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As we settle into the hottest months of the year, food growers have their work cut out. There’s no rest for a gardener with ripe produce on their plants. You need to be picking every day if you want to catch your edibles at their peak. Then there is the matter of attending to these harvests.
What might start as the perfect trickle of peppers or tomatoes or plums quickly turns into a glut too big to consume fresh. Even if you give plenty away, you might still have buckets of just-picked produce packed full of flavour. It won’t last. It can be panic stations making sure nothing goes to waste.
Anything you’re harvesting can be transformed into something delightful.Credit: iStock
Extending the life of your summer bounty is first and foremost for many gardeners at this time of year. While stockpiling provisions takes energy and time, once you start roasting, stewing, dehydrating, pickling, freezing and otherwise transforming your haul, it can be hard to stop.
Harvest, harvest, harvest!
Filling jars, bottles, bags and containers with jams, pickles, compotes and all sorts of reductions that will enliven future meals feels deeply pleasing. It also provides another way of engaging with your garden.
It means that in the depths of winter, you will be able to literally taste summer. It also forces you to keep close tabs on your plants now. If you are to make the most of your entire yield, you need to be checking your plants regularly to harvest whatever has hit its prime.
Many summer crops can be directly frozen as you pick them – especially useful for something as small as a blueberry, corn kernel or damson plum. But for anything larger, you run the risk of exhausting all freezer space. This is where baking, stewing and otherwise transforming your bounty to jams, jellies and chutneys that can be stored at room temperature comes to the fore.
Jar it
Three kilograms of apricots, one kilogram of sugar and a little lemon juice can be recast as 10 small jars of jam. Cook figs in syrup and these fruits that are notoriously fragile straight off the tree can be squeezed into jars and saved. Dehydrate chillis and they become tiny, long-lived fractions of their fleshy selves.