A good harvest does not begin when you start harvesting.
Already when planning and sowing, you can think about when you want to eat something. By sowing early and late, choosing different varieties, using succession planting and making optimal use of a polytunnel or sheltered places, you can spread the harvest period out as much as possible.
That matters, because fresh food has something that no preservation technique can completely replace. A tomato that has just ripened in the garden. A head of lettuce that you cut just before the meal. Herbs that you pick when you need them.
The intention is therefore not to preserve everything the garden produces. On the contrary: the more that can go directly from garden to kitchen, the better.
Abundance is not a problem — until it arrives all at once
A good harvest is fantastic, until there is more food available at the same time than we can use at that moment. What is an abundant raw material in one situation can become a problem in another when we do nothing with it. But there is an important difference between too much and too much right now. Twenty kilos of tomatoes are not a problem when you know that you will eventually need twenty kilos — just not today. The question then is no longer: how do I prevent abundance? But: how do I move that abundance through time?
This is where the kitchen becomes an important part of the system. The kitchen is not only the place where food is eaten, but also the place where we can create time between harvest and consumption.
Letting food travel through time
That is where preservation begins.
Instead of seeing an abundant harvest as a problem, we can let food travel through time in different ways. Sometimes it is very simple. Potatoes, pumpkins, onions, garlic, nuts or certain apples do not need to be preserved in complicated ways. If we can store them under the right conditions, the harvest itself is already a supply. Other products require some form of intervention. We can freeze them when that is the simplest and best solution. We can dry them and thereby remove the water from the product, creating a compact supply. We can preserve or can them, making the food last longer while often creating a new preparation at the same time.
We can preserve products in brine, salt or vinegar. We can ferment, where we do not try to eliminate all microorganisms, but instead allow certain microorganisms to do their work. And we can smoke foods, where preservation and flavour meet.
All these techniques are different, but essentially they do the same thing: they make it possible to separate the moment of harvest from the moment when we eat the food.
In a next article, we will look at these methods individually and give a simple basic preparation for each method.
Preserving is a way of adding time to food
That brings us back to the garden.
Because once you know what you want to do with your harvest, the way you plan your garden changes too. You do not simply sow thirty tomato plants because they grow well. You think about it. How many tomatoes do we eat fresh? How many do we want to preserve? How much sauce do we want for the winter? How much can we dry? And how much do we actually need? The same idea applies to beans, courgettes, fruit, herbs and almost everything the garden gives us.
The calendar determines when something grows.
The kitchen determines what happens to it.
Preservation ensures that the moment when something grows does not necessarily have to be the moment when it is eaten.
In this way, preservation does not become a separate activity that only begins when the harvest becomes too large. It becomes part of the design. From the garden to the kitchen, and from today to later.
Preserving is a way of adding time to food.