Happy Halloween!

Don't let the zombie flamingos get you!

The Butterfly Moon

As I write this, Hurricane Sandy is making landfall in New Jersey, which seems to be an unusually northern location for a hurricane. It's also worse because of it being on the full moon, making high tide even higher. Take care up there!

Here in Texas, it's finally feeling like fall. We haven't had a frost here in San Marcos yet, but further out in places like Johnson City and Fredricksburg it's at least been getting close. The plants out in the garden that are not freeze-tolerant are running out of time. By next full moon, we will probably have had our first freeze.

And yes, I have been seeing the migrating monarch butterflies, along with lots of snout butterflies, and some others. Lots of migrating animals, not just butterflies, but bats and birds also ride the cold fronts this time of year to get to their wintering grounds in Mexico and Central America.

Most of the peppers are doing a good job putting on a second crop before frost. Too bad I can't say as much about the tomatoes. They have a few blooms but that's about it.

Speaking of blooms, I gave up on trying to save basil seed this time because I just couldn't keep up with pinching off the blossoms to prevent the basil I wanted to save from cross-pollinating with other varieties. Every time I got out there, there are more blossoms, and more bees mixing pollen all around.

The luffa gourds now have several fruits the size of large cucumbers. Problem is most of them are way up in the tree. Not sure how I'll get them down.

Most of the garlic seems to be sprouted by now, mixed in with all those rain lilies. The garlic appears to be lighter in color than the lilies, but the only way to tell for sure is by smell.

Fall crops like the arugula are also doing well, and almost big enough to start harvesting from.

The beets are mostly doing well too, though some varieties are germinating better than others, Bull's Blood being the worst. I seem to have this problem with Baker Creek's seeds fairly often. I'll buy several different varieties of seeds from them, and one or two will have really low germination. I wonder if they don't store them under very good conditions or something.

The Red Giant mustard is also doing well. It's turned out to be purple on the top of the leaves and green underneath. It's going better than my other Brassicas, but all of them are getting eaten up by caterpillars. I'm not sure if I'll spray them with Bt or wait for a freeze to take care of the bugs for me.

So that's how things are doing in the garden now. I love this time of year!

Cushaw Pumpkin Butter

Yesterday I decided to try a new thing with the frozen cushaw puree I still have in the freezer from 2010. I made a batch of pumpkin butter with some of it. I based it off of this recipe, with only a few tweaks. I added some more spices, since pumpkin pie spice usually contains ginger and allspice in addition to cinnamon and nutmeg, so I added a half teaspoon of each of those spices as well. I used a cup of brown sugar and only two tablespoons of maple syrup to sweeten it, mainly because that's the all the maple syrup I had left! Of course, I only use real maple syrup, not that artificially maple- flavored high fructose corn syrup, and using the full quarter cup the recipe called for probably would have been even more yummy. I used a pinch of kosher salt instead of sea salt, since that's my default salt. Lastly, I cooked it a lot longer than the recipe called for. The recipe said you only need to cook it for 10 minutes, which seems way too short. Maybe it depends on how high your heat is and how watery your squash started out.

The tip to keep a lid on with a wooden spoon sticking out was very helpful. Once the stuff starts cooking it bloops everywhere, and if a drop of it hits you in the arm, it hurts! I put it on the stove on low enough heat so it was gently blooping and blubbing... and then I ended up letting it do that for a full two hours. I went to work on potting up some more transplants, and came back about every ten minutes to take it off the heat and give it a good stir. The point is to get the pumpkin to a thick, spreadable consistency. I'm sure it's possible to burn this stuff, so I kept it on low heat and made sure to check on it often, and that seemed to work just fine.

After two hours this is the result. When I stirred it, it mostly kept its shape. A blob put on a plate didn't leak out any liquid around the edges. It also made my house smell wonderful!

There is some controversy over whether you can safely can pumpkin butter. The USDA says absolutely not, but I found plenty of blogs saying they can it all the time and nobody's gotten botulism yet. Well, I decided not to take my chances anyway, and ended up packaging it in Ball freezer jam jars. I ended up filling 5 jars all the way, and a 6th one about halfway full. The halfway full one went in the fridge, and the rest went in the freezer.

And here is the completely cooled butter being put to the test on some ciabatta toast. As you can see it's thick enough to be spread with a knife, so I guess that means I cooked it long enough. It was tasty too! I bet this would also be good on a hearty whole grain bread, or English muffins, or pancakes, or oatmeal, or ice cream, whatever!

So that used up two more containers of cushaw puree. I still have 11 more left in the freezer! I guess I won't have to grow any more pumpkin/winter squash in 2013 either.

Pumpkin (or winter squash) Butter

• 4 1/2 cups roasted and pureed cushaw squash (or whatever winter squash or pumpkin you have)
• 1/4 cup apple cider
• 1 cup brown sugar
• 2-4 tbsp real maple syrup
• 1 tbsp ground cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
• 1/2 tsp ground allspice
• 1/2 tsp ground ginger
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 tsp lemon juice
• pinch of salt

Mix everything together in a medium saucepan and put on low to medium-low, just so the mixture gently simmers/boils. Cover with a lid propped up with a wooden spoon to protect from splatters. Stir well every ten minutes or so to keep the bottom from burning, and cook for an hour or two, until the butter is as thick as you'd like. Keep in the refrigerator or freeze for longer term storage.

The Gold Moon

Sorry this post is a couple of days late. The full moon was actually Sept. 30. I think traditionally this moon is called the Harvest Moon, the full moon closest to the Autumn Equinox. It's just not very gold out there right now, it's mostly very green. We got lots of rain in September, about 5 inches, so everything is looking very lush and green out there. The weather has cooled down so we're having highs in the low 80's and lows in the low 60's.

The garlic is starting to sprout, but so are a lot of rain lilies that are in the bed with them, so it's a little hard to tell what is what. I planted the garlic in the last bed on the end, which is very close to some oak trees, so I hope that wasn't a bad move. I think after I harvest the garlic next summer I'm going to abandon that bed. Hopefully by then I'll have the old shed taken down and that prime sunny area it's now taking up made into more garden space. (We plan on rebuilding a new shed in the shade.)

I also haven't gotten around to mulching the garlic yet. It's probably OK for now since we've gotten a lot of rain and it's not cold yet, but it's on my to-do list.

The Red Giant mustard is growing bigger, but it's still not very red. Does it need cold weather to get red? You can see some more rain lilies coming up there too. They're so pretty, I just don't have the heart to pull them out. They're hard to pull out anyway because of the bulb.

I've also planted some arugula, which you can see here with another wildflower, purple wood-sorrel  growing up among it. That's another "weed" I don't like to pull up. It gets pretty purple flowers on it and the leaves are edible. A whole bunch started coming up in the yard after the rain.

I also planted kale, chard, and dill plants which have also settled in nicely. Still left to plant are parsley, cilantro, and celery.

The beets are just starting to sprout as well. Don't see any carrot sprouts yet. This year I also planted leek and onion seeds directly in the ground instead of trying to transplant them like I've done before. No sprouts of them yet.

The fall tomatoes are doing OK but still pretty small. I don't know if they'll have time to set a crop of tomatoes before frost. Maybe fall tomatoes just aren't worth it.

The tomatoes that survived the summer aren't looking much better than the fall-planted ones. Still no fruit being set. Maybe in the future I should concentrate my efforts on getting a good tomato harvest in the spring and summer, and just accept that there will be no more fresh tomatoes after July or so.

The basil is doing great. I think I should plant basil earlier next year so I'll have some to harvest earlier in the year (like when I have tomatoes!), but no problem with getting a fall harvest of basil too. The only problem I'm having is pinching off the flowers on the varieties I'm not saving seed from this year fast enough to keep them from cross pollinating with the variety I am saving seed from this year.

Well, another problem is figuring out what to do with so much Cinnamon Basil. I've found a few recipes for it, but most of the time when I do a search for "cinnamon basil recipes", I get recipes that have both cinnamon and basil in them but not Cinnamon Basil.

The luffa gourds are another summer survivor that I'm not sure are going to do anything before frost. I wonder if they are in too much shade? They're on the extreme other end of the garden from the garlic. They have grown up into the Ashe juniper tree that shades them on that side, but even the part that's up there isn't setting any fruit.

The hot peppers are putting out a second crop, but disappointingly the bell peppers haven't. The plants look fine, but no peppers. I feel like I'm up to my eyeballs in hot peppers already, but it would be nice to have some more bells before frost.

The leeks I planted in spring are still there, and I still think that's weird. They still haven't bolted or made any bulbs. They've just sat there all through the summer. I was going to try either saving seeds or bulbs from them but they haven't made either. I think this week I'll try cooking with some and seeing if they're at least edible. I keep thinking they're probably tough or bad-tasting by now, but maybe not.

Lastly, the Austrian Winter Peas I planted as a cover crop in the bed I plan on planting potatoes in are growing nicely, with all the rain. The idea is for them to fix nitrogen in the bed before I plant nitrogen-loving potatoes in there in January or February.

Which reminds me, I still need to plant my edible peas and fava beans, but I've run out of room. This is why I'm a bit annoyed with my tomatoes, bell peppers, and luffa gourds right now. They're taking up valuable garden room, as it becomes increasingly doubtful I'm going to get anything more out of them this year. I wonder if I should go ahead and yank any of them up, or if I should wait until they freeze to death before I plant my peas. Except that might delay the pea harvest, and I'm really looking forward to some delicious, fresh homegrown peas. This winter I want to grow enough peas to freeze some for later.

Pipian Verde de Pollo

To celebrate the Autumn Equinox I decided I wanted to make a feast from Mexico: One Plate at a Time by Rick Bayless, a cookbook I got last Yule. It's full of delicious-sounding traditional Mexican foods, but a lot of the entrees seem a bit time-consuming to make and best saved for special occasions. One of these days I'd love to make turkey mole, for instance, but this time around I decided to make Pipian Verde de Pollo, using some of the pepitas I still have saved from the great cushaw squash harvest of 2010.

I ended up with three quart mason jars full of seeds once all my squash were cut up and pureed. I searched and searched for a way to get the hulls off, with no luck. I did find instructions saying to crack the seeds with a rolling pin or mallet and then drop them into water, and the hulls should float while the rest of the seed sinks. That didn't work. Most of the seeds just got split in half, with the meat staying inside the seed.

Finally I gave up. On page 223, Rick Bayless says unhulled seeds can be used, though he prefers hulled seeds. Yes, but that defeats the point of using my own homegrown seeds!

Here are my homegrown seeds toasted. They really smelled good, and started making popping noises. It occurred to me that maybe the seeds would be easier to de-hull if they were toasted. Maybe the toasting makes the seed pull away from the seed coat better. Except I tried peeling a couple of them and it was still very difficult. There's got to be some trick to this!

Bayless says you are supposed to blend everything up in a blender, but I decided to use my food processor first to grind up the seeds as finely as I could (besides, my blender was already being used to puree the tortilla soup). This is my result. It had a lot of flecks of ground up seed hull with it. At this point I realized it would probably be best if I strained the sauce to get the hulls out, so I ground up about 2 cups of seed instead of the 1 1/4 cups the recipe called for, to make up for the volume lost by straining.

I then pureed the tomatillo, onion, garlic, herbs, and chiles (I used Lemon Drops from my garden) in the food processor, mixed them with the ground up pumpkin seeds and chicken stock, and then simmered them for 20 minutes like the recipe said. I tasted it after the simmering, and it had a delicious flavor, but sure enough, there were those tough, fibrous shards of hull floating around in the sauce. Those had to go.

After straining the sauce, I was alarmed at how much volume was left behind in the strainer, even after lots of scraping and pushing through the mesh. Good thing I put extra pumpkin seeds in. There's got to be an easier way to do this. I did end up with a lovely smooth, creamy sauce when done, with plenty of nutty pumpkin seed flavor.

Another change I made to the recipe was that Bayless cooks the chicken (he uses six skinless bone-in chicken breasts), along with some zucchini and chayote squash separately, and then adds them to the sauce. I used one cut-up whole chicken (free range of course), and calabacitas for the squash. It sounded like a lot of trouble to cook everything separately, so I browned the skinned chicken pieces in a pot, and then added the squash and the pipian and braised them in the sauce until done. This is similar to the technique he uses with his turkey mole, so I don't know why he has it different with the chicken.

Here is the result. I served the chicken and squash with his arroz blanco, which is like a rice pilaf with lime juice, and some fried plantains. Tortilla soup was the first course, and for dessert we had his Mexican chocolate strudel cake, which is one of his "contemporary" recipes.

It was very good, and this recipe uses a lot of things I can grow myself: garlic, thyme, marjoram, bay leaves, epazote, pumpkin seeds, tomatillos, chiles, and cilantro. That's just about everything besides the chicken and olive oil, though the chicken was still locally raised.

Now if I could just figure out how to get the hulls off the pumpkin seeds so I could save myself a lot of trouble straining.

Starting the Beet Variety Trial

When I was a kid first getting into gardening, ordering seeds from seed catalogs with my mom's borrowed credit card, I would stare and stare and stare at the pages trying to decide which variety of a certain vegetable I wanted to get. I was so hard to decide, but I was sure I needed to get only one variety of each thing. Who really needs more than one variety of anything, right? I even felt bad about ordering a variety that costed a little more than the others, because that would be a waste of money (that one is fifty cents more, oh no!), so the price was a thing I took into consideration along with the pretty pictures and descriptions. If there was more than one variety I wanted to try, I would pick one, usually the cheapest, and then tell myself once I run out of those seeds and need to reorder, I would try the other one. Using up a whole seed packet in a small garden takes a few years, so I didn't end up getting to try a lot of things.

Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties has started to change my mind about that. She has a whole chapter about conducting variety trials, where she describes buying many varieties of mustard greens to see which one preforms best in her garden. It sounded like so much fun, perhaps it's worth "wasting" the money buying a few extra $2 or $3 packets of seed.

I've already been doing trials of a sort with the garlic, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, and peppers, and posting the results here. Except the difference with those is I plan on growing multiple varieties of those all the time anyway, because different varieties are good for different things. There are tomatoes for cooking, tomatoes for slicing onto sandwiches, and tomatoes for salads. There are bell peppers and hot peppers good for drying and making chili powder, and hot peppers good for pickling. Some sweet potatoes are sweet and moist and others are dry and starchy. And even though I use all my garlic pretty much interchangeably in the kitchen, different varieties of garlic mature at different times and store for different lengths of time, so it's still worth it to plant a few different ones. If I were to do a "real" trial with those, I'd plant a bunch of paste tomatoes to compare, or a bunch of bell peppers to compare, or something like that (which I actually would like to do some day).

However, there are some crops that I'd probably be fine with growing only one variety of. Collard greens, for example. I think I could figure out one variety of collard I like best and grow that one all the time. Then again, technically collards are in the same species as kale, cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower, and those are certainly not interchangeable, so maybe it still counts as growing a lot of varieties of the same thing.

But even for vegetables where only one variety would do, I still have to figure out what that one best variety is (best for me, of course, your mileage may vary). Back when everyone grew their own vegetables, the one best variety for the area was passed down from generation to generation in a family, but now I have to start from scratch.

This fall planting season I didn't have any more beet or carrot seed, so I thought this was my chance to do a trial, since I needed to buy more seed anyway. I decided to go with Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds this time, since it looks like they have a good selection, and I re-read the chapter on conducting trials in Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties. Beets and carrots are both vegetables I think I'd be fine with growing only one good variety of, but I need to find out what that variety is (and I could be wrong and maybe it is worth it to grow more than one).

After thinking about it some more, I decided I needed to simplify things for myself and not do both beets and carrots in the same year. I have a bad habit of biting off more than I can chew, so it would be best to do one simple trial well than a couple of big complicated trials poorly. I went with beets because I have grown a good crop of them in the past, while carrots continue to give me trouble. If I did a carrot trial it's possible that none of them might make it, but with beets I'm much more likely to actually get some beets to eat.

I can do carrots next time.

Next I had to choose which varieties of beets I want from the 15 Baker Creek has listed on their website (it's not quite seed catalog season yet, so I had to order off the website). Carol Deppe says that a variety trial is really a scientific experiment, and in every scientific experiment you should have a control. In a variety trial your control is some sort of "standard" variety. It's either your favorite variety you've already been growing, or the most common variety everyone grows.

I've grown two varieties of beets before. Bull's Blood was my first, and then when I ran out of that, I grew Detroit Dark Red, which probably counts as the "standard" beet. All seed catalogs have Detroit Dark Red. It's like the Purple Top turnip of beets. However, since I never grew Bull's Blood and Detroit Dark red side by side in the same year, I can't really say which one is best. See, that's why you need to do trials!

So I knew I had to get those two, and then have fun getting some more that I've never grown before. I ruled out any of the long, skinny ones like Cylindra or Crapaudine, because I have heavy soil. I wanted to get ones I thought had a good chance of growing well. Flat of Egypt doesn't sound good to me because a flattened beet sounds like it would be hard to slice. They have a few varieties of fodder beets, and I'm not a rabbit, so I ruled those out.

I realized I have a prejudice against non-red beets. It just seems wrong. Beets are supposed to be red. And I know from tomatoes that color can actually make a difference in flavor. Vegetables don't work like M&M's. The colors don't all taste the same. The darker the color of a tomato, the more flavor it seems to have. I'm suspecting it's the same with beets, but I'm not sure since I've never tasted a non-red beet. I couldn't bring myself to get Albino, but I did go ahead and get a couple of other non-red beets.

Here are the beets I ended up getting. I thought five was a good number to start with. I could have gotten a couple more, but like I said, I'm trying to resist my tendency to go overboard with these things.

• Bull's Blood - This was the first beet I ever grew. It did well and I loved the purple foliage.
• Chioggia - I don't know how to pronounce this beet! I've seen people rave about it for so long, I decided to finally try it. It's white and red stripes on the inside, and I think the reason people love it is because it's so pretty, so it looks good in magazine photos. Interestingly, the reviews on Baker Creek's website are not kind, saying this beet is sweet but without much flavor. Maybe color is related to flavor after all! Oh well, I guess I'll see for myself.
• Detroit Dark Red - The standard beet everybody has. Just a regular round red beet with green leaves.
• Golden - If I was going to plant a non-red beet I decided an orange beet would be best. At least I could get some beta carotene out of it. Catalogs always say this variety is good because it doesn't stain everything red, but again, it just seems wrong to me to have a beet that doesn't stain everything red. That's just what beets do! Oh well, I'll give it a chance.
• Lutz Salad Leaf - I got this one because Baker Creek says it stores well, and stays tender even when large. That sounds good to me. I like the idea of growing vegetables that store well. This also seems to be a rarer variety. The other four varieties are carried by many catalogs, but I don't really see Lutz around as much.

Along with the beets, I also ordered a packet of Danver's Half Long carrots. That's a standard carrot around here, so I decided if I was only going to grow one carrot, I'd grow that one, and then get more varieties to compare to it in the future. (I also got a couple of varieties of fava beans, but that's a subject for another post.) Deppe suggests you plant your trials so that plants you can tell apart easily are side-by-side, or you can plant some other crop between them to keep them separate. Great minds think alike since I already got that idea on my own and have been doing both with garlic (alternate hardnecks and softnecks next to each other, with rows of brassicas between each variety), so I decided to separate my beet varieties with carrots.

I got my hoe and made furrows across the bed about 6 inches apart, and then planted two rows of each beet variety with one row of carrots between them. For small seeds like this I just sprinkle the seeds in the furrows, and then water them and let the running water cover the seeds with soil.

I planted the beets in the following order: Golden - Lutz - Chioggia - Detroit - Bull's Blood. Since Lutz and Detroit are both red-rooted and green-leafed, I didn't want them right next to each other in case I couldn't tell them apart. The other beets should be pretty obvious which is which.

Ideally, to have the a better experimental design, I would repeat that sequence of beets further down the bed. Just in case one side of the bed is different than the other. Carol Deppe even suggests alternating the standard with the experimental varieties, so I'd have a row of Detroit, than a row of something else, then another row of Detroit, than another row of something else, and so on. But she also says you should just plant whatever is practical, and even professional scientists often have to pare down their experimental designs for practical reasons. Besides, gardeners eat their own experiments, and how many beets can I eat? I think one double-row of each variety is plenty for now.

And if you didn't already know what a plant nerd I was, you know now, since here I am doing scientific experiments with garden vegetables in my spare time!

The Garlic is Planted

I had such a great garlic harvest in 2010, but then in 2011 it was the drought, and in 2012 it was the move. No garlic, back to buying it from the store. The great thing about gardening, though, is there's always next year. Maybe 2013 will be another year with a garage full of curing garlic. I hope so, because garlic is one of my favorite things to grow and to eat.

This year I ordered planting garlic from Gourmet Garlic Gardens. It's a neat website run by a guy from Texas, with a lot of good info about growing garlic in warm climates. I got the Warm Winter Sampler, which ended up getting me three new varieties of garlic I haven't tried before.

Burgundy is a Creole garlic, which I'm happy about, because Creoles are supposed to do well in warm areas. I tried to grow another Creole, Ajo Rojo, year before last, but the late freeze killed it (before the drought finished off everything else). One interesting thing is I remember Ajo Rojo's bulbs having only one layer of cloves around the central "hardneck" stalk, but Burgundy had two layers. I ended up with a lot more cloves of this than any of my other varieties. Not only did they give me three whole bulbs, but each one had a lot of tall, thin cloves in it. I ended up with 70 cloves in total. Hope it does well!

I've seen a lot of raves about Music, except I'm not sure why I got Music in a warm climate sampler, because I was under the impression that it likes cold climates. It's a Porcelain, which are so-so in warm climates, in general. Hope it does OK.

Another Porcelain, with only a few large cloves per bulb. I'm assuming since it's from Romania, then it should be especially good against vampires, if I get a good crop.

Those are the three new varieties of garlic I got, and then I have a couple that I actually managed to harvest this year that I'm going to try replanting.

I got a small harvest of Elephant garlic, though they were only the size of regular garlic. I went ahead and divided them into cloves and planted them anyway.

The Lorz Italian was the only other garlic from the last harvest I felt was worth replanting. As you can see, most of the bulbs only got to about quarter-sized and never divided into cloves. I was able to divide a couple of them into two. I'll see how they do. I also planted Lorz the year before, and it was killed by the drought like everything else, but it was one of the ones that hung on longer. That leads me to believe it's probably a good variety for me, if it could just get a fair chance. It's an Artichoke, which is a type that usually does well in warm areas. In 2010, the highest yielding garlics I grew were all artichokes (Red Toch, Chet's Italian Red, and Broadleaf Czech), but unfortunately I couldn't obtain planting garlic for any of those varieties this year. Planting garlic sells out so fast!

All five of my garlic varieties are now planted, taking up one whole bed on the end, with kale plants separating them so I can be sure to keep track of what variety is what. I'm going to put a thick mulch of grass clippings over them as soon as I get around to mowing the yard, and I hope they do well!