Autumn fruits

For one reason or another, there's been a gap between this and my last post. One reason is that it's a busy time in the garden getting things in and working out what to do with them. When the weather has let us, that is. It seems that all we've done this summer is talk about the weather, which has been pretty filthy. And having pretty much saved our main crop of tomatoes from the dread blight, we could really do with it bringing some late summer or autumn sunshine just to bring the last ones along to ripeness.

Despite all the problems earlier on, the tomatoes have been a success again. Elsewhere, the runner beans have been really good. And possibly my favourite this year, the cucumbers. I'm probably alone in this, but it seems somehow vaguely glamorous to be growing cucumbers in our Staffordshire garden. There's something slightly frivolous about them which is quite appealing. I don't know if it's just because they remind me of summer salads - or Sunday night help-yourself tea - when I was growing up, but for whatever reason, it's been good to wander about the garden seeing the little blighters grow. And as you can see from the picture at the start of this post, the latest crop of them is pretty substantial.

Which brings us on to the main, if somewhat rambling, point of this post, which is the real challenge of this time of year. Just what do you do with the glut of food which your garden should hopefully be producing?

Tomatoes are easy - halved and roasted in the oven, turned into passata or used in a good arrabiata pasta sauce, they can be frozen and stashed away in the freezer to use later on. The runner beans can be eaten as and when they come or left to grow big, with the borlottis, to use the beans themselves rather than the pods. The potatoes never last long the number we get through. Same with beetroot.

Cucumbers? We're having a go at pickling them using some of the dill we've grown:



Plums? Good lord, the plum tree has been overloaded with fruit this year. We've given some away, turned some into spiced plum 'butter' and converted some more into several batches of jam and chutney, including this big pot of 'Dower House' chutney:



But it's nice to preserve some of them for just eating, maybe with a big dollop of yoghurt at breakfast. Last year, we stewed and froze a big batch, but this year we're having a go at bottling them. Here's one of the first jars, rather depleted after we felt we just had to check on how they were doing. Lovely:



It's not for the fainthearted, not least because there's a risk of cultivating botulism if the sealing doesn't go quite right. Yikes. The bit in the instructions where it says 'if you feel short of breath...' isn't exactly reassuring. But faint heart never won fair bottled plums and all that. By the way, if you squint at that picture, you should be able to make out some pinkish blobs on the tree in the background - plums that we've still got to pick or the ones we're sharing with the jaspers.

Finally, an old favourite. We stripped the most successful chilli plant of its fruit to make a fiery pickle with mustard seeds, oil and salt, left on the windowsill to ferment slightly and do its stuff as per Madhur Jaffrey's instructions (one adaptation here). Here it is, can't wait for this one to be ready: