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I bought a small chest freezer earlier in the year, and keep it in my shed.  I've been busy ever since then filling it with produce.  I was harvesting apricots when it arrived so they got processed first.  Since then I've added climbing beans, broad beans, rhubarb, peaches, blackberries, tomatoes, capsicum and grapes.  I'm not sure how I will use the frozen grapes yet, but I'm sure to find a way.

April 2016

My small Olive tree is full of fruit just starting to ripen, and I began the pickling process today.  This is a small scale process for just a few bottles but its easy to scale up using a food quality plastic bucket for larger quantities.

January 2015

This blog will follow our progress in the kitchen trying to get the best use we can from the organic fruit, vegetables and herbs we grow in our garden.  We will aim for excellence in taste, good nutrition and the art of preserving surpluses.

We will record our journey of culinary discovery into jam making, preserving and cooking and we will explore the enormous resource on the net and in print for recipes which best suit our pallet and adapt our range and output of food from the garden to meet the demand appropriately.

The above photo shows some of the things we do now with our garden produce, including making jams, chutneys and other relishes.  We currently preserve peaches, apricots, tomatoes, apples, rhubarb, beetroot, carrots, broad beans, climbing beans, potatoes, garlic, onions, cucumbers, basil, rosemary and sage .

We will try to improve the methods we currently use to preserve our surplus including pressure cooking, freezing, dehydrating and dry storage (e.g. potatoes, onions and garlic).