Winter Squash for the Holidays

With Thanksgiving just a few days away, I thought it might be a good time to show you some of the new winter squashes we grew this past year. This bowl full is sitting on our coffee table, it’s the perfect seasonal decoration and it reminds me of the good fortune we have to grow such beautiful, nourishing food.

The squash on top is new to us this year. It’s called a Shishigatani or Toonas Makino from Baker Creek. It wasn’t the most productive plant, we only got two small squash, but isn’t it interesting looking? It’s a rare variety from Japan, that supposedly when eaten in the hottest part of summer, prevents paralysis. And really, who doesn’t want to prevent paralysis? We haven’t tried eating it yet so I’ll get back to you on how it tastes.

The long neck squash just below that, I wrote about before, however I had showed a picture of it while it was still green and on the vine. This also is a new one to us from Baker Creek, an Italian variety called Zucchino Rampicante. I highly recommend growing this one next year! The great part about this is that it can be eaten green as a summer squash or you can let it mature into a winter squash, plus the vine is fairly productive and easy to grow.

Below that are a few acorn squashes which we try and grow every year. Who can resist a stuffed, roasted acorn squash? Not I, I say.

Above is a photo of dinner starting to be made with our first ever grown parsnip. This fellow decided to grow two legs. I have to say, I was not a big fan of how it turned out roasted, but I’m willing to give it another chance, we still have some growing outside.

We also tried our luck with Blue Hubbards too. I can’t boast that it was a very prolific crop, we only got one per vine and they didn’t get as big as advertised, but they are worth a try next year too. Remember our growing season this year was a little wonky. Nothing grew exactly as it should have. We did however, buy an enormous one at the Tolay Fall Festival in October that is sitting on our mantle. Early Thursday morning we’ll cut it up and roast it for our Thanksgiving meal.

The Tolay Fall Festival by the way is a must visit for anyone who lives even remotely close to Sonoma County, this was our first year going and we spent hours upon hours there, it is most certainly worth the drive. Mark it on your calendars to visit next October.

Are you serving winter squash with your Thanksgiving meal?

What to Do with All the Fruit?

Despite last weeks reported disappointments, we must be doing something right in other parts of our yard because it is becoming increasingly harder to find counter space in our kitchen. Is your kitchen counter the same each summer? We are truly at that point in zucchini season where you are ready to sneak over and pop a few into the neighbors mailbox and run for dear life. If I knew that our neighbors didn’t already grow plenty of zucchini I would have done so already. In fact our neighbor across the street was the one who inspired us to grow these Portofino zucchini’s which are our favorite by far.

The peach and nectarine tree are ripe this week which means lots of canning, fruit roll ups and of course peach margaritas!

Do you have any ideas for preserving fruit besides canning? Enough people have suggested dehydrating that I might just give that a try this year. We’ve tried freezing bags of cut up peaches, but besides using them in smoothies we haven’t found them to be a very useful. I’d love to hear more suggestions.

UPDATE: Yesterday I made this fantastic peach galette that a former collegue created. It was fantastic! Give it a try.

Purple Haze Glory

Oh sweet glory, the purple hazes are ready!

Onions, Potatos and Daikons. Oh My!

While it’s easy to see what’s growing above ground, it’s a bit of mystery on what’s growing under the ground, so we get a little curious and start to peek.

Daikon radish bloom
We knew the daikons weren’t going to do well for us this spring, but we are so into our new kimchi recipe that we couldn’t wait until the recommended fall. Well it serves our impatient nature right by bolting straight away and giving us piddly little roots. Have you seen them at the farmers markets? Daikon’s can be monsterous! We’ll try again in fall.

mini daikon radishes

Back when we first planted our onions at the very end of January I counted forward 100 days (the tags estimated date of maturity) to May 5th. We’ll they aren’t ready. Not that we haven’t picked a few to use as young spring onions, but it’s not time to pull them out and let them dry. We’ve still got at least a month to go. I’ll let you know.

We planted our potatoes on the same day as the spinach and daikon seeds, February 27th. And it looks like we’ve gotten our moneys worth on the Red Golds at least. We planted 1lb of them in this box and from one plant we’ve gotten 1.2lbs. Six more plants to dig. Of course this isn’t anything close to Sinfonian’s 100lb of potatoes, but it’s enough to enjoy with dinner. They were the creamiest potates I’ve every had.

Merlo Nero vs. Bloomsdale Spinach

We grew two types of spinach next to each other this spring. Bloomsdale Long Standing and Merlo Nero Spinach. We were looking to see if we had a spinach preference. Maybe one would grow better, maybe one would taste better? Maybe one would be less prone to insect attacks.We enjoyed growing our watermelons together last year to pick a favorite. So we hoped to see a big difference. So today I asked Scott while he was harvesting it all what he had to say about the spinach growing experiment. Did he notice a difference? His comments were, “they both grew, they both bolted, and they both taste good.” So there you go folks. The in-depth analysis about the two spinaches.

To be more specific, we planted them from seed on February 27th, and they had already started to bolt when we picked them today, so maturity for both Bloomsdale and Merlo Nero was about 10 weeks for us. Spinach in general likes to grow in cooler weather and I’ve read that it’s best to start it 6 weeks before your first frost in fall and 6 weeks before your last frost in spring. Pretty easy to remember.

When the days get too long in spring, that’s when they start to bolt, which is exactly what’s happened to us. Especially after this past weekend’s heat wave (which hit at the exact same time as last year!) No matter though, we had a good crop. The Bloomsdale spinach was a little less savoyed (or crinkled) than the Merlo Nero and the leaves were also slightly lighter in color and more delicate in nature than the Merlo Nero spinach. The Merlo Nero definately had more heft to the leaves. Maybe you could say that the Merlo Nero spinach is better for cooking and the Bloomsdale is better for fresh salads, but in the end, they are both great spinaches.

We eat a lot of spinach. We heard once that the average American eats about 3lbs of spinach a year and I think we far exceed that in our diet. It’s just so good. You can eat it raw, cooked, braised, pureed into smoothies, wilted in salads, hidden in raviolis… the possibilities are endless. I bet you eat a lot of spinach too. Time to make Spinach & Green Garlic Soup!

Do you have a favorite spinach variety?

Beets for Obama

I understand you aren’t crazy about beets, President Obama, but can’t you agree that they are so pretty?

We had these chiogga beets the other night with carrots and celery root all cut up match stick like. Scott made a simple dressing of mayo+yogurt+rice wine vinegar+pepper. Delicious.

This week has been a busy week. Next week I promise more postings!

Our fig had a little baby

Our blackjack fig is finally kicking it into production. This is one of the very first fruit trees that we planted when we moved in five years ago and it was nothing but a stick at the time. Now its the size of a small bush, but it actually has handfuls of figs on it.

When I was young my best friend had a mature fig tree in her backyard and we’d spend hours after school sitting on our favorite branches talking about everything that had happened in school that day. There’s something magical about large fig trees, isn’t there? Down the street from our house is the Sonoma Garden Park, a community garden, which we love to stroll through. They have an entire fig grove which they hold lectures in the middle of. It’s amazing.

Last spring our fig tree had a baby. Part of one of it’s drooping branches got buried in the soil and sprouted roots. We clipped off this new sprout and potted it up. It’s even produced a fig! Expert gardeners would call that layering, we call it a miracle.

Some of my favorite things to do with figs are stuff them with goat cheese, wrap in procuitto and put in the oven for a bit to warm it up. Or even better, put them on skewers with thin slices of lemon in between, brush with a mixture of honey and lemon juice and grill. Oh, that’s delectible!

A Peppery Success

I’ll be the first to admit that our vegetable garden isn’t looking its finest right about now. That’s why you haven’t seen many outdoor photos lately. Its been hot and dry recently. So dry that it is hard to keep things looking green and lush. The melons ares are done, the first round of zucchini have hit retirement and truth be told, our minds have drifted over to other parts of our yard.

Carmen Peppers
We always had it a goal to own a small house on a large lot, which we gratefully have. However, having a large lot means having a large list of things to do. This summer has been titled ‘The Summer of Taking Care of Business’. A summer filled full of to-do’s which we didn’t accomplish last year, which was ‘The Summer of Getting It Done.’ So we’ve set about the business of reseeding the entire back lawn, building new and repairing old fences and planting large landscape plants to give us a bit more privacy.

Quadrato d’Asti Giallo Peppers
One thing we are having great success with in the vegetable garden are with peppers. We planted enough to feed a small army. We planted all sorts, Carmens, Quadrato d’Asti Giallos, Serranos, Gourmets (remember when we ordered them from Territorial?) and a few from some fellow Seed Savers, Colossal Kim’s and a few pimentos. All are doing outstanding. Peppers take a long time to grow (some long time readers might remember our post about planting the seeds) and needs lots of sun and heat. Things that we have in abundance here in our Sonoma garden.

What’s your most successful crop this year? What have you been disappointed by?

After a day in Sebastopol

Tuesday was our oldest son’s fourth birthday. After a weekend of celebration, we spent his actual birthday with the BellaMadris clan in a little orchard in Sebastopol. It was lovely. And beautiful. This orchard, down a long quiet gravel road, is in a No Spray Zone and the owner isn’t a big fruit harvesting guy, so Julie has been given permission to pick all she wants. And this was part of the result of our harvest.

The boys ran wild, fueled by chocolate cupcakes and the prospects of sitting on this shiny red tractor.
A great day was had by all. Thanks Julie for bringing us there!

It made us both think, if we could actually live way out in the country. We (Julie and I) both like the convenience of living in town, not using our cars, but we also have a draw towards living out in a quiet open place in the country too. Melinda chose to give up country life for the city recently. Where do you live? Do you wish you lived closer to a town, or farther from it?

Ali Baba is the Best!

We’ve had a troublesome history with watermelons. It’s like us and watermelons never really jived. We started to think that maybe we just weren’t watermelon-growing kind of people. But this year things have been different. Maybe it’s because we planted two different kinds together. Or maybe the stars are just aligned like one big watermelon this year, but it’s been a good year for us and watermelons.

Sugar baby

We grew Sugar Babies and Ali Babas. The Sugar Babies, they were pretty good. Smallish and roundish with dark skin and a nice red center. But they were only mostly sweet and they were full of countless little black seeds. Which made for a lot of spitting. So much spitting that we barely got to taste the flesh.

Ali Baba

But the Ali Babas…. Now those are our kinds of melons. So sweet that you don’t even know what to do with yourself. So full of flavor. And the seeds are big and not so plentiful, so when you take a bite, it’s an easy ‘patooie’ to spit them out. And did I mention the flavor? Oh, we’re in watermelon heaven. It’s a good thing that it’s so incredible because so far we’ve harvested two and this one here is 14 pounds. The previous one wasn’t far from that weight. We’ve got a lot of melon eating to do.

The story behind these Ali Baba’s is pretty cool too. The seeds were given to Rare Seeds from a man who collected them from Iraq before the war started. Now its virtually impossible to get seeds from that country. “A rare genetic treasure” reads the description.

And look, it’s beautiful growing in the yard. You must all put this melon at the top of your list for growing next year. You won’t be disappointed.