With a fairly mild summer and our gardens producing an abundance of beautifully ripe homegrown fruit and vegies, many of you may find you have more produce than you can use for your daily meals. This is where the real beauty of growing your own food begins to shine - preserving.

While there may be loads of meals you can prepare with your abundant crops of tomatoes, basil, zucchini, cucumbers, chillies, eggplant and capsicum, there are many preserving techniques to help you enjoy your plentiful supplies later in the year - pickling, freezing, dehydrating and bottling just to name a few.

Tomatoes are easy. Making sauces, pastes and jams are on most home-growers’ radars. But simply storing your whole or chopped tomatoes can allow much more flexibility for many months to come. And if you have planted a good crop (say 20-30 plants) you will likely have enough to take you close or through to the next harvest in 2018-19.

Abundant herbs can be quickly transformed into pestos, whacked in the freezer and thawed as required throughout the year for cooking or snacking.

Zucchinis (and cucumbers) have well-earned reputations for overproducing, with most people choosing to let them rot on the ground after getting sick of too many zucchini meals over summer. How often, though, have you wanted to use zucchini or cucumber when they are not in the garden? Pickling both of these fruits in various ways is fantastic, as is making and freezing zucchini soups, slow-cooking or dehydrating zucchini chips and juicing both if you still have too many.

Eggplant and capsicum are always well enjoyed in many ways during the warm seasons, whether it’s cooked on the barbie, made into dips or just eaten raw. If enough is enough, then think about charring them and storing them in oil to be used all year as condiments and additions to a wide range of meals.

And as for chillies, well, if you have more than one good-size plant in this season you’ll likely be wondering what to do with the excess long after the plant has withered and died. Stringing chillies up to dry and hanging alongside your garlic in the kitchen will give you two very versatile and well-used meal additions. However, chilli pastes and sauces are a must-have in the fridge and cupboard for any spicy food-loving family. And depending on the variety of chilli you have grown, they will provide you with many spiced-up meals through the year.

Preserving your excess fruit is also a very rewarding activity. Although most stone fruit has finished now (fantastic for bottling), there are still the apples, pears, quince, figs and citrus you can have a go at.

Doing a bit of reading on preserving will give you limitless ideas on how to continue to enjoy your homegrown harvests over the coming year, and given a little time and creativity your pantry will be filled with many delicious alternatives for your already fabulous produce.

HAPPY HARVESTING!

Drew Cooper, Edible Gardens

ediblegardens.com.au