What to do with leftover vegetable garden produce

The week the patch turns on you

There is a point in every vegetable garden where the thing you have been nursing along for months suddenly produces more in a week than your household eats in a month, and it is always the zucchini that starts it. You go from checking the plant hopefully to avoiding eye contact with it. So here is what to do with the pile on the bench, and at the bottom of this, the thing that stops it happening quite so hard next time.

Keep it, properly

Preserving is the option most people skip because they think it is a whole production, and a lot of it genuinely is not.

• Freezing. Blanch first for anything green, which means a minute or so in boiling water and then straight into iced water to stop it cooking, because that is what keeps the colour and the texture. Beans and broccoli both take this well.
• Bottling. Fowlers Vacola is the gear we stock for this. The jars themselves last more or less forever, and the rings, the clips, the lids and the wax are the parts that perish, which is exactly why those are the bits people come in for.
• Pickling. Cucumbers, onions, beans and green tomatoes all go into a vinegar brine and come out better than they went in. This is the one to start with because it needs no special gear at all.
• Drying. Herbs hang in a paper bag in a dark cupboard and need nothing else. Tomatoes want a very low oven or a dehydrator, and they are worth the effort because dried tomatoes go into things all winter.
• Vacuum sealing. The cheapest way to stop freezer burn on anything you are freezing in quantity, and it makes a small freezer hold a lot more.

Cook it down and freeze the result

A glut is easier to store cooked than raw, which is the bit people work out late. Tomatoes become a pot of passata that freezes flat in bags. A mountain of odds and ends becomes soup. Zucchini grates and freezes in measured lots and goes straight into fritters and cakes later without anybody noticing it was frozen. The rule of thumb is that if you cannot face eating it, cook it into something you would eat in July.

Give the rest back to the garden

Spent plants and the stuff that got away from you do not need to leave the yard. Chop them up and lay them straight on the bed as a rough mulch, or put them through the heap. Spring onions and celery will regrow from the base if you stand them in water. None of that needs anything bought.

Pass it around, which is the good bit

In a town this size the swap sorts itself out, because somebody down the road has a tree loaded with lemons and no tomatoes, and you have the exact opposite problem. Leave a box out the front, put it in the local group, or hand it over the fence. Community kitchens and food charities take fresh produce as well, and it is worth ringing whoever you have in mind first rather than turning up with a crate, because they cannot always take it on the day.

This is the part I like about a glut. It is the reason people who have never spoken end up knowing each other's names, and you will run into them at the shops for the next 20 years.

The actual fix, for next season

A glut is a planting problem wearing a kitchen problem's clothes. Nobody needs 6 zucchini plants and almost everybody plants 6, because the seedlings are small and it seems mean to leave any out. Sow a short row every few weeks instead of the whole packet at once, and you get the same total over a much longer stretch with none of the panic. Lettuce, rocket, radish and spring onions are the ones where this makes the most obvious difference, and a packet of seed lasts several sowings.

Shop related products

• D.T. Brown Lettuce All Year Seed. Sow a short row at a time, which is the whole trick.
• D.T. Brown Rocket Seed. Fast enough that you can keep restarting it rather than planting it all at once.
• Martins Organic Sugar Cane Bale 11kg. For laying the chopped up spent plants under.
• Brunnings Garden Compost with Seaweed 25L. For the bed you have just cleared, before the next lot goes in.

Did you know we also stock the Fowlers Vacola preserving range in store, the rings, the clips, the stainless lids and the preserving wax, plus dissolvable preserving labels and vacuum seal rolls. None of that is on the website, so give us a ring on (08) 8536 4333 to check what is on the shelf before you come in.

The seed rack and the bagged soil are in the garden centre, and the online range is in garden products.

Read next

• When to pick vegetables, crop by crop
• Compost activators, and whether your heap needs one
• Crop rotation in a home vegetable garden, and why it works

I plant too many zucchini every single time, and I am not expecting that to change.

Cheers,
Candeece