July is the opposite of February – and that can only be a good thing. No need for ingenuity and effort. No seasonal despondency to cook your way out of. This is the moment you’ve been waiting for: a glorious harvest of sun-ripened vegetables and fruits to be enjoyed in all their unadorned nakedness. And if it takes you longer to cook your crop than to harvest it, I would suggest you’re wasting time in the kitchen.

If you’re not lucky enough to have your own vegetable garden, then this is the month to do business with those who have. This is as good as fresh fruit and vegetables get, and you’d be a fool not to claim your fair share: so get to the local farmer’s market, a farm shop or a pick-your-own premises without delay.

Incidentally, I often wonder why so few PYO fruit farms have extended this admirable method of retailing fresh produce to include vegetables. There are surely enough people who appreciate the difference in taste, and the sheer feel-good factor, of just-picked vegetables to make this a very viable commercial proposition. People who dream of having their own vegetable patch but just can’t find the time to make it happen.

I feel it would work brilliantly with one crop in particular: peas. Peas are already grown on a massive scale in this country, not just for the frozen food market but as a forage crop for cattle – they make a superbly nutritious silage. Just imagine if you could get people to pay to come and pick your peas throughout the summer – and you can still make forage out of the plants at the end of it.

I know what pleasures could be had from such an enterprise because from July until September this is exactly what is happening in my garden. We practically live among the vegetables. Any July day on which more hours are spent inside than out is, in my book, a day misspent. ‘Supper’ may simply mean cruising through the garden for an hour or so, eating raw peas, broad beans, carrots and lettuces until we can’t manage any more.

Forays into the kitchen are purely for a rapid combination of absurdly fresh ingredients, and perhaps for shaking up a hastily improvised dressing. If heat is applied at all, it is the briefest of blanchings, to enhance or fix the natural sugars of something picked just minutes before. And when the ‘cooking’ is done, with a bit of luck the dish comes out of the kitchen and heads back into the garden, where it belongs. Al fresco at every opportunity is our July motto.

If only, one is left thinking, it were possible to bottle July’s bounty for leisurely consumption at less plentiful times of year. It is, of course. And these days the most practical way metaphorically to ‘bottle’ the harvest is to freeze it.

This raises the interesting philosophical question of whether it goes against the spirit of seasonal cooking to freeze the excess of the harvest so it can be used when it is no longer in season. To my mind, there’s only one answer to that: it would be mad not to. It’s not out of some puritanical sense of living in harmony with nature that I’ve been urging you to shop and cook seasonally (if it was, it would be hard to justify the greenhouse and the polytunnel). It’s because, almost by definition, seasonal local food is likely to be fresher and tastier than imported unseasonal food.

So the philosophical freezing question takes a different, simpler and more relevant form: is the produce in question worth freezing? Or, put another way, can it compete, either with its fresh self or with what is available fresh at the time of year you might wish to defrost it?

There are many vegetables for which the answer is a resounding no. Carrots, French and runner beans, beetroot, broccoli, cabbages, cauliflower – all of these return from the freezer to the table like zombies from the grave. Which is to say they don’t look half as good as they did when they were alive, and encounters with them in the flesh, or what’s left of it, are simply not pleasant. This is usually due to loss of texture and degradation of the ‘wholeness’ of the vegetable. Of course, such issues of integrity may no longer apply – for example, when vegetables are transformed into soups and purées (including, very usefully we have found, baby food). In such cases, common sense applies: if the end product is worthwhile, then freezing it will be equally worthwhile.

However, there are two vegetables in particular that survive the process of being frozen whole and intact remarkably well. In fact, their defrosted self is so winning that even those familiar with the original would struggle to spot that they’d been frozen at all.

I’m talking about peas and broad beans. Worth freezing not only because they freeze well but also because, in my book, they are two of the most delicious vegetables on the planet. So the ‘can they compete?’ question is also a no-brainer. Peas from the freezer? In January? With steak and kidney pudding! Yes please!

I see no sacrilege here. For many a year now, my father has had a ritual of reserving the last batch of frozen broad beans to serve, alongside the sprouts and parsnips, with the goose or turkey on Christmas Day. Long may it continue – he won’t hear a murmur of complaint from me.

The success of the reincarnated pea and broad bean does, however, depend on the freezing technique. The most important thing to remember is that the aim is principally to fix the sugars. The best way to do this is to blanch the peas or beans briefly before freezing – and as soon as possible after picking. Aim to pick, pod, blanch and drop in the freezer all within an hour – two at the most. Blanching simply means immersing the peas or beans in rapidly boiling water for 30 seconds, or absolutely no more than a minute. Then drain them, refresh quickly in ice-cold water, toss in a tea towel to dry, and bag up for the freezer. Sucking the air out of the bag – either with your own lungs or, if you’re freezing a very big harvest, with the aid of a vac-packing machine – helps to remove moist air that will otherwise form ice crystals. Such crystals are not critically damaging but they are worth minimising, as they will scar the peas or beans with a mild freezer burn.

When it comes to reincarnation, bring a pan of lightly salted water to a full rolling boil. Peel off the bag from the still-frozen peas and add them to the pan. Once the water has come back to the boil, a scant minute is all the peas or beans will need – from which you may correctly deduce that I would never cook fresh young garden peas or broad beans for longer than two minutes. You could make that four for bigger, mealier peas and five for larger, later broad beans – but no more.

Get this right and you will have something that is beaten only – and fractionally at that – by the taste of the very same, just-picked peas a few minutes before they went in the freezer. It’s as well not to fool oneself about this. It is, I’m afraid, out of a quite misguided sense of virtue – to thank them, if you like, for at least trying – that I sometimes find myself gathering up from a greengrocer’s box the withered shells of some peas in the pod that have been languishing there for days. I know in my heart of hearts that, when it comes to taste, Bird’s Eye will have them licked every time. Turning our attention from vegetables to fruit for a moment, which is something we certainly shouldn’t forget to do this month, we may apply the freezing question again. Which of July’s abundant soft fruits and berries are worth freezing?

If you wish to reincarnate the fruit, like the pea or the broad bean, as some passable vestige of its former self, then only one type of summer fruit passes the test: the raspberry, and its related cluster-berry types, the tayberry and loganberry. Freeze these as individuals on trays. Then, when they are frozen as solid as stones, pack them loose in Tupperware boxes. Spread them out in an even, single layer to defrost and they’ll be passably usable as fresh fruit.

It is worth amending the question, though, to broaden the catchment: which summer fruits are worth freezing as purées or, better still, sorbets and ice-creams? The answer is, all that you can possibly lay your hands on.