PRESERVATION FOR THE NATION
The late summer and early autumn months are both joyful and busy for home preservers. The enveloping warmth of these days allows orchard and hedgerow fruits to reach fulfilment, bringing a sweetness to the air.
Orchards fill with numerous varieties of fruit. There are fat juicy plums, some sweet and ready to eat, others needing a little work to make them pleasing, rosy-skinned apples, and sharp and tart cooking apples. There are succulent pears, which more often than not fall to the ground like honeyed confetti, but if picked from the branches and stored carefully will keep for several months, their characteristics changing as their natural sugars develop to create a rich flavour.
Hedgerows are radiant and bursting with berries and fruits, including blackberries, elderberries, hips, haws, blue-black sloes and crab apples – an abundance for the wild food forager, and the birds too! And of course down in the veg patch there’s invariably a plethora of green beans, courgettes, marrows and more to feast upon. It’s a time to reap and preserve the bounties of the growing year.
These generous gluts of fresh seasonal produce will perish quickly if action isn’t taken. With a few other ingredients, plus a little of your time, most can be transformed into something rather special and safe to tuck away and be enjoyed later in the year. Let us ‘waste
