Day 3

One of the things we really want to do with our garden is keep to the seasons.  Why try and grow a winter vegetable in summer or vice versa.

But how can we have some of the produce that we love from one season right through the year?

What do we do when we have excess of something.  I don't want to turn into a rabbit and eat 50 kg of tomatoes and cucumbers.

Preserving.  Its what our grandparents and their grandparents did many years ago.  Its a way to value add to a product as well.  Yummy pickles and chutneys, tomato sauces and many other things that add that little bit of something to your dishes.

Lately we have been picking about 1 cucumber a day from our patch and initially we were just eating them in salads.  Lots of crunch and sweetness, but trying to eat one a day was too much.

We decided to pickle some and have made a batch of Diana's Bread and Butter Pickled Cucumbers* this morning.  It was so easy and took no time at all.  We'll continue to pickle them every 3-4 days as we get more and more cucumbers.  They taste amazing and we'll now be able to use them all year long.

We are so excited about making preserves from our produce that we have cleared an area of the pantry to start stocking up.

*Recipe from Kitchen Garden Companion by Stephanie Alexander