For the past month and more, the kitchen garden has been reaching an ever-intensifying crescendo of production. Despite a very disheartening start to the growing year, with successive sowings and crops succumbing to the cold, wet and ensuing molluscs, things have picked up in recent weeks. Although there have been some abject failures – a garlic crop badly impacted by rust; the sudden ripening and rotting of all our plums and gages simultaneously in early August; every single chicory, chard and late lettuce seedling and young plants of Cavolo Nero eaten by slugs – there has been enough produce to balance the disappointments. As the harvests start coming in, the preserving keeps me busy in the kitchen day and night.
First were what we could rescue of those precocious plums which, due to the scarcity of the yield, were mixed up, stewed and put straight into the freezer. There they joined what remains of last year’s plum harvest, which was fortunately more impressive, so we will still have mirabelles and greengages for winter puddings.
Tomatoes have been coming in waves since early August. These have been fermented (Olia Hercules’ recipe), made into passata, sauce, Indian kasundi chutney (Kylie Newton’s recipe) and concentrate, made by reducing several kilos of fruit down to a couple of jars of the thick paste you usually buy in tubes. It looks like the last fully ripe harvest will be this weekend and, as we run out of pantry space, these will be put through the tomato mill and reduced into a more concentrated, thicker passata or dried in the dehydrator for storing under oil. As usual I have grown a number of new varieties alongside the old favourites , ‘Purple Ukraine’, ‘Orange Banana’, ‘Feo de Rio Gordo’ – which produced whopping fruit of three quarters of a kilo each – and ‘Amish Paste’.
The new seeds were from Tomato Revolution, a small company based in Wiltshire where Lance Turner has been breeding a range of new varieties specifically for their flavour. He also has an eye for colour and pattern and these are some of the most beautiful tomatoes you will grow. Once you have got them into your head, they also have memorable names – ‘Alice’s Dream’, ‘Rebel Starfighter Prime’, ‘Xanadu Green Goddess’. Although all delicious the great discovery from this selection was ‘Brad’s Atomic Grape’, a small plum type, which starts a deep brown turning bronze-green before developing gold and orange striping. The fruits are firm, the flesh saffron and the flavour distinctively sweet and citrussy. To top it all it can also be grown successfully outside.
I needed to liberate some Kilner jars containing an over-vinegared plum and pear chutney made last year and intended for Christmas presents. It was so mouth-puckering though, even after three months maturing, that the jars have sat in a cupboard since last September. Intent not to waste it I remembered that brown sauce is effectively a highly spiced, pureed chutney, so I added tomatoes, onions and apples, a liberal amount of garlic and upped the spices with the addition of cumin, coriander seed, allspice, cinnamon, nutmeg, chilli and fresh ginger. More sugar to counteract the acid came in the form of an apple concentrate made from last year’s windfalls and a couple of old jars of redcurrant jelly from the pantry. Very satisfied to have rescued what appeared to have been a waste of time, effort and produce, those I know should expect a bottle in their Christmas hampers.
In tandem with the tomatoes and plums came the soft fruit. The last of the blackcurrants and first of the blackberries, again for the freezer and also as the basis for fruit shrubs – the blackcurrant flavoured with bay and the blackberry with sage – and raspberries, which it has been almost impossible to keep up with. The perfumed yellow raspberry, ‘Allgold’, makes a particularly delicious jam, which this year I flavoured with rosemary. This was made with a lower percentage of sugar – only 60% – and so will need to be kept in the fridge and eaten quickly.
Ferments have become a key way to preserve much of the vegetable glut. The intense, savoury quality of lacto-fermented pickles is something we can’t get enough of and their probiotic benefits means that I now make fewer and fewer traditional cooked pickles with vinegar and sugar. As the pace gets up it is particularly satisfying to get into the rhythm of successional ferments as the harvest season progresses. After the tomatoes were cucumbers pickled with dill and garlic, excellent as a snack with a piece of cheese and glass of wine, or finely chopped and added to potato and tomato salads or sandwiches. An excellent crop of Chinese cabbage was transmuted into four one kilo jars of kimchi, the perfect accompaniment to a simple bowl of steamed rice, tofu and steamed greens.
As I write a jar of hot, pickled sweet wax peppers is slowly fizzing on the worktop. Once done they will be followed by a ferment of kohl rabi flavoured with mustard and coriander seed and after that a red cabbage and apple sauerkraut. This weekend I’ll make up a batch of beetroot kvass, which should be ready to bottle next weekend just before we go on holiday. The only downside with live ferments is the need to have cold storage to prevent fermentation once they are ready. Mine take up both the salad drawer and bottle space in the fridge door, so once made it is important to eat them regularly to make room for those that are coming. I’d love a cold basement large enough to take any amount.
The polytunnel is now starting to slow down and this week I brought up an aubergine weighing all of two kilos – one of the few produced this year due to an infestation of red spider – a substantial number of Padron peppers – the first time I’ve grown them – and all of the melons (‘Charentais’ and ‘Petit Gris de Rennes’), which have also had a good year, producing eight fruits of good size. The only problem being that they have all ripened in close proximity so, with Dan away this week, I have not been able to eat them all fresh. Unwilling to let them go to waste I have liquidised the flesh and put it into the freezer ready to be turned into a refreshing sorbet to be served in the depths of winter when we are eating heavier food. Likewise the William’s pears, which started to drop last week. Most of them, apart from a choice few kept for eating fresh, will be preserved in a light sugar syrup this weekend or dried for compote, allowing them to see us through the winter.
Last weekend I picked all of the sweetcorn – twenty two cobs – which, blanched and bagged, produced over three kilos of kernels for the freezer. Borlotti and butter beans are drying in the toolshed, pumpkins are doing their final ripening in their new bed above the polytunnel and will be brought up nearer to the house this weekend to cure. In the brassica cage above them ever-reliable cabbage ‘Stanton’ provide an invitation to the coming season, while ‘Early Purple Sprouting’ broccoli jumps us forward to early spring. All that remains to do this week, before we depart for Greece, is to order broad beans, garlic and green manure seed and sow the very last of the oriental greens and winter lettuce for the polytunnel which, by the time we return, should be making their presence known with the promise of fresh greens through the coldest months.
Words & photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 21 September 2024
