I mentioned in an earlier post that we’re saving seeds from a couple of pumpkins, one home-grown, one purchased. It occurred to me today that although I’m fairly confident the seed from the pumpkin grown at home will reproduce the same pumpkin (by virtue of the fact that we didn’t grow anything it could cross with, and it’s unlikely our neighbors did), I don’t know anything about the location where the store-bought pumpkin was grown and it’s possible it has crossed with something else. Only growing the seeds will tell us for sure, so we’ll keep an eye on it and try not to be surprised by whatever it produces.
Archive for the ‘Gardening’ Category
Saving Seeds
18 October 2009More Gardening!
18 October 2009Today, I:
- wrapped the three pear/plum trees with anti-rabbit fencing.
- weighed down the bottom of the green snow fencing around the hazelnuts with a section of pipe to keep them from getting blown over in the winter
- planted the daffodils dug up from the vegetable garden last summer in between most of the arbor vitaes between the house and the road
- dug ten gallons of coffee grounds into the garden
- stripped the dry leaves off one of the stevia plants that has been drying in the greenhouse for the last few weeks and packed them into a quart jar
- put the onions in the basement in a cardboard box to make room for the butternut, which I moved from the greenhouse to the basement (from what I’ve read, the butternuts would probably do better up in the house, but I haven’t figured out where I would put them — the obvious place is the shelves in the dining room, but they’re full)
- ate a fantastic meal of collards and cut-up pork roast cooked together by M. Man, I can’t even begin to describe how good that is
Planting Filberts & Getting Ready
17 October 2009I’m having a hard time believing that in only a few weeks, it’s going to be damn cold. We’ve had several frosts now, and mostly cloudy, wet weather for the last few weeks, but I still can’t get it into my head that big, bad Winter is about to arrive. The grass is still green and most trees still have green leaves on them.
Planted my three new filbert trees (bushes?) today on the East side of the yard between the privacy fence and the road. They are 3′-4′ trees, typical bare-root stock from Willis Orchards of Berlin, Georgia (poor little trees, moving from Georgia to Wisconsin). They looked to be adequately packed and in good condition.
I’m continuing to clear the brush from that Northeast corner of the yard and will have to keep after it for…ever. Mowing would be the easiest solution, but the grass whip or a scythe would be the fossil-fuel free option. No matter what, I’m going to have to put some effort into keeping that area brush-free, especially next Spring and Summer, if the filberts are going to have a chance.
After planting them, I dumped half a wheelbarrow of leaf compost under each and watered each with about 4 gallons of water. There’s rain in the forecast and it’s been quite wet, so I shouldn’t have to water them again for a while. I also wrapped them in green snow fencing to protect them from the hungry rabbits of March.
Also put half a wheelbarrow of leaf compost under the three plum/pear trees. They’re looking good — we planted them about a year ago.
Pumpkin Seeds and Acorns
11 October 2009Today G and D and I separated pumpkin seeds from the guts of the two pumpkins (one home-grown, one grocery-store pumpkin) we carved for jack o lanterns. They’d been in the refrigerator since last weekend. The boys were into it and quite helpful.
I had saved about 25 seeds from D’s pumpkin that he grew from seed, and G wanted to do the same for the bought pumpkin, so I saved an additional 20 or so seeds from that. (Wash them, put them on top of the refrigerator for a week to dry them, then bring them down into the cool and dark of the basement.) So we’ll have lots of pumpkins in the garden next year, which is fine. I don’t have that much experience with eating them, but I know I like them.
I washed the rest of the seeds, put them on a large flat pan with some salt and coconut oil, and put them in the oven for 40 minutes at 300F. Stirred them every ten minutes. They came out good, above average for pumpkin seeds.
At the same time, also baked the acorn meats we collected last weekend for 30 minutes at 300F. Those had been in water in a quart jar in the refrigerator for the last week. I changed the water every day in an effort to remove some of the tannins. I tasted them this morning, and they were still too bitter to eat. So I thought I would bake them and see if that improved them — it was either that or the compost pile.
And baking did improve them — they were within shouting distance of edibility. I figured they would be okay in something, maybe especially something sweet, so G and I made some molasses-banana bread with some on-the-edge bananas. It’s in the oven now — I’ll update later with results.
The banana bread came out great. G gave it two thumbs-up, which is high praise. The only trace of the acorns is a distant bitter aftertaste that doesn’t detract from the bread at all. So although it involved a lot of steps, I’m happy that we identified another wild food source and learned how to prepare it.
The End
10 October 2009It was 24°F this morning, marking the official end to the 2009 growing season.
So sometime in August we pulled up all the tomato plants because they were dead or dieing from the blight. I should have planted a green manure crop there. If you have an unoccupied spot in the garden during the growing season, plant some buckwheat!
Harvested a few last green peppers and dug the plants in. Dug up the one sweet potato plant — got one large and one medium sweet potato.
Dug in another 10 gallons of coffee grounds.
Ending and Beginning 