If there is a freezer on your homestead, you want it full! Enjoy a bounty of yums throughout the year by working these five ways to fill your freezer into your homesteading plans.

(Don't want to read all the words? This blog post is also a podcast—just press the triangle play button on the little black bar at the top of this post!)

1. One of the most obvious ways to fill your freezer? Raise your own meat animals.

Probably a given when talking to many homesteaders, but one common way to fill your freezer on the homestead is to raise your own meat animals. Raising your own meat means you can be assured you're eating humanely raised, healthful meat.

Need to hear someone's experience raising certain animals for meat before you dive in?

Beef:

Providing Meat for Our Family Homestead

Chickens:

My ebook: Choosing the Best Meat Chicken for Your Homestead

The Great Meat Bird Experiment: Cornish Cross vs. Red Rangers

Pigs:

How to Raise Pigs Naturally on a Small Farm

Rabbits:

Why We Chose to Homestead with Meat Rabbits

Turkeys:

Raising Turkeys on the Homestead

 

Bonus! Fill your freezer more cheaply by butchering at home.

And hey, if you want to save money and be really self-reliant, you can butcher and process those animals yourself. It's great because if you do your own butchering, you can divide and package the meat into the exact proportions that work for your own family.

7 Reasons to Butcher Your Own Meat

10 Tips for Butchering at Home

Butchering Chickens: Tips from the Trenches

Chicken Butchering Set Up: 7 Things You Need

5 Turkey Butchering Tips

Butchering Pigs on Our Homestead

How to Butcher a Pig at Home

How to Make Cuts of Meat: Butchering a Pig at Home

2. Grow your own vegetables to help fill your freezer.

Another obvious answer for most homesteaders is to fill the freezer with amazing homegrown vegetables from your own homestead. Go ahead and fill up your garden space with vegetables you enjoy eating, that are also useful to you—there are so many different choices!

Here are some ideas of vegetables you can grow and freeze (some need to be blanched/cooked first):

Brussels Sprouts (my favorite!), green beans, zucchini, kale, swiss chard, corn, sweet potatoes, carrots, okra, winter squash, potatoes, beet greens,  or eggplant. 

You can certainly can your veggies—be sure you're using the correct canning method for the vegetables you're dealing with, as well as the right canning equipment—but freezing your veggies is also a completely acceptable option.

One of our favorite things to do is to grow tomatoes, and then use this clever freezer tip to pop your tomatoes in the freezer at the peak of busy harvest time so you can process them later. Awesome, right?

And psst! There are other foods to put in your freezer besides meat and vegetables! What about preserved herbs in compound butter? And what about these 9 foods that you might not have known you can freeze?

3. A successful hunt will help fill your freezer.

I grew up in a hunting family and then married into a hunting family. Hunting is a big part of life.

Whether you're hunting for something as small as a rabbit or something as large as a bear, all of that respectfully harvested meat can help to fill your freezer. Which, where I come from, is really the only reason to hunt.

Not sure about hunting? Are you a beginner who doesn't know where to start? It's a great idea to find a mentor to show you the ropes. There is a lot to learn about safety, rules, hunting seasons, and equipment needed. I highly recommend adding hunting to your to-do list as a way to provide meat for your homestead. I'll be writing more about this in the future!

If you need to know how to prepare a good meal after you take the wild game from the freezer, my friends at Happy Hills Homestead have some great rabbit recipes and goose recipes on their website—or you can check out my favorite wild game cookbo...