Recipes, preserves and ideas for making the most of your berry harvest.
Once the harvest is in, this is where I put what to actually do with it — jams, sauces and preserves that use up a glut rather than let it go to waste. Try the loganberry jam recipe first, and check the berries-in-season calendar to plan around what's ripe when.
Sloe gin is the great British hedgerow tradition — a fruit too bitter to eat transformed, with nothing but gin, sugar and patience, into a deep garnet liqueur...
See recipe →Hedgerow jelly is the one recipe I'd tell every new forager to learn first, because it doesn't ask you to pick any one thing. Blackberries, elderberries,...
See recipe →Redcurrants are one of the few fruits that genuinely need nothing but sugar to set into a proper jelly — no jam sugar, no lemon juice, no pectin sachets....
See recipe →By late July, every loganberry grower faces the same happy problem: the plant is producing faster than anyone can eat with cream, and the question shifts from...
See recipe →Rosehip syrup is made by simmering rosehips in water, straining the juice twice to remove the fine irritant hairs around the seeds, then boiling it with sugar...
See recipe →Elderberry syrup is the classic way to deal with a hedgerow glut in September — simmer the berries down with sugar and you get a dark, tart-sweet syrup that...
See recipe →Bramble jelly is the classic hedgerow preserve: deep purple, crystal clear, and set firm enough to hold a knife mark. Unlike jam, it has no seeds and no pulp,...
See recipe →This blackberry and apple crumble takes 15 minutes to prepare and about 40 minutes in the oven, and it's the pudding I make more than any other once the...
See recipe →If you only ever make one jam in your life, let it be blackcurrant. I grow my own bushes, and every summer there comes a morning when the fruit is so glossy...
See recipe →Every September the elder trees around here turn from something I barely notice to something I can't stop looking at — heavy black clusters hanging over every...
See recipe →There are a handful of jobs I look forward to every Christmas, and making the cranberry sauce is one of them. It takes about fifteen minutes, fills the kitchen...
See recipe →If you only ever make one jam from your garden, I'd make a quiet case for it being loganberry. I've grown and cooked all sorts of berries over the years, and...
See recipe →Not always — high-pectin fruit like blackcurrants sets fine with ordinary sugar; low-pectin fruit like strawberries usually needs jam sugar or added pectin.
An unopened, properly sealed jar keeps for around a year in a cool, dark cupboard; once opened, use it within a few weeks from the fridge.
Yes, in almost every recipe here — frozen berries work well for jams, syrups and sauces since they break down anyway; just don't thaw them first for jam, tip them in still frozen.
