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09/30/2007: "Fall Flavors"

Last spring, I harassed Nate a little bit about how much I love pumpkins, and how he won't grow them for me. Oh sure, he grows yummy little sugar pie pumpkins, but I wanted a jack-o-lantern, fresh from the farm. So imagine my surprise when about two months ago I asked Nate what the little green globe squash were and he informed me that they were pumpkins, BIG pumpkins! They are not GIANT pumpkins, which would interfere with his careful breeding projects. However they are field pumpkins that he needed for a breeding cross. Oh the surprises you get when you're a farm wife! So I have my jack-o-lantern already picked out, and hopefully Kurt's daughters and my nieces and nephew will all be able to pick out a pumpkin from the patch soon. The powdery mildew is splotching the vines, and will eventually kill the plant. Then with a light frost it will be time to harvest!




This is a Tahitian melon squash. Apparently it's fairly rare, can be eaten as a winter squash or a summer squash, and is very resistant to powdery mildew. We're eager to try it.


Nate harvested the last of the corn. The crop was 2-3 times as large as last year's crop, and the ears more uniform in color, shape, and size. The stalks all dried down, so Nate prepared the ground for next year by tilling in the stalks, adding soil amendments, then planting wheat and pasture mix.


He's also tilled the garden plot for next year and has sown a crimson clover cover crop. Hopefully, the clover will fix nitrogen into the soil, as well as prevent nutrients from leaching out of the soil in the soggy winter. It should also be much easier to till the clover in in the spring time, rather than break sod. We're crossing our fingers, too, and hoping that the crimson clover will help keep the weed population under control.


Nate also harvested the Black Coco dry beans. He brought the nearly dried pods into the cowshed when the first rain clouds threatened, and allowed them to dry there. Once dry, he set up a threshing system. First he put all of the dried plants on a tarp, and "whacked them with an ax handle". He then tried to separate the beans from the pods, sifting them in front of a fan.


He kept working at it, slowly removing the dried outer layers.


A few more passes in front of the fan, and he was close to a beautiful crop of shiny black beans. Nate grew about 80 row feet of the beans, and that yielded just about a gallon of food! Not bad, and I think we'll be doing it again next year.


Winter-cat likes to walk down to the garden, and her curiosity about the pig is fairly amusing.


The pig is getting bigger, and fatter. He's been enjoying the excess melons Nate's grown (who knew you couldn't eat more than three melons a day?!) as well as whatever else he can get into his snout. The neighbor grew an acre of sweet corn, so occasionally we cross the fence (with permission) and grab a few ears for piglet. He seems to enjoy that too.



Nate's gotten all of the potatoes out of the ground. Mmmmmmmm, delicious!



And this weekend I decided to do a little canning. Nate and I went to the garden, each of us with an apple picking bag. We both filed our bags with red ripe Amish Paste tomatoes. The countertop was covered in tomatoes! So I made several pints and quarts of both tomato chunks and tomato sauce. It's gratifying to remember making the soil blocks, stumbling over the light and heating pad in the kitchen, then moving them outside, sometimes forgetting the water, sometimes remembering, all in eager anticipation of a few red ripe fruits. And now we have more than we could possibly eat! Such wealth.