Two ways to deal with a glut

By late August, even a modest plot turns against you. The courgettes have become marrows overnight, the runner beans are producing a carrier bag a day, and the tomato plants are leaning under the weight of fruit that all ripens at once. You can only press so many on neighbours before they start avoiding the front path.

This is where bottling and fermenting earn their keep. Both are old, cheap and remarkably forgiving, and between them they will handle almost anything a British garden throws at you. Bottling suits fruit, tomatoes and anything you want to simmer into a chutney or sauce. Fermenting suits the crunchy, savoury vegetables that go limp and dull when heat-treated. Learn one properly, then the other, and the glut stops being a problem and starts being the point.

Sort your jars and kit first

You do not need a preserving pan or a pressure canner. You do need clean glass jars with sound metal lids, and a deep pan tall enough to take them with the lids clear of the water by a good 2.5cm.

• Jars: reused jam and pickle jars are fine, provided the rims are unchipped and the lids are not rusted. Screw bands and lids can be reused if they are clean and undented.
• Sterilising: wash in hot soapy water, rinse well, then either 20 minutes in an oven at 140°C, a hot dishwasher cycle, or a few minutes simmering in a pan. Keep them hot until the moment you fill them.
• Useful extras: a jam funnel, jar tongs, a clean tea towel, and a thermometer if you want to be precise about temperatures.

Bottling fruit and tomatoes

The water bath method is the workhorse here. Pack your fruit into hot jars — raw, or lightly stewed first if you prefer a softer set — then cover with syrup. A light syrup is 250g of sugar to a litre of water; a heavy one is double that, and better for plums and damsons that you plan to eat straight from the jar in January.

Tomatoes need a little acid to be safe: add two tablespoons of lemon juice or half a teaspoon of citric acid per 500ml jar, plus half a teaspoon of salt if you like. Then stand the jars on a trivet in the pan, cover with water, bring to 100°C and hold there — 20 to 25 minutes for 500ml jars, 30 to 40 for litre jars.

Lift them out, leave undisturbed for 24 hours, then check every lid. A good seal is concave and does not give when pressed. Any that have failed go in the fridge and get eaten within a fortnight.

Chutneys, ketchups and sauces

These are the safest things you will ever bottle, because sugar, vinegar and long cooking do most of the work. Simmer until a spoon drawn through the pan leaves a clear trail that fills slowly behind it. If it is still watery, keep going — undercooked chutney goes mouldy at the shoulder of the jar.

Marrow chutney, green tomato ketchup, plum sauce and spiced apple butter all follow the same pattern: chop, salt overnight if you want to draw out water, simmer with vinegar and spice, then bottle hot into hot jars and screw the lids down immediately. The heat of the mixture helps pull the lid tight as it cools.

Fermenting: the salty, forgiving one

Lacto-fermentation needs salt, vegetables and time, and it fails far more rarely than people expect. The golden rule is 2% salt by weight. For a shredded cabbage kraut, weigh the cabbage, add 2% of that weight in salt, massage it for ten minutes and it will make its own brine. For firm vegetables, make a brine instead: 20g of salt per litre of water is roughly 2%, or a level tablespoon per 500ml.

Keep everything submerged under the liquid — a whole outer cabbage leaf tucked over the top, weighed down with a clean stone or a small jar, works well. Cover the mouth of the jar with a cloth or a loose lid and leave it somewhere at 18–22°C. Bubbles after two days mean it is working. Taste from day five onwards and move it to the fridge when you like it.

White film on the surface is kahm yeast and can be skimmed off. Fuzzy mould, slime or a genuinely rotten smell means bin it — do not scrape and hope. Burp jars daily if you are using a plain lid, or fit an airlock and forget about them.

What to ferment from the plot

• Courgettes: sliced into batons with garlic and dill, ready in four or five days and still crunchy.
• Green beans: packed upright in brine for a week — sharply pickled and excellent alongside cold meat.
• Carrots, beetroot and turnip: batons or coarse grate, one to two weeks, earthy and bright.
• Chillies: mashed with 2% salt, left a fortnight, then blended into a hot sauce that keeps for months in the fridge.
• Green tomatoes: sliced with salt and a pinch of sugar, fermented, then blended into a tangy relish.
• Runner beans and cabbage: shred and treat exactly like sauerkraut.

Bottled jars want a cool, dark cupboard and will hold for a year or more. Ferments want the fridge once they taste right, where they will slow to a crawl and keep for months. Use clean forks, never dip back into a jar with a used spoon, and trust your nose above all. Between a shelf of ruby jars and a fridge of quietly fizzing crocks, February will feel a great deal shorter.