Now that we are teetering on the edge of autumn and harvest season for Captain, my harvest season is winding down.
Our garden produced prolifically this year. In contrast to last year, we had a bumper green bean crop, abundant tomatoes, and many cucumbers.
Because of that, our pantry is now brimming! I canned 10 quarts of dill pickles, 35 pints of vegetable soup, 12 half-pints of pickle relish, 15 jars of pizza sauce, 16 pints of salsa, 10 quarts of stewed tomatoes, and almost 40 pints of green beans.
Uff da!
I did discover something new this year. It took three or four pickings of green beans (done every other day) to get enough to do a full canner, so I thought I would be smart and store them in the freezer after Captain got them snapped. Seemed to be a stupendous idea...until we ate the first jar. I thought the beans were extremely bitter, although Captain didn't notice it. After some rudimentary research, it turns out that freezing them changes the chemical makeup or something so that the reaction during the pressure canning process makes them bitter. Hmmm...lesson learned for next year. Plus, if you put enough butter and salt on them, they are tolerable.
The only...disappointment...is the giant pumpkin patch that was Molly’s and Captain’s project. See, when we took Molly with us to the State Fair a few years ago, we cruised through the Horticulture Building to see The Largest [every vegetable in existence], and the giant pumpkins caught her fancy.
So this spring, we bought giant pumpkin seeds and plunked them in the ground. The trouble is, we didn’t read all the fine print on the extension service website about growing these things. Apparently there are many tricks to it.
First off, you have to start the seeds indoors in early April to give them a head start. I guess growing a half-ton vegetable takes plenty of time. Who knew?
There is also a disconcerting aspect of growing these things that I call pumpkin porn. I guess that the flowers on the vines are male and female, and in order to get produce, you need to sort of help them out by picking the male flower and rubbing it on the female flower. Can we just say...eeeuuuww!
After doing the flower-rubbing thing, you have to watch for little pumpkins to appear. Then you have to trim the vines or the leaves from the vines or some such thing so that all of the nutrients go to just one pumpkin.
There’s also a delicate balance of sun, shade, and water for these things. It’s all really a bunch of hoopla for something that really isn’t good for anything but 15 seconds of fame.
I question the necessity of that pumpkin porn stuff because we didn't do that, but we still got pumpkins
Up to about a week ago, we had one pumpkin the size of a basketball and half a dozen more the size of softballs or just a bit bigger.
As of yesterday, the biggest pumpkin was the size of a 30-gallon tote, and we had two or three more in the basketball-plus size range, and a plethora of smaller gourd-sized specimens.
Sadly, they are all still short of the size needed to be entered into competition at the State Fair as anything we’ve seen there has been a minimum of 800 pounds, not to mention that the State Fair has come and gone for this year.
We will have pumpkins for Halloween, however! We’ve never been big on carving pumpkins in this house, even when the kids were young. I did, however, find stick-on decorations for pumpkins in the dollar section at Target the other night, and one of them was a pirate face! How perfect...couldn’t pass that one up at all.
So yesterday as Captain was beginning his harvest season doing a pile of high moisture corn, I did the very last batch of green beans, and I am calling it quits for this year. It’s funny how the very thing that was so darned exciting in late June/early July has now become a burdensome chore in late September/early October.
Too much of a good thing maybe? We’ll go with that.
Images used:
http://quotespics.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/1470533311.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/74/GreatPumpkin.jpg
http://www.theridgefieldpress.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/28/2013/03/P1-ROP-Pumpkin-Growing-CL.jpg
http://i.ebayimg.com/00/s/NTY2WDg0OQ==/z/desAAOSwxH1UBCHg/$_32.JPG?set_id=880000500F
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