March has seen me crushed by the weight of kilos of garden produce. Every flat surface has been taken over with overflowing baskets of pears, tomatoes, hazelnuts and blackberries, while the fridge and freezer situation calls on skills developed during tetris training from the arcade game era of yesteryear.
Unlike the garden, where the stampede of urgent jobs starts slowing to a gentle canter, the urgency instead shifts to the kitchen, where countertops full of produce that simply can’t fit into the fridge need to be processed before they turn into a heap of gourmet compost. When you know firsthand the hours of care, attention, resources and labour that goes into raising a plant from seed to maturity, any amount of waste weighs heavy. While a little bit of spoilage is inevitable, it at least it finds its way back to the soil before very long.
Pantry prepping has felt even more essential this month as a series of escalating global conflicts, fuel price hikes and yet more interest rate rises are soon going to be reflected in food prices – if not outright shortages due to supply chain shocks. Knowing I’m well stocked on fruit and vegetables, dry goods, tea, coffee and grains brings me a measure of comfort – especially in the case our transport may be curtailed – while knowing full well that any serious systemic failings can only be weathered as a community.
But enough about the rest of the crazy world, and onto some preserving highlights.
Tomatoes: It’s fair to say I’m getting a bit sick of the sight of them. Now rounding up on 50kg of a mix of tomatoes of all sizes (including the 400g behemoth) I feel like I’ve transformed them into every possible permutation. I’ve boatloads of passata, soup, have given away kilos and transformed them into a variety of tomato-based meals – including having a go at a tomato foccacia – and still have a heap of them staring at me from an oversized basket. They need to get a wriggle on and finish up though, my pea seedlings won’t wait much longer.
Pears: I’ve been getting fed up with those too. Dehydrated, bottled, made into jam (using my own recipe that I stole from a Dutch bakehouse), and used in cakes – I was running out of ideas. So I did a little experiment making a kind of pear caramel which takes a frankly massive number of fruit and reduces them down til they fit in a jam jar. For about 5 cups of blended pear, I’d add one cup of sugar, some cinnamon and allspice, a pinch of salt and reduce it down until it’s a thick paste. At the end add a big knob of butter and reduce it about 10 more minutes. It’s very much by eye, taste and preference so there are no strict measurements here. Oh, did I mention my second pear tree is now almost ready and also loaded? Sigh. Garden world problems.
Blackberries: Finally time for the annual wild blackberry pick. And yet another round of freezer tetris. Grabbed a good few kg which will last me through the year.
Hazelnuts: Like every good Pict before me, I never let a hazelnut go to waste. The cockatoos that visited last year have obviously decided they’re not worth the effort and haven’t come back (not that they took that many last year). I actually have quite a stupid amount of hazelnuts in storage and should probably do something more useful with them than hoard them in the pantry like a squirrel with an anxiety disorder (ok but I am kind of a squirrel with an anxiety disorder).
Apples: What the Valley’s renowned for and if my own apple trees should ever fail I’m surrounded by the windfall of thousands of commercial trees in the orchard next door. Needles to say my apples haven’t failed and I have no idea how I’m going to manage them all. Anyway, that’s next month’s problem.
Lest you think I live in some kind of terminal bucolic abundance, I should probably shed some light on all the things that didn’t do well for me this season or that I didn’t get around to planting at all thanks to challenges with time management (i.e. spending too much time watching videos online).
Beans – bit of a crop but nothing to write home about. I also planted Borlotti beans very late so won’t get many of those either – but I think that’s a crop to give up on. It takes up a lot of space for what amounts to a small jar of dried beans
Plums – no idea what happened with those but almost every one of my plum trees struggled this season.
Carrots – Basically kept forgetting to plant any until late in March so I don’t have any on the horizon until spring.
Pumpkins – While not absolute zero, I’ve only got 4 pumpkins off three plants so we’re not exactly kicking it out of the park here.
Tomatillo – normally a roaring success, the fruit didn’t form properly so no salsa for me.
Parsnips – Seedlings are struggling, it’ll be a meagre crop
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