Preserving Garden - Jo Turner

The bit nobody tells you about a good harvest? It all arrives at once.

Forty kilos of tomatoes in a fortnight, then nothing until next summer. Preserving Garden by Jo Turner is the direct fix for that exact dilemma — a guide to growing food and actually keeping it, turning an overwhelming garden glut into twelve months of good eating rather than a compost heap and a guilty conscience.

Forty-three plant profiles cover the growing side with the unglamorous fundamentals done properly: fruit tree maintenance, pollination, crop rotation, composting, and soil pH. From there, every profile hands over the recipes to match — chutneys, relishes, jams, jellies, marmalades, bottling, and drying — all completely scalable to whatever your garden actually gave you.

Puree the tomatoes, ferment the cabbage, dry the cherries. Plus, it works whichever hemisphere you are gardening in — which is considerably more than most of these books can say.