School of Sustainability

The courgettes all come at once, and so does the work

Late August on an allotment has a particular problem, and it is not drought or blight. It is abundance. The beans you babied through June are suddenly producing faster than any household can eat, courgettes seem to double in size if you turn your back, and the tomatoes all decide to ripen at once. Growing the food turns out to be only half the job. The other half is keeping it.

Garden Organic, the organic growing charity, has set out the keeping, crop by crop. Beans and peas go in the morning, while their sugars are still high, then get three minutes in boiling water and a dunk in iced water before freezing. Onions and garlic are pulled when the leaves yellow, dried on the ground in the sun, cured indoors until the necks go papery, then plaited and hung - but kept away from the potatoes, because the onions and garlic can absorb moisture from them.

Cabbage gets the slowest treatment. It is shredded and worked with sea salt, at two per cent of its own weight, until the leaves weep their juice, then packed into sterilised jars with whatever flavourings are to hand - garlic, spices, a spoon of miso. Five days in the cool and dark, the lid lifted daily to let the gas out and any scum skimmed, then into the fridge, where it keeps six months.

The oldest method in the list needs no jar and no electricity. A clamp is a trench in a sheltered, well-drained corner: twenty centimetres of sand, a layer of straw, the carrots stacked biggest at the bottom, covered over with more straw and soil against the frost. Done right, the roots keep from autumn to spring. None of this is new knowledge; it is craft that used to pass between neighbours and now has to be written down and emailed round.

Garden Organic · Read the source