Dark Days 7: Lessons Learned from Winter Squash

This week, I bring you two tales of good intentions and not-so-good outcomes.

Kitty happy meal?

I.
I bought a pile of butternut squash and pie pumpkins from Musterfield Farm in September and put it in dry storage in our garage. I put it on a wooden tray up on a high shelf stacked on top of a bucket, which meant it was difficult to see and difficult to pull down.

Last week, I went through the hassle of pulling the tray off the shelf. Guess what I found - one completely putrefied and moldy squash and one icky pumpkin. Straight to the compost for those. I also found a squash with one small soft spot, so the chickens got a special squash treat.

The rest of the winter squash are still fine, but they do not last forever, so I guess we will be eating squash more often in the next few months.

Moral of the story - Check on your root-cellared vegetables frequently.

II.
This week, the Dark Days Challenge organizers have posed a special challenge - the one-pot meal. I had roasted a butternut squash and a small pie pumpkin earlier, and had the puree hanging out in the fridge. Butternut squash soup with garlic and ginger was calling my name.

I didn't quite manage to answer that call. I used onion, garlic, carrot and dried celery as the base of the soup, and got the proportion of dried celery to fresh veggies wrong. Even though I used all local ingredients (except for the ginger), this week's challenge was a failure. The bottom line is that I have a golden-colored soup that tastes like celery instead of squash.

This is a disappointment, my first Dark Days failure. I have still been eating the soup for lunch at work, with chunks of bread thrown in to mop up my sadness.

Moral of the story - 1 teaspoon dried herbs equals 1 tablespoon fresh. Forgetting this rule equals a waste of time.

P.S. The photo above shows Magalloway scoping out the day-old chicks in their transport box. He decided that they were much too loud to eat, so we have the happy outcome of keeping chickens and a pet cat who is interested but afraid of them.

In Praise of Long Summers

In my mind, I think of September as autumn - back to school traffic, waking up before the sun is fully up, rapid sunsets transitioning to cool nights, pumpkins sitting on the stone wall at the local farm, the first of the fall apples and the end of the peaches.

But September is really a summer month - just as June is really a spring month. We've got another 3 weeks of summer after August passes us by, which is really a pleasant prospect. First, it means that I can still wear sandals even though it's now after Labor Day because it's STILL SUMMER!! I have an unwritten but oft-spoken rule that sandal season is from Memorial Day through Labor Day, but I think I'd like to amend the time period to Memorial Day to the Autumnal Equinox on a trial basis.



Secondly, more summertime means more vegetable-growing weather, more baskets full of basil, and more time for my tomatoes to ripen and red bell peppers to turn red. In New Hampshire, sweet red peppers are difficult to come by; the past few years, I've picked them as green peppers. This year it's been nice and warm and I'm hoping that the green will start turning to red this week.

I've been pulling a few pounds of tomatoes from the vine every other day for the past 2-3 weeks, but the number of green tomatoes still overshadow the red ones picked so far. Green tomato chow-chow is all piquant and thrifty and good, but it's just not as good as the fresh-picked tomatoes that exude redness or any of the many products that can be created from red tomatoes.

I remember 2 years ago, the first year I had a garden at our house, the red tomato harvest was decent, however, I had dozens of green tomatoes that I picked before the first frost and gamely packed them in paper to wait for them to ripen... let's just say that indoor ripening didn't really work out. The majority of those tomatoes went into the compost pile as soggy greenish-yellowish half-rotten orbs. Then, last year, the late blight hit our region and I lost all my tomatoes in mid-August; I think I harvested 3 tomatoes. It was a sad time for home gardeners and a really tough year for market gardeners and farmers.

However, optimism is a requisite trait for a gardener - hope must spring eternal, as a pessimistic gardener is likely to throw in the trowel and take up a more predictable hobby, like cross-stitch or sky-diving. At least for the tomatoes, my optimism had paid off - I'm happy to report that this year's tomato harvest has been great and there's still a rather long time before the end of summer and autumn's killing frosts. Here's a photo of Friday's harvest; the basil basket is also from Friday. Happy summer!

The Dark Days of Rain

I was so excited in April and May - weeks of gorgeous sunny days, even getting up into the 80's a couple of days. We moved our bedroom downstairs to the sleeping porch two months ago, and it was so lovely to sleep with the windows open. My gardens were thriving; even the hydrangea that I left in a garbage bag for 5 days before transplanting managed to put out some flower buds (whoops - not a recommended practice.) And the rhododendron that I thought might curl up and die actually put out new leaves. And the little squeaky cockeyed optimist in my head chirped, "This summer will surely be a warm, sunny, summery season"...

And all that hope and good will and early planting for nothing - June is rainy and cold... it's been raining every day for a solid week!

The pea plants love the cool, wet weather, although I'd really like to see them start flowering. The pole bean seeds soaked up enough water to sprout vigorously, and the snapdragons and dianthus don't care what the weather does - they just keep blooming. (Mental note to buy more snapdragons next year!)

But the daisies have been beaten down, the lettuce is covered with dirt, and my cucumber seeds show no signs of sprouting. The marigolds look sad and sluggy, the squash is turning yellow (the leaves, not the fruit), and the rest of the garden looks lethargic at best. This is a demoralizing time. This is a time when I wonder how the local farmstand can possibly be starting to harvest their greenhouse tomatoes, and why I bother to grow in marginal soil with marginal sunlight when I can just go to the farmers' market... and plenty of other depressing thoughts that make me want to throw in the spade and spend my time in some more rewarding endeavor (model rockets? writing the great American novel?).

This past week is a test of my little internal optimist's patience because most plants don't grow quickly in cool weather. The daytime high's have been in the upper 50's or low 60's - I've worn sweaters every day this week. How can I expect my hot-weather tomatoes and peppers to do anything, if I'm shivering without a jacket? If I can just hold out long enough until the skies clear... then I'll have a moment of sheer bliss before I go out into the garden and find something else to complain about!

I don't think the daisies will ever stand straight again, but this is what they looked like before the rains came!