Making the Most of Gluts

Every gardener meets the courgette glut, the tomato avalanche, the autumn apple surplus. The instinct is to preserve everything, but that is the wrong approach. Preserve only what you will genuinely eat in quantity. Three jars of piccalilli is useful; thirty jars is clutter. Focus on crops that improve with preservation or have no fresh equivalent in winter.

Tomatoes are the glut worth tackling hard. Make passata by simmering chopped tomatoes until reduced by half, then blitz and bottle. Make green tomato chutney with the unripe ones — it is sharper and more interesting than most preserves. Freeze whole tomatoes for winter soups; the texture is irrelevant once cooked. Dry the meaty paste types and store in olive oil with garlic and herbs — they become a ready-made pasta ingredient.

Courgettes are harder to preserve well. Freezing them makes them mushy; drying is better but they must be sliced thin. The best use for a glut is to grate them raw, squeeze out moisture, and freeze in portion-sized bags for adding to winter stews, fritters or cakes. Apples store well as whole fruit if you have a cool space; otherwise make sauce, freeze it in tubs, and use it as the base for crumbles, cakes and compotes all winter. Heritage varieties like Bramley's Seedling or Howgate Wonder make the best sauce — high acid, fluffy texture, no added sugar needed.