Ideas For Dealing With A Glut

If you have done well in your fruit and vegetable garden this year then you may well be enjoying a time of fruitfulness and abundance this month. August in a successful organic garden is the time when a lot of your hard work is paying off and you and your family can be eating very well. Sometimes, the produce can be so abundant it can be a little hard to know what to do with it all. Here are five ideas to help you when it comes to dealing with a glut:

Cook

The key to using up excess produce can sometimes be as simple as getting a little inventive in the kitchen. Salsas, sauces, soups, stews and pestos can all be good ways to use up something that you have a lot of. To many cucumbers? Make a cooling raita to go with a curry, or fill them with creamy, spiced cous cous or a nut butter for a simple summer snack. Too many courgettes? Make some savoury muffins or some delicious courgette fritters to use up excess without it being boring.

Freeze

Many fruits and vegetables can easily be frozen for later use. Soft fruits will not usually retain their shape and integrity when frozen and defrosted, but they could be frozen none the less if you wanted to use them to bake a pie or another pudding later, when you have the time. Green veg should be blanched before freezing to retain vitamins. Boil greens for 30 seconds or so then plunge into ice water, before placing portions in airtight containers and placing them in your freezer.

Preserve

August is a wonderful time for fruit. If you have a large amount of any fruit, this can be used to make a range of different jams or jellies. Unripe apples are very high in pectin to can be boiled down now and used as an alternative to the shop-bought stuff in your soft-fruit jams and jellies. Other crops can also be preserved. Why not make a tomato jam or tomato chutney, a mixed vegetable chutney or a piccalilli. Making preserves is not always as difficult or time consuming as you might imagine.

Barter

Simply do not have the time or energy to preserve your glut yourself? Rather than watching it going off, make sure that someone will get it who can use it up. If you are trying to live more sustainably and are trying to grow some of your own food, you will know that things often go wrong and what you grew very easily one year you might have tremendous trouble with the next. Is there anything you are missing? How about bartering with a friend, neighbour or someone else in your community? You could exchange some of your glut for something else you want or need.

Give

Of course the other thing to do with a glut is to give some of it away to those around you. A friend, neighbour or relative might really appreciate the food. Pay it forward and it will always come back to you in abundance in a range of different yields.