What's in Season in the UK Right Now: A Cook's Guide to Summer Produce

Here's a thing I learned pricing vegetables for a living: seasonality isn't a farmers' market aesthetic, it's the main force behind the numbers on the shelf ticket. When British crops flood in, prices drop, quality peaks and promotions cluster — because buyers like me had gluts to shift. Cook with the season and you're surfing the supermarket's own supply curve instead of paying to fight it.

This is the UK summer edition: what's coming into season from June through to early September, roughly what good value looks like, and the fastest thing worth doing with each. No polytunnel romance, just the shopping list.

Why seasonal is cheaper (the buyer's view)

Out of season, that courgette flew or sailed here, with every mile on the invoice. In season, it came up the motorway from Kent or Lincolnshire in bulk, and several suppliers were competing to sell it. Retailers also use abundant seasonal lines as traffic-drivers — the strawberries by the front door in June are priced to get you in. The practical rule: when a British-grown vegetable is everywhere, on promotion and looking magnificent, that's the supply chain telling you what to cook this week.

The summer hit list

• Courgettes (June–September) — abundant to the point of comedy; often great value in high summer. If you grow them, see our full glut survival plan.
• Tomatoes (July–September) — British ones actually taste of something from midsummer. Buy the ugly ones for cooking.
• New potatoes, including Jersey Royals early in the season — boil, butter, done.
• Broad beans, peas and runner beans (June–August) — runner beans in August are often absurdly cheap.
• Lettuce, cucumber, spring onions, radishes — salad season is the one time salad is the economical choice.
• Strawberries (June–July), then raspberries and blackcurrants — peak British berries, peak value, and blackberries are literally free from hedgerows come late August.
• Sweetcorn (August–September) — cobs for pennies at peak.
• Beetroot, carrots, spinach and chard all summer long.

Cooking the glut, night by night

Seasonal shopping only saves money if the food becomes dinner, so anchor each week's plan in whatever was cheapest: a traybake of courgettes, peppers and onions under sausages or halloumi; runner beans sliced into a garlicky tomato sauce — a classic for a reason; new potatoes with anything; corn cobs charred under the grill and rolled in butter. Salads count as cooking in July: tomatoes, cucumber, spring onion, torn bread, oil and vinegar is a meal with a fried egg on top. And when tomatoes hit rock bottom in late August, roast a couple of trays with garlic and oil, then freeze in bags — that's your pasta sauce base into autumn, and it slots straight into the batch-cooking routine.

The shelf ticket is a weather report. British, abundant and on offer means buy it now and cook it this week.

Preserving without becoming a preserving person

You don't need Kilner jars and a pressure canner. The freezer does 90 per cent of the job: berries frozen loose on a tray then bagged; blanched runner beans and podded broad beans; roasted tomatoes; grated courgette pressed dry in portions for winter soups and fritters. Herbs blitzed with oil into ice cube trays turn 60p of summer basil into a winter's worth of instant flavour. The only 'preserving' recipe I'll insist on: quick-pickled anything — thin-sliced cucumber, radish or beetroot in half vinegar, half water, a spoon of sugar, pinch of salt. Ten minutes, keeps for weeks in the fridge, and it makes cheap dinners taste deliberate.

What autumn is about to do to prices

Come September, the baton passes: squash, leeks, cabbages, cauliflower, parsnips, apples, plums and blackberries take over as the value picks, and the salad aisle quietly doubles in price as it goes back on the plane. The system stays the same all year — buy what Britain is currently drowning in, cook it while it's cheap, freeze the surplus. Twelve months of that habit and you'll notice two things: the food is better, and the receipts are shorter. Both for the same reason.

Where to buy it: supermarket, market or greengrocer

Supermarkets are fine for all of this — especially the discounters — and their 'wonky' or imperfect ranges are exactly the same crop in less flattering shapes at a lower price. Buy them without hesitation; everything on this list is getting chopped anyway. But summer is when the alternatives earn a visit too. A proper street market an hour before packing-up time is some of the cheapest fresh food in Britain, because traders would rather sell a bowl of tomatoes for a pound than load it back into the van. Independent greengrocers sell loose, so you can buy two courgettes and a single onion instead of a plastic-wrapped quartet — often cheaper per meal even when it's pricier per kilo.

Loose usually beats packaged in the supermarket as well: check the per-kilo prices on the shelf edge and you'll be surprised how often the bagged 'value' option loses. And if a pick-your-own farm is within reach, June and July berries picked yourself cost a fraction of the punnet price and become the year's cheapest jam and crumbles. Take children — they work for strawberries.

Shop first, decide second

One last buyer's habit worth stealing: walk the produce aisle before anything else in the shop, spot the two or three British lines that are obviously having their moment — piled high, well priced, in great nick — and let those choose the week's dinners, rather than arriving with a rigid list and paying whatever it costs to satisfy it. It's a five-minute habit that rewires the whole shop around value, and it's exactly how professional caterers keep menus profitable. Your kitchen is a very small restaurant; run it like one, and the season stops being a food-writer's whimsy and starts being a discount that renews itself every month.

Pin the hit list above to the fridge for the summer, and let the shelf tickets do your meal planning. When a vegetable is having its moment, be there for it.