How To Wash & Preserve Greens-Plus Our Favorite Way To Eat Them!

Greens are a crop that I tend to overplant. Once they come in, they just keeeep cooomming. I justify this by giving my wasted bits to the chickens, but when I’m on my game, this is how I use them.

They are also the one thing that we have growing in our garden pretty much year-round.
Kale, chard, lettuce….we’ve got lots of greens folks. I pick a bunch every couple of days, then scramble to do something with them before they go limp.

Once you pick them, there’s a pretty short window of time before that happens, so you want to get them cooled off quickly.

1.  Fill up your sink with cold water, submerge the greens, & let them soak for about 10 minutes (or 2 hours if you’re like me & forget about them).  
   This step is crucial to keeping them fresh & crisp.
   
2.   Remove the stems, rinsing the leaves as you go along.
   
3.   I use my nifty little salad spinner to dry the leaves,
   but you could just let them drain on a dish towel.
   

At this point, you can either store them in the fridge (they’ll stay fresh for up to a week), freeze them, or cook them up.

How To Freeze Your Garden Greens

This has been so helpful for me when it comes to saving greens from our garden. I don’t want them with every meal, but having them to pull out in the winter months is pretty nice (although we have such a mild season that I can usually grow them long into the winter).

Once you’ve washed them, layer your greens on a baking sheet with a paper towel or thin kitchen towel in between each layer. Once they’ve flash frozen, pull them out and store them in the freezer in an airtight container.

When you do decide to use them, this is our favorite way to enjoy them.