How to organize a freezer?

[Gobnait]

I have a chest freezer that I'm having problems with.

Yes, I need to do a proper inventory, but sometime mid-summer I made an effort to sort and supposedly meat is on one side and vegetables on another, but I haven't been buying freezer meat, so the vegetables are crowding from where I put them to cover everything else. Also, I've been slowly adding ice-bottles, so they're also on top because of natural forces. /Want to keep them upright while freezing, then haven't had the energy to pull the freezer contents on top of them.\

Really, my biggest gripe is that I have some horrible fish that hubby won't eat, so lunch was the perfect opportunity to get rid of them.

[Arawlins]

In our chest freezer we have cardboard boxes with the top flaps cut off that create dividers and multiple layers. So to get to bottom stuff you pull the top box out of the way and get stuff further down. We have a big chest freezer and I am not sure how that would work for a small chest freezer, probably you would just need to find the right size boxes.

We also have a standup freezer, so we separate by putting meat in one, then vegetables/freezer jars in the other, so I can't speak to how to keep those seperated. (Which reminds me I still have homemade turkey stock to use up, and a homemade rhubarb syrup that I want to try on a crockpot roast)

[Oogiem]

I currently have 4 big chest freezers, 1 for personal foods and 3 with for sale meat in them. We use wine boxes to make 2 layers of stuff. Wine boxes are the perfect height, I fold the tops in or cut the flaps off and make 2 layers. I also keep a map in my head of what is where. When loading the freezer I try to stack like on top of like and also distribute cuts top and bottom layer.

For example, we raise all of our own chickens and I have the entire year's worth of chicken in the freezer now. I break down the carcasses into breasts and leg thigh portions and package all the breasts together and the leg/thighs together. So the bottom wine box in the chicken corner of our freezer has equal numbers of packages of legs and breasts. Because the freezer is not an even multiple of wine boxes I use the odd space for the wings, which I keep separate from the rest.

I have stacks for chicken, pork, sheep, veges, venison and misc.

[Gobnait]

I think our freezer could handle about four file boxes with some side capacity, without ice bottles. Our stand-up is pretty narrow and useless, I mostly keep half-bags of veggies and misc fat and bone trimmings, some small items.

I should probably just say "order the quarter cow" and hope that we have the room. I'm not afraid of something that's been sitting in the crock pot for two days.