What to Do With a Courgette Glut

If you're standing in the kitchen wondering what on earth to do with another armful of courgettes, the short answer is: grate and freeze the surplus, cook the rest into fritters, soup and cake, and give the overflow to anyone who'll take it. A courgette glut in July and August is one of the most reliable events in a UK garden — so reliable it's almost a running joke among allotment holders. The good news is that with a little planning, none of it has to go to waste.

This guide walks through why the glut happens, how to slow it down by picking little and often, and the genuinely useful ways to eat, freeze and store the mountain. It pairs with our main guide to growing courgettes, so if you're still deciding how many plants to put in, read that first.

Why the glut happens

A single healthy courgette plant will produce something like 20 to 30 fruits over a UK summer, often more in a warm year. That's a lot of courgette from one plant — and most beginners, understandably, plant three or four "just in case". Multiply 25 fruits by four plants and you have a hundred courgettes heading your way between July and September.

The other half of the problem is speed. In the warm weeks of high summer, a courgette can go from finger-sized to dinner-plate marrow in three or four days. Miss one tucked under a big leaf, and the next time you look you've got a baseball bat instead of a tender fruit. Worse, a plant that's allowed to mature a few large fruits slows down its production — the plant's job, as far as it's concerned, is to set seed, so once it has a couple of big marrows it eases off. Keeping fruits small actually keeps the plant cropping.

So the glut isn't bad luck. It's the natural behaviour of a productive plant meeting a gardener who planted one too many and looked away for a long weekend.

Pick early and often to manage it

The single best way to manage a glut is to pick young and pick frequently. Harvest courgettes at 10 to 15cm long, when the skin is glossy and the flesh is firm. At this size they're tender, the flavour is at its best, and there are no tough seeds in the middle.

Get into the habit of checking your plants every two to three days through July and August — daily in a real heatwave. Use a sharp knife or secateurs to cut the stalk rather than tugging, which can damage the brittle plant. Lift the big leaves and look underneath; that's where the sneaky ones hide.

Picking often does two things at once. It gives you a steady stream of usable, kitchen-sized fruits instead of an occasional avalanche of marrows, and it keeps the plant in productive mode. For the full picture on watering, feeding and spacing, our growing courgettes guide covers the season from sowing to harvest. If you'd like to estimate how much one or two plants will actually give you before you commit, the yield calculator is a quick reality check.

In the kitchen

Courgettes are mild and obliging, which is exactly why a glut can feel monotonous — they don't shout flavour on their own. The trick is variety. Here are the methods that earn their place in a busy courgette summer.

Ribbons with pasta. Run a peeler down a courgette to make long ribbons, then toss them through hot pasta with garlic, lemon, olive oil and plenty of parmesan. They cook in the residual heat in a minute. It's the fastest way to use two or three fruits in a single meal.

Fritters. Grate the courgette, salt it lightly, squeeze out the water (this matters — see below), then mix with egg, flour and a handful of herbs or feta and shallow-fry in spoonfuls. Crisp, savoury and a reliable way to clear a backlog.

Courgette cake and bread. Grated courgette keeps cakes and loaves wonderfully moist, much as carrot does, and you genuinely can't taste it. A lemon courgette loaf or a chocolate courgette cake is a brilliant way to use up a surprising volume — and a good answer to anyone who turns their nose up at "more veg".

Soup. Soften onion and garlic, add chopped courgette and stock, simmer until tender and blitz. A swirl of cream or a crumble of blue cheese lifts it. It freezes well, so it's a glut-buster in two senses.

Stuffed round courgettes. If you grow a round variety such as 'Eight Ball', halve and hollow them, fill with rice, mince or couscous, and bake. The shape is made for it.

Griddled. Slice lengthways, brush with oil, and griddle until striped and just tender. Dressed with lemon and mint, it's a side dish that uses several fruits at once and barely any effort.

Freezing

This is the one that beginners get wrong, so it's worth being clear: you cannot usefully freeze courgettes whole or in chunks. They have such a high water content that they thaw to a watery mush — fine to hide in a soup, unpleasant to eat as a vegetable.

The method that does work is grating. Coarsely grate the courgettes, then put the gratings in a colander, sprinkle with a little salt, and leave for 20 minutes. Squeeze out the released water firmly with your hands or in a clean tea towel — you'll be surprised how much comes out. Pack the squeezed courgette into portion-sized freezer bags (a couple of handfuls per bag is about right for one bake or batch of fritters), flatten, label and freeze.

Frozen this way it keeps for up to six months and drops straight into cake, bread, fritters, soup or a pasta sauce from frozen. It's far and away the best long-term answer to a glut, and a freezer drawer of labelled bags in August is a genuine pleasure to find in January.

Storing and marrows

For the short term, fresh courgettes keep about a week in the salad drawer of the fridge — don't wash them until you use them, as surface moisture speeds up softening. Beyond that they go limp and lose their gloss, so the fridge is a holding bay, not real storage.

For proper long storage, work with the plant's nature rather than against it: deliberately let one or two fruits grow on into marrows. A marrow stored somewhere cool, dry and frost-free — a shed, garage or cool larder shelf — will keep for months, right through autumn. Marrows are excellent stuffed and baked, or made into the classic marrow chutney that uses up a big one in a single afternoon. So the occasional one you "missed" needn't be a failure; treat it as a winter store and let it carry on growing.

Giving it away

There's a reason courgettes are the unofficial currency of British allotments and village shows. When your own freezer is full and you've eaten fritters three nights running, the surplus becomes a way to make friends.

Leave a basket at the office, by the front gate with an honesty note, or pass bags over the fence to neighbours. Many community fridges, food banks and harvest tables welcome fresh produce — a quick ask locally usually finds a home for it. Allotment sites often have a swaps table where your courgettes might come back to you as someone else's runner beans or crisp lettuce. Giving it away is not admitting defeat; it's the most sociable part of growing your own.

Preventing next year's glut

If this summer has taught you that one plant is plenty, take the lesson into next spring. For most households, two plants are ample — enough for a steady supply with a manageable surplus, not a flood. One plant alone risks a gap if it gets damaged or struck by disease, but four is asking for trouble.

You can also spread the harvest by succession sowing: sow one plant in late April or May, then a second a few weeks later in June. The younger plant comes into its own as the first one tires, stretching your supply through to the first frosts rather than dumping it all in a fortnight.

The glut, in any case, doesn't last forever. By late summer you'll usually see a dusty white film spreading across the older leaves — powdery mildew on courgettes — which is the plant signalling that its productive season is winding down. By then you'll likely be quietly relieved. Until then, pick small, freeze the surplus grated, and don't be shy about handing the rest over the fence.