Keeping it safe: food safety for gardeners

Simply having produced it yourself doesn't guarantee that your homegrown food will be safe to eat.

Growing and preparing your own food makes you responsible for the safety of the food you harvest and feed your family.

For that, you'll need to follow the best food-safety practices at every step: preparing your soil, making and using compost or animal manures, as well as during post-harvest handling, preparation, and storage foods.

Don't skimp on any food safety rules, and don't forget the cardinal rule: When in doubt, throw it out!

Comprehensive food safety guides for gardeners

UNH Cooperative Extension food safety pages Links to a wide variety of food safety topics.

Food safety: best practices for home gardeners Keep food safety in mind at every stage of preparation, production, harvest and post-harvest.

Still Tasty "The ultimate shelf-life guide." Wonderful visual depictions of the food-safety lives of raw, cooked, canned (opened or sealed), and frozen foods. Many pages of tips, answers to common vexing questions. 

Food Keeper Valuable food safety and storage advice to help you maintain the freshness and quality of foods that you purchase.

The National Center for Home Food Preservation at the University of Georgia offers the latest research-based information about freezing, canning, drying, curing, smoking, fermenting, pickling, and making jams and jellies. To ensure the safetly of your stored garden products, always refer to this Web site. Don't use instructions from old cookbooks or preservation manuals, or practices passed down as cherished family traditions, and don't use equipment or methods not recommended by the Center.

Photo credit: Kathy Martin, Skippy's Vegetable Garden. Used with permission.