Anyone who has ever tried their hand at growing fruit and vegetables will have observed that although getting the stuff to grow is challenging, getting it all eaten afterwards can be near impossible.
One year I grew garlic, but in my ignorance I did not realise that what you actually planted for growing on was the little clove inside each, so instead of having a single dozen garlic plants to harvest, I ended up with several dozen. I like garlic, but no one likes garlic quite that much.
Of course even when we know what we are doing, the retailers will confound us. If you buy a packet of courgette seeds you might get thirty seeds. Unless you are running a farm this is far too many to grow. Growing courgettes this year I have six plants actually in the ground and they are cropping a couple of decent courgettes a day!! Every day!!!
When it comes ready it all comes at once. You might like what you have planted, but most crops require to be used fairly briskly. You can only really store perfect specimens, if it is a bit bashed about you really need to use immediately. A lot of crops won't store at all.
The art of effective gardening is getting round all these problems. For example, effective storage, making jams and chutneys, or finding ways to shift produce.
For our six courgette plants, I have bought my wife a courgette recipe book, and started taking in courgettes for my colleagues at work. It is better to see them eaten than left to wither. In fact it is actually quite satisfying to see folk all excited about the odd free courgette.
We do have a Damson tree, a stocky little fellow, that currently boasts a personal best crop of two damsons. However I do have great expectations, there are quite a few damsons growing round here, so it should eventually get to the stage of cropping away happily.
My wife is a keen jam maker and Damson Jams is a perennial favourite. You can pick up damsons in the shops now and again, and with a little bit of chapping on doors it would probably be possible to source some informally. However this year we got our ration of Damsons at the Newburgh Orchard Group Plum Market. This is a wonderful scheme to record and use the vast number of fruit trees in a quiet Fife village. These apparently date back to the local Benedictine Monastry which supplied the royal court at nearby Falkland Palace. Obviously not terribly recently, the Abbey is now a ruin. But as is the nature of these things, a fruit orchard is a long term thing.
So we fired up the Satnav and headed up to Newburgh, which does not seem to have changed much in the last thirty years. One of those places that progress seems to have forgotten about. It also seems to have a thriving community spirit with plenty of places to stop and chat and a host of voluntary societies. There were a few trestle tables with Damsons, plums, various apples and pears. My wife quickly stocked up on plenty of produce and compared notes with fellow jam making enthusiasts.
Also worth mentioning a fabulous garden centre come coffee shop just along the road at the Jamesfield Farm, the home of the Bellfield Organic Box Scheme.
Finding a home for your surplus crop can involve dipping into the wider community, but surely it is through sharing that we deepen and better our communities.
