Preserves abound in many variations - mint sauce to go with lamb, redcurrant jelly to go with roast beef, mango chutney with a spicy curry, black cherry jam to flavour yoghurt, and of course, the bitter-sweet taste of orange and ginger marmalade on some toasted brown bread with Sunday breakfast. From discovering how good homemade pickled beetroot tastes on a cheese sandwich to finding that blackberry and port jam goes really well with kangaroo steaks, the combinations and permutations are endless. So many cakes, pastries and tarts simply would not exist without them.

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Make a “shin of beef with dark ale casserole” in a slow cooker over twelve hours, and then in the last hour, add a few spoons of red onion and cranberry marmalade - it really does makes a dish fit for a king!

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Even using just the traditional ingredients and methods, it is intriguing to try to recreate some long forgotten flavours, new combinations of the well-known ones, or even invent some brand-new ones from scratch.

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Having only a windowsill or even just the smallest plot to grow something for the table can be both fascinating and rewarding. In a good season, the harvest may well deliver bigger yields than expected, and this often leads to the discovery of the many ways to preserve and use the bounty of your own gardening skills. It has been a tradition going back to ancient Greek and Roman times.

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This site will be updated as soon as this year’s batches are all in jars, labelled and stored, so please look in again soon.