Freezing your homegrown produce

I've been experimenting. My kitchen is currently filled with plastic bags, a large array of saucepans, colanders, jugs, sieves and funnels. There's also a pervading odour of boiling vegetables.

A combination of Mother Nature, lots of worm poo, care & and attention and sheer luck, has produced a vast quantity of vegetables and fruit from my vegetable patch. Perhaps I need to get better at timing my planting so as to stagger my harvest, but this year everything has arrived at once. I'm doing pretty well munching my way through a wide variety of salad leaves but there's only a certain amount of peas one girl can eat. Some of the extra produce, I'm donating to friends and family but it seems a shame not to try to keep back some of the produce to use later on in the year.

So, I'm attempting to freeze my homegrown vegetables and fruit.

My Mum is expert at freezing vegetables (not her only talent, I should point out), having had plenty of practice freezing the excess produce from my Dad's vegetable patch. She tells me that there are many vegetables and fruit that will still taste delicious several months after freezing- reassuring me that they won't lose their taste or flavour.

Peas and beans are ideal for freezing. I blanched the beans by boiling them in water for a few minutes, and then popped them into plastic bags and into the freezer. With the peas, I shelled them first, which is a really satisfying job. I highly recommend doing it in the sunshine with a glass of something chilled and white. I then blanched them slightly, bagged them up and popped them in the freezer. My Mum's top tip for freezing peas is to make sure you use young, juicy ones, rather than older, starchier ones.

Tomatoes are very versatile and can be frozen raw or cooked. I began by cooking the tomatoes, then peeling them but, after a while, I decided it was just as easy to leave them raw and decide what to do with them when I want to use them. Freezing tomatoes means you will need to cook them after defrosting them because they will go a bit mushy but this is perfectly harmless.

Herbs are also great for freezing and, unlike dried herbs, can be used in the same quantities as when fresh. Although herbs will look limp and when defrosted, this will not affect their flavour as this will stay for several months after being frozen. You don't need to blanch them and they can just be bagged and frozen straight away. I've read that you can can put a few herbs into ice cube trays, mixed with water, and this makes a convenient way to use them straight from frozen as you simply plonk the ice cube straight into whatever you're cooking. Personally, I haven't tried this as my ice cube trays are fully stocked and ready for the evening G&Ts but it does, nevertheless, seem like a good idea.

Berry fruits just cry out to be frozen! You can make mixed bags of whatever takes your fancy, such as raspberries, blackcurrants and gooseberries, put them in the freezer after washing and de-stalking them, and you'll have readymade mixtures for crumbles, jams, pies and any number of delicious treats.

And finally, a useful but easily forgotten (if you're me) tip: label all your bags! It's really annoying if you come to find a bag of beans and can't distinguish it from the gooseberries. Sounds silly? Believe me, things look different covered in ice.

Salad leaves

It appears there is no limit to my brother's talents! I arrived at his flat, which happens to be above the office at Rocket HQ (so that we can keep him working 24/7) and he proudly showed me to the direction of his balcony where there were 3 containers full of a variety of salad leaves. Considering we haven't yet reached May, this is quite a feat and so I made suitably impressed noises.

I imagined that there must be some clever gardener's trick that he had employed to get such successful results so early on in the season.

At this point, he went rather quiet.

At last, he confessed that, no, there was no trickery or voodoo magic involved, he had simply stumbled across some plugs leftover from last year and had casually sown them into the pots to see what would happen.

It would seem that our particularly mild climate, deep down in the southerly tip of the UK, means that plants, such as delicate-looking lettuce, are able to survive where in other parts they wouldn't be quite so lucky. The farm is also pretty well sheltered from any extremes of cold or wind.

I should probably now highlight that my aim of writing this is not to encourage you to ring up our office, demanding our Salad Garden immediately! Although Rob was lucky, it is definitely preferable to wait a month to be sure of success.

Having said that, the taste of those leaves, picked fresh from the ground and chopped straight into a salad is absolutely divine! If you've not tried growing salad yet, I cannot recommend highly enough that this is the year that you give it a go. As proven by Rob, you don't need much space, or skill, or even a very high attention span. The books say that lettuce likes shady, cool areas and damp soil. In a roundabout way, they imply that salad leaves are easy to grow.

From Rob's experience, I'd recommend the following:

Stick them in whatever container you have available. Water them occasionally (Rob admits he was sometimes a little sporadic with this). If they are outside, watering them is often done for you, straight from the sky.

Rob is now noticing though that a lot of the salad plants are going to seed, he reckons through lack of care and attention, so regular picking is good.

One book I read gave "Keep eating," as aftercare advice. Now that's something even the most novice of gardeners can surely do!