I've written here before about how the kitchen gardener copes with gluts. Last year one of those, for us at least, was quinces, used with apples in pies and breakfast purees, added to lamb stews, poached in sweetened wine, baked... But sometimes the opposite happens, with a crop failing, as indeed is the case in 2019 with.. quinces.
Our tree had a few small fruits visible in early summer, but one by one they've dropped off, or more accurately been washed off by the heavy and all too frequent showers of August, or been blown away by this summer's equally prevalent gales.
It's not disastrous, as quince is hardly an essential in the kitchen. But one of our major reasons for kitchen gardening is growing things that are either absent from the shops, or rarely seen and very expensive. Things that improve our quality of life; fruits and vegetables that make cooking and eating a pleasure.
My apologies for widening this out, but our agriculture is fragile: weather extremes happen all too often; industrial farming is weakening the soil; the B word threatens to hit the sector from all sides. The British Retail Consortium just said Michael Gove's statement that Brexit would not bring any fresh food shortages was categorically wrong. We may find that the opposite of glut is not just a gardener's problem soon.
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