By the second week of July, the raspberry canes are handing you more fruit than the family can eat, and the strawberry bed is doing the same. Freezing is the least fussy answer, and it works better than most gardeners expect — provided the fruit goes in cold, dry and separate. Here is a checklist that covers the three main crops of a British soft-fruit patch.

Before you pick: sort the kit and the timing

Pick in the cool of the morning, once the dew has dried. Dry fruit freezes as individual berries; wet fruit freezes into a block of ice crystals and tastes thinner when it thaws.

• Two shallow trays lined with baking parchment or a silicone mat.
• Freezer bags in a couple of sizes, or small rigid tubs for fragile fruit.
• A marker pen and labels — you will not remember which bag is which in February.
• A clean tea towel for drying, and a colander if the fruit really needs washing.

Clear a shelf in the freezer before you start, and slide the empty trays in for ten minutes so they are cold when the fruit lands on them. Work in small batches — a kilo at a time — rather than leaving a full trug sitting in the sun while you deal with the first punnet.

Strawberries: hull late and freeze whole

Wash strawberries gently first, then hull them. Hulling before washing leaves a cavity that fills with water and turns the fruit to pulp. Pat them dry and leave them on a tea towel for twenty minutes.

Small and medium berries can go in whole. Halve or quarter the big ones, which are often hollow in the middle and freeze badly as a lump. If you want sliced strawberries for a winter pavlova, toss them with caster sugar — roughly 50g of sugar to 500g of fruit — and leave them for ten minutes until the juices start to run. The sugar holds the colour and firms up the texture a little.

Be realistic about strawberries: they are the softest of the three crops and will collapse on thawing. That is fine for smoothies, coulis, jam, ice cream or a summer pudding. If you want them to hold any shape, use them while still half frozen.

Raspberries: handle them as little as you can

Raspberries are too delicate for washing unless they are dusty or have been visited by birds. Tip them straight from the punnet onto the tray rather than pouring them from a height, and pick out any that are already leaking. One squashy berry will stain and soften its neighbours.

Spread them in a single layer with a little space between each one and freeze within an hour or two of picking. Autumn-fruiting varieties crop right through September and October, so keep a small tray going rather than letting a bowlful sit in the fridge. Loganberries, tayberries and cultivated blackberries take the same treatment; the larger ones are more forgiving and freeze very well.

Currants: the easiest job in the garden

Blackcurrants, redcurrants and whitecurrants all freeze beautifully, and the stalks are the only real work. There are two sensible approaches.

The fork trick

Hold a strig of currants over a bowl and run a fork down it. Ripe berries drop away and the stalks stay in your hand. It takes a few minutes per punnet and leaves you with clean fruit ready for the tray.

The freeze-first trick

Freeze whole strigs on the tray, then rub the frozen berries off the stalks into a bag. The berries come away easily, the stalks snap off cleanly, and you avoid a sticky kitchen. Redcurrants destined for jelly can stay on the strigs altogether — drop the frozen bunches straight into the preserving pan.

Currants also take a sugar pack well: one part sugar to four parts fruit, stirred and left until syrupy, gives you a soft, spoonable fruit for yoghurt or porridge.

Tray-freezing, step by step

1. Line a shallow tray with baking parchment or a silicone mat. Berries stick to bare metal and tear when you prise them off.
2. Spread the fruit in a single layer, not touching, with a small gap at the edges of the tray.
3. Slide the tray into the coldest part of the freezer — the back of a chest freezer or the top shelf of an upright.
4. Leave for two to four hours. Give the tray a shake: the berries should rattle, not slide about in a clump.
5. Tip the frozen berries into labelled bags or tubs, press out the air and seal.
6. Return them to the freezer straight away, especially on a warm day.

Do not stack trays of unfrozen fruit on top of each other, and do not fill the freezer to the point where cold air cannot move around. A slow freeze makes bigger ice crystals, and bigger ice crystals mean mushier fruit.

Berries frozen within an hour or two of picking taste like June in January. Berries left in a bowl on the windowsill until tomorrow will not.

Packaging, labelling and keeping

Freezer bags are the workhorse. Fill them no more than two-thirds full so the fruit is not crushed under its own weight, squeeze the air out, then seal. If you want to go further, push a drinking straw into the open corner, seal around it, suck the air out and seal the last centimetre as you pull the straw free.

Rigid tubs suit raspberries and sliced strawberries, which bruise in a bag. Reused ice cream tubs are ideal, and a square tub wastes less space than a round one. Label everything with the fruit, the variety if you know it, the date, and whether it went in sugared or plain.

Home freezers are usually run at about -18°C. At that temperature soft fruit stays safe far longer than it stays good. Plan on using it within six to nine months for the best flavour and texture, and within a year at the outside. Never refreeze fruit that has thawed — cook it into jam, sauce or cordial instead. If you are preserving for anyone who is pregnant, elderly or immunocompromised, follow current Food Standards Agency guidance on freezing and thawing.

Thawing and using what you froze

Thaw berries in the fridge, ideally spread out in a single layer, for four to six hours or overnight. A bowl on the worktop works but gives softer fruit; the microwave gives you fruit that is half cooked at the edges. For smoothies, yoghurt or a cold topping, skip thawing entirely and use them straight from the freezer — they behave like ice cubes with flavour.

Catch the juice that runs off. It is concentrated, bright and worth keeping: stir it into a dressing, a glass of sparkling water or a batch of ice lollies. Currants and raspberries can go into a pan still frozen for jam, crumble, coulis or cordial, which is one of the quiet pleasures of a well-stocked freezer in November.

The five-minute habit

Keep one small tray permanently in the freezer through the picking season. Whenever you come in with a handful more than you need, spread them out, freeze them, and bag them the next morning. Do that three or four times a week and you will never face a counter covered in softening fruit again — just a stack of labelled bags that tastes like the best of the summer.

Photo: Stefan Richter / Pexels