---
title: "A Year of Eating Seasonally: What I Learned"
created: 2025-05-10 10:00
author: Amelia Fontaine
keywords: seasonal eating, produce, UK seasons, local food, vegetables
description: A month-by-month guide to seasonal produce in Northern Europe, what eating with the seasons changed about cooking, and the real cost comparison.
---

# A Year of Eating Seasonally: What I Learned

Three years ago I made an experiment: for one year, I would cook primarily with whatever was in season in the UK, buying from farmers' markets when possible and from supermarkets when necessary but choosing seasonal produce. No tomatoes in January, no asparagus in October. I kept a food diary.

What I expected: virtuous inconvenience, occasional genuine pleasure, and a sense of moral superiority.

What I found: far better food than I had been eating, a dramatically changed relationship with the kitchen calendar, and — this surprised me most — lower grocery bills.

## Month-by-Month: Northern European Seasonal Guide

**January / February**
Root vegetables at their peak after frost (parsnips, celeriac, beetroot, swede). Leeks, Brussels sprouts, kale, Savoy cabbage. Forced rhubarb arrives in late January — pink and tender. Blood oranges from Sicily and Spain. Bergamot lemons briefly. Game birds if you eat them.

**March / April**
The hungry gap — the hardest time. Purple sprouting broccoli bridges it magnificently. Spring greens, wild garlic (from hedgerows and woods), radishes, early spinach. Jersey Royal new potatoes appear in late April — small, earthy, best boiled and eaten with good butter. Nothing else required.

**May / June**
The garden wakes up. Asparagus season (May–June, approximately six weeks — eat it every day). Peas and broad beans, best eaten young and raw or barely cooked. Strawberries from mid-June. Early courgettes and their flowers. Elderflower for cordial and fritters. Wet garlic — young, soft-skinned, sweet, milder than cured.

**July / August**
The abundance. Tomatoes, courgettes, cucumbers, French beans. Sweetcorn. Raspberries, blueberries, gooseberries. Plums and early apples. Fennel. Aubergines in a good summer.

**September / October**
The transition into autumn is the most dramatic flavour shift of the year. Wild mushrooms. Autumn raspberries continue. Quince — underused and extraordinary in paste and as an accompaniment to cheese. Cobnuts. Main crop apples and pears at their best. Butternut squash and pumpkins. Jerusalem artichokes begin.

**November / December**
Roots again, and brassicas at their best after frost (a frost improves both Brussels sprouts and parsnips by converting starch to sugar). Chestnuts. Seville oranges arrive in December for marmalade. Celery.

## What Changed

**Cooking became easier.** When you stop trying to make out-of-season ingredients taste like themselves, you stop fighting your food. A parsnip in January is magnificent. A parsnip in July is pointless.

**The same vegetables, prepared differently, stopped boring me.** By February I had been eating celeriac for three months and had remoulade, dauphinoise, roasted, puréed, raw, in soup, and with preserved lemon. The constraint produced creativity I would not have found otherwise.

**I discovered vegetables I had ignored.** Swede. Salsify. Jerusalem artichokes (marvellous despite their intestinal reputation, which is somewhat exaggerated). Purple sprouting broccoli, which I now grow in my own small garden because the window of freshness before it reaches shops is part of its quality.

## The Cost Comparison

Seasonal, locally produced vegetables at farmers' markets are sometimes more expensive per unit than supermarket imports. But the yield is different. A genuinely ripe July tomato is twice the tomato of a January hothouse import — you use fewer, you eat more slowly, it satisfies better.

Across the year, my food costs were slightly lower, primarily because I stopped throwing away vegetables that had been disappointing enough to not eat.

## The One Compromise

I kept buying citrus fruit year-round. The lemons that are fundamental to most of my cooking have no British equivalent, and I was not prepared to become a purist at the expense of most of my sauces. I also kept tinned tomatoes for winter — at their best they are superior to fresh winter tomatoes and I feel no guilt about this at all.

Within those limits, the experiment became permanent. I cook this way now not because I decided to continue the experiment but because it simply became how I cook.
