Keeping Freezers Organized

We bought our first freezer new in 1984. It was a Kenmore 18 cu. ft. chest freezer. Mostly what we put into it was a bought side of beef each year. I wasn’t real good about keeping it organized.

We bought another one, a used 23 cu. ft Kenmore, sometime after 1992. I wasn’t much better about keeping that second one organized either.

(Both of these photos were taken 15 years later.)

In 1998 I started keeping track of what I was putting into the freezers. Then I got really sick in 1999 and stopped doing it until 2006. When we started raising most of our own food in 2008, I got really serious about keeping track. I made more of an effort to keep them organized.

In 2013 the big freezer died and we got a smaller used freezer. We were able to be part of a program that replaces old appliances with new more efficient ones. They took the dead freezer and the old smaller freezer and gave us 2 new 20 cu. ft. ones. Then in 2014 we had a chance to get 2 whole steers for the freezer. But our freezers were full so we asked around and friends went in on a 23 cu. ft. freezer in exchange for what was in the freezer. In 2015 the change out program deemed our freezer from 1984 too inefficient and replaced it with another 20 cu. ft. one. Now we had 4 huge freezers. Last year we picked up an upright freezer for backup, and for free. That made 5!

I had to get real serious about managing them. That’s when I started inventorying each year. I had also come across posts on the Granny Miller site run by Katherine Grossman about inventorying pantries, root cellars and freezers each year.

The old freezers had a few baskets and we had cobbled more together to help with organization. It didn’t work very well.

The new freezers had at least 3 baskets each plus they had an adjustable divider system for the bottom. This gave me 7 bins in the bottom and 3 baskets on top for organizing.

I had collected old freezer boxes at tag sales for decades. I never put one into the freezer without a freezer tape label with exact contents and month and date. I record at the time how much I make of anything to be stored.

These freezer boxes are easy to stack, if they aren’t overfilled. This keeps organizing them a bit easier.

For our meat and butter, we vacuum seal it. Each package is identified and dated. These are sorted into the bottom bins. These are all weighed and recorded so we will know what the cost of producing it comes to.

For ground meat, we use freezer Ziplocks and squeeze all the air out, leaving the package flat. These are frozen flat and take up little room as they can also be stacked vertically once frozen. These are on the shelf on the side or in the baskets. These are always weighed 1# packages.

I tried keeping a list of what was in the freezer, to be crossed out as things were removed. But no one remembered to do this, so I stopped it after 1 year.

As the year moves on, I organize and consolidate the freezers so there aren’t half full freezers running. Currently 2 of the 5 are shut down.

In June, when we've eaten most stuff up and before I start filling the freezers, I inventory and organize what is left and it gives me an idea of our usage of anything frozen or canned. (I also inventory the canned stuff in the root cellar.) By doing the inventory, it makes sure we use the older stuff, stops the waste of making too much of something, and insures there's enough room in the 4 freezers for what we need.