Got more feijoas than you know what to do with? Preserve them to enjoy all year round.  

I may have mentioned before that we have 26 feijoa trees. It means that at this time of year, come rain or shine, you’ll often find us outside under the trees picking up each and every feijoa that hits the ground. They fall thick and fast and as we pick it’s not uncommon to hear the soft thud of falling fruit or have feijoas rain down on our heads as we bump into boughs heavy with fruit! Mid-season we fill a wheelbarrow with fruit everyday. As we’re not currently able to share them freely, we have taken to leaving them by the bucketful at the letterbox in the hope that they’ll all be made good use of. What we don’t share, we preserve, and my partner Nick turns hundreds of kilos of fruit into cider, much to the delight of all our friends and neighbours. I do my preserving on a much smaller scale, making jam and chutney as well as these delicious ginger, lime and vanilla-spiked bottled feijoas.  

GINGER, LIME AND VANILLA-SPIKED FEIJOAS

Makes 3 x 1l jars plus 2 x 750ml jars

• 4 limes
• 4kg feijoas
• 2 cups sugar
• 6 cups water
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 25g ginger, finely sliced

Preheat the oven to 100°C. Put three 1-litre jars into the oven along with two 750ml jars. Put the lids and/or seals for the jars into a heatproof jug or bowl and pour boiling water over them. Leave the jars to sterilise in the oven for 30 minutes while you prepare the fruit.

Peel the zest from the limes in long strips and set aside. Juice the limes into a large bowl. Peel the feijoas and put them into the bowl of lime juice, stirring as you go so the feijoas are coated in the juice to prevent them from going brown.

Put the sugar and water into a large stock pot and bring to the boil. Once boiling, add the feijoas, put on the lid and wait for it to come to the boil again, stirring a few times as the heats comes back up. Once boiling, add the vanilla, ginger and lime zest and boil for 1 minute then remove from the heat.

Take the sterilised jars out of the oven, put them into a roasting dish and pack the feijoas into the jars. Pour over the syrup until it just begins to overflow out of the jars. Take a butter knife and slide it down the insides of the jars in between the feiijoas and the glass to remove any pockets of air. You can gently tap the jars on the bench to do this too. Top up with more syrup if needed and then seal with sterilised seals or lids.