We don’t have a lot of surplus vegetables in the garden.
Our aim is to grow a small quantity of a large variety of produce – sufficient for our daily consumption – rather than large quantities of just a few. As a result we’re unlikely to have a glut of cucumbers, but we’re usually able to put three or four different veg on the table each night for dinner.
Having said that, we’ve had enough to do some small scale preserving, and it’s been very rewarding!
We harvested about six kilos of roma tomatoes in total – after cooking and eating, there was enough left over for a small batch of passata and a bottle of roasted tomato ketchup…
Capsicums have been a poor performer in our garden – we’ve only had a few little green ones that never turned red, but the Japanese eggplants have been fantastic! I turned a kilo of our homegrown crop into three and a half jars of eggplant pickle…
Finally, I was keen to try Pam the Jam’s piccalilli following the recipe here. Most people make preserves when they have garden surplus, but I did the reverse – I came across the recipe first and then went hunting in the garden to see what I could find. In the end, I was able to cobble together a kilo of crisp vegetables, including a couple of straggly beets, some Lebanese cucumbers, celery, green tomatoes, an assortment of multi-coloured carrots and the aforementioned green capsicums…
The piccalilli (top photo) was very easy to make and is currently maturing in the pantry. Great stuff!
Fig Jam and Lime Cordial 