the Cutting Garden in June:

I moved parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme and chives from the old location. I also planted basil, dill and mint. Here is the Herb Garden in June:

I planted cucumbers because we love them. We love to eat them raw, we love pickles. There are three vines. Little did I know what these vines would put out when I took this photo in June:

And I planted tomatoes. Mr. Saucy requested that I plant tomato plants just for harvesting green tomatoes. He wanted plenty of them for me to pickle and he wanted Baked Not Fried Green Tomatoes on a regular basis. I also planted a different variety of tomatoes to harvest ripe for eating. Once the tomatoes were planted, I created this grid tomato cage to be able to tie them up. For the ties, I bought some green fleece fabric and cut it into strips. Not only does the fabric stretch a bit, but it’s soft, so it won’t hurt the vines. It has worked really well!

On June 9th, I had my first little baby tomatoes!

One June 13th, I harvested the first cucumbers! The first cucumbers of MANY cucumbers!

June 18th brought more cucumbers and my first flowers from the cutting garden!

And the flowers have kept coming! I told myself when I planted cutting flowers that my goal was to not purchase flowers all summer. I love keeping flowers in the house. I keep them in the kitchen to keep me company while I cook; I keep them in the keeping room; I keep them in the guest bathroom and guest bedroom…I love flowers everywhere! I haven’t purchased a single flower all summer.

There have been so many flowers, I have started making up vases to give away to friends and neighbors!

I had critters eating my flowers, and dill and nibbling on my parsley. So I bought garden stakes with shiny butterflies on them to discourage the garden raiders. They worked! Then July came and here’s how the Wee Kitchen Garden grew:

Remember those first baby tomatoes? Here they are ripening!

And once the garden munchers left off with the introduction of the butterfly stakes, the cutting garden really started filling out. No matter how many I cut, there are always so many more to keep the garden filled with beautiful color!

And the produce came and came and came!

So, I pickled and canned:

Staging cucumbers and spices for canning

Staging for Salsa and Bruschetta in a Jar

Tomato Jam

Tomato Sauce

Dill Pickle Relish

A Sink Full of Basil for Preserving and for Basil Jelly

The Stocked Pantry

And…believe it or not, the garden is still producing! While the cucumbers finally succumbed (after over 9 gallons of pickles, 16 half pints of dill pickle relish, eating cucumbers constantly, giving them away) the tomatoes are still going strong! I had crows pecking the tomatoes, so I installed a plastic hawk (see him on the tomato cage?) and they have *fingers crossed* stopped eating my tomatoes. Here it is as an early August Wee Kitchen Garden:

As I said, this post kicks off a week of recipes for canning! While I have posted a lot of recipes for canning, which you can find here, this week I’ll be bringing you recipes for Dill Pickle Relish, Tomato Jam (unbelievable addition to a cheese board), Bruschetta in a Jar, Preserving Basil and Tomato Sauce.

So, stay tuned! And get those canning kettles and jars ready!

P~

My Wee Kitchen Garden has moved from its old location to its new location pictured here. It was an enormous undertaking; let me show you my journey with this project. 

What is a kitchen garden? A kitchen garden is a garden in which vegetables and/or herbs and/or fruit are grown for use in cooking. In April of 2013 I decided I was going to build a raised bed garden in the little field that goes down to our barn. I called it my Wee Kitchen Garden because it wasn’t very large.

I bought a raised bed garden kit, laid landscape fabric, assembled the boxes, put gravel around the perimeter of the garden, built trellises, built a garden gate and put a critter fence around the outside. Here it is in August of that year:

While I was able to grow a lot in that garden, it wasn’t the best spot for sun. I’ve been wanting to move it ever since. Last year, I decided it was going to be time. So in the fall, while my neighbor was out and about with his backhoe, I had him “level” a bank near the edge of our property where I knew there would be plenty of light.

On April 2, I started the move of the garden boxes. It was pretty easy to disassemble them, but they weren’t in the best shape. I decided I was going to move them anyway and just see if this location was going to work better.

Once again, I laid landscape fabric under where I was going to put the boxes. This really helps keep down the weeds that might grow up through the box soil. Because I changed the configuration of the boxes, I was able to add another whole box. The bank wasn’t exactly level, but I figured I could make it work. I leveled it using some stones (which created an issue later). Here it is partially assembled:

The next step was to create a retaining wall on the far bank, and to surround the garden with concrete retaining wall blocks. This not only makes a level surface to surround the garden for ease of access, but it acts as a barrier between the garden and any grass or weeds.

Here is the first phase:

Note the beer in the above photo? It was well deserved. All of this first phase of block was done in one day.

I measured how much I was going to need, but ran into some problems. First, the measurement of the blocks was given as 12 inches, when in fact they are only 11 inches. Then, because of the grade, it took more blocks than I anticipated.

I had 100 blocks delivered, but ended up needing 131 blocks. Weighing in at 24.4 pounds per block, I moved and placed 2934.4 pounds of block. It was way more when you consider how many times I moved them from place to place.

My fabulous neighbor pumps water from a cave on his property to a tank behind his house. This system is then gravity fed down to his own garden and orchard (which is just across the road from my garden site). At first he asked if I wanted to run a hose over to his spigot in the orchard and I was thrilled! Then, he offered to dig a trench and run a line directly to my site. Could there be a better neighbor?

Fortunately, we live in a tiny little subdivision with a gravel road. And since we control what goes on back here, it was no problem to dig across the road. The only issue was that we have underground utilities. I called to have the location marked and hand dug, with a pick, fifteen inches deep, across the top of the lines.

I filled the beds with an equal mixture of top soil and mushroom compost, transplanted all of my perennial herbs and cutting flowers from the old garden location, planted annual herbs from seed and two types of tomatoes and pickling cucumbers. This was at the end of April, just before were away for a couple of weeks on a fishing trip. Fortunately, my neighbor’s wife watered for me while we were gone.

When I returned in the middle of May, everything was thriving! The final step in the Wee Kitchen Garden move was to finish the block surround and to fill the surround with gravel.

Yesterday, I pulled all the weeds from the inside of the surround, laid the last of landscape fabric inside to fully cover the areas inside the surround.

My same fabulous, incredible, super-hero neighbor used his backhoe to bring me gravel (from the pile we use for our subdivision road maintenance) to fill the surround. I raked and shoveled it into place and this is it! Finished!

Everything is doing amazingly well! More sun, great soil, water without any chemicals. I’m beyond thrilled! I’m never afraid to tackle huge projects, so this one was a lot of fun for me! I can’t wait to be able to share recipes using my herbs and vegetables from the new Wee Kitchen Garden!

P~