The autumn glut: what to do with a mountain of apples, plums and courgettes

Every autumn the same thing happens: a garden tree, an allotment row or a generous producer box delivers three times what anyone can eat in a week, and half of it quietly goes over on the side. The old country skill was never really about growing food — it was about handling a glut when it came. Here is the short version.

Apples

A good apple glut wants three destinations. Eat the best of them fresh. Cook the bruised and windfallen ones straight away — stewed apple freezes perfectly and reappears all winter under a crumble or on the morning porridge. And store the sound, unblemished keepers somewhere cool and dark, not touching, on a tray; a proper keeping variety will hold for months. Anything left over becomes juice, chutney, or the base of a cake.

Plums and damsons

Plums won’t keep, so a glut is a same-week job. Halve and freeze them on a tray for winter puddings, or turn them into jam — plums and damsons are among the easiest of all fruit to set, because they’re naturally high in pectin. A roasting tin of plums with a little sugar, cooked until collapsing, keeps a fortnight in the fridge and improves everything from yoghurt to a Sunday roast.

The last courgettes and tomatoes

The end-of-season courgette glut is a British comedy in its own right. Grate the marrow-sized ones into fritters or a loaf cake; roast the rest hard to concentrate them. Green tomatoes that will never ripen become chutney — the traditional and genuinely excellent answer. Ripe ones, in quantity, cook down into a passata that freezes flat in bags.

Preserve, don’t panic

You don’t need to be a jam-maker to save a glut. The freezer does most of the work: stewed fruit, roasted vegetables, tomato sauce and blanched beans all freeze well and cost nothing but an hour. Jam, chutney and bottling are the next step up, and a single afternoon of it puts a shelf of the summer away for December.

Share the surplus

The oldest answer of all is to give it away, and a glut is the friendliest thing a village has. A note on the board — real or the one at /classifieds — turns your surplus courgettes into someone else’s dinner and, more often than not, a jar of their chutney back. When a whole village has a glut at once, that’s exactly what a group-buy in reverse looks like: see who’s nearby in the directory, or pool a bulk order the other way through /group-buys.