We’ve had a few frosty nights recently, so this weekend RailGuy harvested most of the produce remaining in the vegetable garden. The first heavy frost is like the Great Reveal, when all the assorted squash, hidden beneath big vine leaves just the day before, are suddenly laid bare.
We have a weird and wonderful assortment, as the squash tend to hybridize and produce some odd-looking individuals. I already gave the largest pumpkin away at Thanksgiving to Ponygirl. She lives in suburbia, and the pumpkin’s substantial girth will be better appreciated by hoards of Trick-or-Treaters there. We still have a couple of smaller pumpkins, some sizeable Hubbard squash and many assorted smaller cucurbits.
Our celery did remarkably well this year, perhaps helped along by our rainy summer that provided lots of moisture. We’ve been harvesting stalks from the outside edge as needed for weeks now. I was surprised at how well the cabbage did. Earlier in the season, the cabbage leaves were riddled with holes from insect attacks. However, they not only survived, but went on to produce good heads of cabbage.
While gardening on the rocky ground of the Escarpment in the GTA, I got used to seeing twisted, forked carrots. These carrots are amazing! Aren’t they beautiful? The celeriac also did pretty well. Not quite sure what I’ll do with these; I’ve never used celeriac much. This will require a bit of gastronomic research.
oh wow, what bounty lay beneath those leaves! happy harvest!
Hi iMadeItSo! Lots of good eating to look forward to!
You certainly did well! I wish I could grow carrots like these. As for the celeriac, it is simple, peel the roots & tops, grate what is left and mix it with a remoulade (a fancy name for a dressing made of mayo, lemon juice a little Dijon – some recipes add capers and other things). You will find lots of recipes on the net for a remoulade. When all mixed with the dressing, it keeps a long time in the fridge, but you cannot grate the roots ahead of time as they will turn brown.
Alain, I tried a remoulade recipe tonight and we enjoyed it. Thanks for the tip!
here’ s the account of our harvest: 23 October 2013
Canada: Ontario: Grenville County: Oxford-on-Rideau: Bishops Mills:S side(Schuelers). (100m ard homesite), 31B/13, 44.87156N 75.70095W TIME: 1700ca. AIR TEMP: 5 ca, light overcast, calm. HABITAT: rural village, shallow soil limestone plain. OBSERVER: Frederick W. Schueler. 2012/319/c, Cucurbita moschata (Butternutish Squash) (Plant). 55/common vine, in fruit, cult, forage. pulled aft last night’s light frost. We’ve got 54 mature Butternut/Long of Naples squash and only 1 unfertilized one – unlike last summer when 50% were unfertilized. Also a couple of partly-grown unfertilized ones, and a boxful of immature fruit and female flowers. These were planted late, but benefited by the delay of frost until last night – 42 days after the traditional (if a bit alarmist) 10 September date of first frost in Bishops Mills. If frost had come a little earlier, about 100 kg of Squash vines could been shoved into the meat Chickens to offset some of their purchased feed, but frost held off until last night, and Goats won’t eat the vines, so they’ll be compost. The Chickens had already eaten the vines on the Septic Drumlin, as well as some fruit from there, which somewhat reduced the count of squashes from the harvest.
These started out as the “Long of Naples” variety a few years ago, but have been genetically compromised to a wide variety of standard Butternut- and long skinny yellow-fruited types). About a third of these were the short-butternut shape, and one is pumpkin shaped.
Heather Johnson asked on facebook: how can you tell if they are unfertilized?
* no seeds – and no swelling where the seeds would be – just a nose-like taper. Of course there may have been pollination that somehow didn’t result in the formation of seeds.
Heather: ohhh, I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before.
* it may be a result of breeding for a great “enthusiasm” for producing fruit, so that if flowers aren’t fertilized in time, one or two on a vine begin to develop parthenogenetically. I’m very impressed, in dragging in these huge squash, how only 1-3/vine have developed, so there must be some hormonal communication through the vine that allocates resources to a few fruit, in order to get the big size – a metre long in the largest ones.
Heather: a METRE long!!! Gosh Fred, what will you do with those!!! That’s amazing that they limit the development to a few squash on their own and you don’t have to remove extras to get big fruits.
* what we do with them is to lay them out on an upstairs floor, and feed on them all winter. They’re not quite as rich as traditional Butternut but they’re fine, and we just whack a meals-worth off the neck and cook it up. Both this spring and last spring, we’ve eaten the last squash at planting time, and planted the seeds directly. We’ve had poor success with traditional Butternut here, and somewhat better luck with Buttercup, but these Long of Naples (crossed with another macro-buttercup variety whose name I forget now) have become our primary crop for the past 6 years or so.
These are really low-maintenance plants – if the area they’re planted in is heavily mulched, and you don’t have a drought, the only work they require is to not mow the areas of the lawn that they grow over. With all the recent chicken bedding, and the goats, we’re looking forward to adequate mulch for next year.
That’s quite a crop. A metre long, I have nothing to match that! Our oddist squash self-seed on the manure pile which doubles as a compost heap. Amazing things come up there. I’m just not fond enough of squash to collect them all. Thanks for your report.
Nice job on the celery! The closest we’ve ever gotten to it is using the fresh stalks on the celeriac, since the roots never got much bigger than marbles. and is that delicata among the squash? We only got one per plant, but we cut ’em in rings and ate ’em rind and all.
I’m not sure if it’s delicata. Rind and all, eh? I’ve never tried that. Any garden produce is great, even if it doesn’t turn out quite like the picture on the seed pack, don’t you think?
I think those squashes are some sort of heart of gold cross, not delicata. Delicatas are one of my favourites for flavour and because they’re a nice small squash with thin enough skin you can just eat it as dandyknife mentioned – but they don’t keep long compared to other winter squashes. The heart of gold ones should keep better.