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Select late-season, winter-keeping varieties but time your planting so that produce will have time to mature completely and comes on at a time and in a sequence that is most convenient for preserving. In other words, plan and plant early enough so that winter squash has plenty of time to harden up naturally, so onion tops can dry and heal in the fall sun, and so that fat full Brussels sprouts can experience one or two light frosts for greatest sweetness. Stagger so you aren't faced with two bushels each of string beans, plum tomatoes, and sweet corn, all on the same August weekend that you'd been promising the kids all summer that you'd take them to the lake.

Our Best-Bet Varieties Beans

By and large, the best vegetables for preserving are slow-growing varieties with a naturally high fiber content. Not that they should be tough and stringy; those characteristics come from bad growing conditions or age. For example, the lovely little French haricots vert, or green beans, are delicious picked and eaten young, but they are too flaccid to preserve well using home methods. By the time they mature long enough to hold up to a canner or drying rack, they are too tough and stringy for good eating.

Most modern bush bean varieties, such as the universally-popular Provider, were specifically developed by commercial plant breeders to be canned or frozen. The pods all come on at the same time for once-over machine harvesting. Better for home preserving are types with a prolonged harvest period that can be picked and preserved in-small batches and in several ways.

As an example here in northern New England, the favorite multi-crop green or snap beans are Blue Lake and Kentucky, pole-types that climb to ten or 12 feet, producing "hands" of four to six pods at every node. Pods make delicious eating from 3" to 6" in length and are good (after stringing, if need be) for slicing or Frenching up to nearly a foot in length. They freeze, can, or dry best at about 4". The rank vines produce over several weeks—months even—and you can pick beans in short lengths for eating and in longer preserving lengths every few days through late summer and early fall. You must harvest every single pod to sustain production; if just one pod is left to mature, the plant thinks it has achieved its goal in life and gives up.

Do leave the last set of pods up at the top of the vine to mature to shell beans; if they are left to dry, you have fine brown-skinned baking beans.

Finally, if uprooted and pulled off their pole supports before they become frost-brittle, the wiry old vines can be stripped of leaves and woven into hammocks, baskets, or wreath foundations. Plus, as beans are legumes with root systems containing nodules full of nitrogen-fixing bacteria, they leave plant food behind in the soil. Let's see: pods fresh or preserved, seeds fresh or dry, vines for crafts, and free fertilizer to boot. How can you lose?

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