Grow – Cook – Make

Second half of October, a dreary day, non stop drizzle, and summer comes to my kitchen counter. This is how it’s been all week: tomatoes and more tomatoes, lots of tomatillos, beans, some eggplants and peppers, a bit of basil, a melon every other day, and dahlias. I’ve also been picking a steady supply of lettuce, onions and nopales.

I am now harvesting the vegetables that ripened during our most recent heat wave. There are still plenty of green tomatoes and peppers on the plants waiting for the next few hot days. There are melons ripening on the vines.

I am curious about the tomatillo plants: will they put out another flush of flowers and fruits? Hard to tell, but they’ve surprised me before. Such are the delights of the lazy gardener. A few weeks back I thought the tomatillos were done for good. The plants looked overpowered by powdery mildew and I was just waiting for a good moment to pull them out, clean and plant the next crop. I didn’t feel like it, I didn’t do it. Today I find the mildew basically gone and the plants heavy with new fruit. You can see them up there, on the counter, that’s a large salad bowl they are in.

I have Italian black and Russian red kale waiting to be picked in the garden too. I am not even getting close to them. I’ll have a long winter to eat kale. For the moment I’ll stick to the tomatoes, the peppers, the eggplant. For the moment I am not ready to let go of the fruits of the summer, and neither is my garden.

For more delicious pictures and stories of harvests and to add your own, head on over to Daphne’s Dandelions, host of Harvest Monday, and take a look at what other gardeners have been up to this week.

This week I am excited about these four kabocha squashes. This is all the winter squash I got this year, my smallest winter squash harvest ever. For a while I thought I would get none, so I am happy to have at least a few. Looking at the bright side, those are four heavy little squashes that I will not have to worry about keeping safe from mold and rodents during a long winter. They won’t last long…

Week after week the plants seemed so happy. They looked verdant and lush, unblemished, perfect. I’ve never seen such beautiful winter squash vines in my garden. Now, here’s the catch: those gorgeous plants did not produce female flowers. You tell me, what good is a squash plant without female flowers?

Every day I checked, ready to hand pollinate any female flower that came up. Most days I came back to the kitchen with a good handful of male flowers and no pollination needed. The total for the whole summer were five female flowers. One didn’t take and here you have the other four.

I guess it was our unusually cold summer that did it. Does heat trigger female flower production in squashes? It looks like it…

We eventually got heat, in the fall. As soon as the heat came powdery mildew covered those perfect verdant vines entirely. I’ve had it with the squash this year! I just pulled the plants, took the four kabochas, and didn’t even check whether they were ready for harvest or not. It doesn’t matter if they didn’t ripen properly, they’ll be eaten soon. I do hope they developed at least some of their characteristic sweetness. I do hope.

While the winter squash was driving me insane, another heat loving cucurbit was doing surprising well, a melon, the Ambrosia cantaloupe. I had chosen this variety precisely because it needs less heat than other varieties to develop an intense sweet flavor. I covered the soil with IRT mulch and hoped for the best. I couldn’t have chosen a better year to give this cantaloupe a try. We’ve been having a steady stream of pretty decent melons. Not fantastic, but better than any other local melons I tasted this year. They are as good as I can expect in cool weather and the last few ones harvested during these recent hot days have been very sweet. All in all a success that makes up for the poor showing of its cousin, the winter squash.

I’ve also been harvesting a variety of other heat loving vegetables: tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, tomatillos, green beans have all been plentiful. A bonus of the cool temperatures was a constant supply of lettuce throughout the summer. Now that it is hot, the lettuce is starting to bolt but it still tastes pretty good. To round up the harvest I have some kale, onions and nopales.

For more delicious pictures and stories of harvests and to add your own, head on over to Daphne’s Dandelions, host of Harvest Monday, and take a look at what other gardeners have been up to this week.

Taking a moment to have a cup of tea. Late afternoon in the porch, the sun low behind the bamboo.

I planted a few dahlias last fall by the blue wall in the garden. Just to try.

I can’t get enough of them.

I will plant more. Oh yes, I will.

Three nice little apples sitting on the deck’s railing.

You turn them around and what have you got?

Argh…. the crows!

All the apples in the tree, every single one of them got pecked by crows and jays before they were even ripe.

Oh well…

The chaparral is drying out. It hasn’t seen any rain in three and a half months. In September this is actually pretty good, it means the winter rains were long this year, it means the chaparral has been blooming a little longer than usual. Take this mallow: it is just now coming to the end of its blooming cycle. It has been looking this glorious for almost two months. A long time, a gift from a wet winter and a cold summer.

This summer has been like this, not so good for the vegetable garden, fantastic for the wild plants in the chaparral.