Happy Halloween!

Full Blood Moon

I love October. It's when things finally cool off around here. The full moon of October is called the Blood Moon. If I remember correctly, that has to do with the slaughtering of livestock that occurred around this time of year to store meat and thin the herd before winter.

But that was in Europe. Here in Texas, things are a little different.

Fall is a time for planting here, but this time around I'm planting cold weather crops that will grow all winter. Here I've got my Brassicaceae, that is, bok choy, cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower, started in pots. That family of plants is actually much better grown in winter. The cold weather gives them a sweeter flavor, and there aren't a lot of bugs.

Another plant family that's better in winter is the Alliaceae. Here are my onions. If you recall, my last batch of onions didn't do so well, but I'm giving them another try. Right now they look really puny.

I've also got leeks. These are from some bulbs I got from my CSA farmer. Leeks grow little bulbs off to the side, and at first I kept them to replant, but then decided not to bother and threw them in the compost pile. When they started growing out of the compost pile, I decided to give them a chance and transplanted them to the garden. I put them in a trench, and will pile dirt up around them as they grow to make the white part (which is the best part of a leek) longer.

My garlic has started coming up! This is one of my softneck varieties. They usually show up before the hardnecks. I also have some shallots and potato onions planted, but they haven't shown up above ground yet.

I just planted my little lettuce plants. This is a lettuce mix that has both red and green varieties. Lettuce gets very bitter in warm weather but does great in winter.

I still have some plants left over from the summer, like my okra. This stuff just won't stop until frost kills it.

A surprise underneath my okra are some watermelons! I thought they were dead, but they grew back and now have two softball-sized fruits growing. I wonder if they'll have time to ripen before frost.

These are my fall eggplants. My spring eggplants didn't make it partially because of a late cold snap, and partially because the seeds I got had very low germination. In summer I went ahead and planted all the rest of the eggplant seeds to see if any would grow, and got these plants. They might have time to grow some fruits before frost, but it's going to cut it close.

The jalapenos are going nuts! All my plants are covered with fruit. I might have enough to make a batch of jalapeno jelly, which I found is much better than concord grape jelly on a peanut butter sandwich.

Two varieties of sweet potatoes, Vardaman and Beauregarde, are flowering. I tried to find you a nice fresh flower, but the best I could do was an old one from yesterday and some buds. You can see why sweet potatoes are close relatives of Morning Glories. The flowers look exactly the same. I was a little surprised because sweet potatoes, like garlic, have mostly given up sex, but sometimes you get a variety that still likes to flower.

What really says autumn harvest to me is winter squash. I've got lots of cushaws growing now, but I'm having trouble telling when they're ripe. Not a lot of people grow cushaws, so Google isn't helping much. You harvest pumpkins when they turn from green to orange, but I think these stay white with green stripes. Pictured above is my biggest specimen. I plan on using them in "pumpkin" recipes, since pumpkins are just winter squashes with that certain look (round, ribbed, and orange). Botanically and culinarily there's no difference between a pumpkin and a winter squash, so they're interchangeable in recipes.

One of my vines is making fruits that have no necks. Not sure what the deal is with that. Genetic diversity, I guess. They'd make some interesting looking jack-o-lanterns, but none of them are very big yet.

Looking at all these fruits, and with Halloween coming up soon and me wanting to cook up some pumpkin (well, winter squash) containing goodies, I finally decided to "sacrifice" this guy here and see if it's ripe.

Here it is now with the jack-o-lantern pumpkin from the store and my Halloween cat for scale. Now that I cut it's umbilical cord, I'm afraid it might not be ripe enough, but I've got plenty more squashes to experiment on. The worst that will happen is this squash will be a bit paler and less flavorful than a fully ripened specimen. I'm going to let it "cure" for a few days before cutting it open. In the meantime, it is looking quite decorative if I do say so myself.

Still Harvesting Okra

October has been very dry so far. It hasn't rained since late September. We've had sunny, clear days with very low humidity, which means it gets chilly at night. Feels nice to me, but I think it's slowed down the growth of my plants. I think most plants prefer things warm and wet, not cool and dry (but cool and dry is still better than hot and dry).

But the okra keeps going! This past weekend I tried making some pickled okra, but I don't think it went too well. It's hard to pick okra at just the right stage. The pods grow very quickly, and in order to have good pickled okra, they have to be pretty small. At least they need to not be too long to fit in the jars.

I ended up with enough okra to loosely fill three jars (you can see they were loosely filled by how much they floated up when the liquid was added). I cheated a little with some of them, trimming off the pointy tips, though I think okra pods are supposed to be pickled whole. I'm afraid slicing into them will allow slime to escape into the pickle brine and cause weirdness somehow. I guess the only way to know for sure is to taste them after they've sat a bit.

Another weird thing is that I'm growing a red variety of okra (Bowling Red from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds), and the red seems to have "bled" out into the pickle brine, leaving the pods green. I didn't expect them to keep their vibrant, pretty color through the pickling process (most red and purple vegetables, like purple green beans for example, turn green or at least fade when cooked), but I wasn't expecting pink pickle juice.

However, most of my okra was much too long to fit in the jars at all. I guess I could have put them in quart jars instead of pints, but the other reason you want small pods is because they're the most tender. The only cooking these pods got was the ten minutes they spent getting sealed. I ended up with a lot more pods that were too big for pickling but still tender enough to cook, so I sliced and froze them.

I just spread the sliced okra out on parchment on a cookie sheet and put them in the freezer. I put them into containers after they were frozen. This is supposed to keep them from sticking together, but I bet some of them will stick together anyway. I didn't blanch them or anything like that since I thought that was just asking for slime. It's not that I don't like okra slime, but the slime still must be managed, especially if you're messing with your okra a lot (forcing them to go through traumas like slicing and freezing and pickling).

I did get some pods that were too far gone even for this. It's amazing how an okra pod can go from tiny to woody so fast. It also seems to vary with individual pods, so I can't really say, "they're good when under X inches" or something like that. I've sliced into some long ones that seemed fine, and others that were shorter and were hard when I tried to slice them (those go into the compost... I found out from personal experience that hardened okra doesn't get soft again with cooking). Basically, if the knife goes through with no resistance, it's good. If the pod goes "CRUNCH" when the knife comes down, and I have to use any effort to cut through, it's no good anymore. I'm not sure what makes some pods harden before others. It probably has to do with environmental conditions when the pod was growing. Since it's so dry out there, I wouldn't be surprised if the plants are stressed, and the pods are getting tough quicker than normal.

Another frustrating thing about okra is that it gets a few pods at a time. In order to save up enough for a full canning batch, I'd have to be out there picking small okra pods every day for a long time, maybe long enough that the first few I picked are moldy before I have enough (okra doesn't have a long fridge life after picking). One solution is to have more plants, so I have more pods at any one time, but that also means more okra overall. Maybe there's some other trick I can figure out.

My plants are still producing, but I think I'm done with pickling okra for this year. I'll see how my three experimental jars do first. Maybe next year I should try a different variety for canning, something that has shorter, green pods. As for the rest of this year's harvest, I might try drying some and see how those turn out. I wonder how well dehydrated okra will rehydrate for use in gumbo or curry.

UPDATE: These okra pickles didn't turn out good. Slicing the ends off made a lot of slime ooze out into the pickling liquid. It looks like it's completely necessary to use okra that's short enough to fit in the jars whole.

The Full Harvest Moon and Autumn Equinox

This week we had a rare thing happen. The Harvest Moon fell on the same night as the Autumn Equinox, making things super harvesty! This doesn't happen very often, so it's nice for it to happen during the first full year of this garden. However, Texas being how it is, there's not a lot of actual harvesting going on now. It's still a time of transition, but the summer crops are mostly gone, and I'm planting winter crops now.

I've been working on getting my winter greens started. Winter is the best time to grow things like broccoli, cabbage, kale, collards, lettuce, arugula, and other green leafy vegetables. They can handle our light freezes just fine, and are much sweeter when grown in cold weather. The problem is starting them while it's still hot outside. I'm having trouble with them either drying out or rotting. Tiny little seedlings are very sensitive. I've had to start over with most of my Brassicas because the first batch didn't make it. I've always had an easy time growing collards and kale, but this year I'm trying to branch out into broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage.

I'm still waiting for my fall potatoes to show up. Right now all that seems to be growing in the potato beds are weeds. I hope they didn't bake down there in August. I recall my spring potatoes took a long time to sprout too, so that I ended up digging some up to check on them. Except that was when temperatures were cold, and plants grow more slowly in the cold.

The surviving summer crops are really enjoying all this rain we've been getting. The sweet potatoes are going nuts, at least above ground. Vines are rambling all over the place. All the weeds are going nuts too, and I've just about given up on trying to control them, but the veggie plants don't seem to care. You're supposed to let sweet potatoes grow all season, all the way up until right before the first frost, and then dig them up. The idea is to give them as much time as possible to grow big roots, but you can't let them freeze. That damages them. That means the day the weatherman says, "It looks like we're in for our first freeze tonight!" I'll be out there with my garden fork in a sweet potato digging frenzy. I hope I get a lot of nice big fat ones.

As usual, I'm having trouble keeping up with the okra, keeping the pods picked before they get too big and tough. They grow very fast, especially now that they've gotten some rain. It's getting hard to reach the ones at the top.

The jalapenos are happy too, and might give me another crop before frost. I already had one good harvest that I let ripen so I could save the seeds and make chipotles at the same time. Maybe I should consider making some jalapeno jelly if I get another good batch. That stuff, strangely enough, makes a really good peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

My fall tomatoes didn't make it, but I still have some eggplant seedlings in pots I need to set out. Hopefully it's not too late to get a quick crop of Thai green eggplants in before frost. I really should have planted them sooner, but it's been too hot and humid for me to want to be out there digging. Perhaps it's just as well, since my tomatoes fried in the heat when I tried planting them out. The eggplants might actually have a better chance now that it's cooler and wetter.

Now, the one crop that really says Autumn to me, and probably to most Americans, is winter squash. Pumpkins, butternuts, sweet dumplings, hubbards, acorns, whatever the variety, they're the vegetable emblems of Halloween and Thanksgiving. After being ravaged by Squash Vine Borers all year, I'm happy to see that the one variety of squash I have left, the Chihuahuan Landrace Cushaws, are bouncing back! I really hope the SVB's are gone now. I haven't seen one in a while. The squash vines have been running rampant with this tropical storm rain, and now they're setting a new batch of fruit!

Look at them go! I'm having trouble keeping them from taking over the whole garden. I keep try to redirect the vines back away from where I have other things planted so they won't smother them.

I also have to keep pulling them back from going through the fence into my neighbor's yard and smothering her dogs!

It's hard to tell how many fruits are growing now. I counted three just standing in one spot, but I'm sure there are lots more hidden in that jungle of huge squash leaves. I still haven't gotten one single ripe cushaw squash this year. Squash Vine Borers chewed into most of them, causing them to rot and be aborted by the plant. The last one split when we had a heavy rain, causing it to absorb water too quickly. But with how fast these squashes are growing now, I'm optimistic that I'll get a good crop in. It would be really neat to be able to make some "pumpkin" pies and "pumpkin" bread with these babies. It would be very traditional, actually. Cushaws grow much better in the south than your traditional orange ribbed pumpkins, and were considered to be THE pie squash in the south. That is, if you were going to make your Thanksgiving pie out of squash instead of sweet potatoes. Or pecans, for that matter. And that reminds me, while I don't have any pecan trees in my yard, there are some areas of town that have some mature pecan trees which are starting to get some nice, big, fat pecans on them. When they ripen, they fall off the tree and end up rolling all over the place. No one seems to mind when I start picking them up off sidewalks and parking lots.

Mmmm, pie.

Garlic Planting

Well, that cool-down was short lived! It soon went right back to being in the mid to high 90's, and the rain caused very high humidity making it even more miserable out there. The mosquitoes are also terrible. My neighbors all around me have a lot of junk in their yards that undoubtedly collects rain water and provides excellent mosquito breeding habitat. I haven't felt like doing much gardening lately.

I did manage to get started planting next year's garlic before things really heated up. I did it a bit early because the weather was so nice. I read that the best garlic planting time is on or just after the Autumn Equinox. I jumped the gun a little planting some of them in early September, but didn't manage to plant everything. For that I'll probably wait until we get another cold front, because I just don't feel motivated enough to endure the heat, humidity, and mosquitoes out there. Last year I planted my garlic in October, and most of them turned out OK, so I guess I still have plenty of time.

This year I've got some new varieties to try, thanks to a GardenWeb trade with a very generous trade partner. He sent me five more varieties of heirloom garlic (which is a lot more than what I actually asked for). Top row pictured is Lorz Italian, Ajo Rojo, and Inchelium Red. The bottom row is two bulbs each of Sonoran and Shilla.

Sadly, when I was looking over my "seed garlic" saved from my last harvest, Bogatyr was all rotted. I pulled out the bulbs I set aside for planting, and they squished in my hand. I immediately dug out the Bogatyr I had set aside for eating, stored in a mesh onion bag in a kitchen cabinet, and it was also all squishy. I know that hardnecks in general don't store as long as softnecks, but they have to at least store until replanting time, right? What a shame!

Next I checked out the garlics that didn't do that well for me the last time around: Chrysalis Purple, Pskem River, and Persian Star.

If you'll remember from my garlic harvest post, Persian Star yielded 15 small bulbs that at the time I didn't feel were worth eating, and suspected had not even divided since they were so small. Well, I was wrong. Once I started unwrapping the bulbs, I found undersized, but still fully formed cloves. I ended up cracking open all 15 bulbs just to make sure, and then picking out 40 of the biggest cloves for replanting. The rest of the cloves went into the food dehydrator since I thought now that they've been unwrapped they won't keep well. Also I didn't want them to rot like their fellow Purple Stripe, Bogatyr. I have high hopes that Persian Star will adjust to my growing conditions and I'll get descent-sized bulbs next year. It's such a beautiful variety that I really don't want to give up on it.

I can't complain about Pskem River too much either. I only got three bulbs, but that's because one of the bulbs I received from SSE was rotten and this variety doesn't have a lot of cloves per bulb. I went ahead and replanted all of them. Shown is the unwrapped largest bulb, which was a good size. The other two were undersized but had still matured and divided into cloves, similar to Persian Star.

The worst garlic, Chrysalis Purple, the one I finally pulled in July because I was just tired of waiting, didn't get a chance to divide. I unwrapped all my bulbs and all of them were solid like this one. I'm really not sure if they're worth replanting. What happens when the garlic life cycle is interrupted? I set these aside and haven't replanted them yet. I'm saving my planting room for more promising varieties, and might just stick CP in where I have some spare space after everyone else is in the ground.

In addition to planting Persian Star and Pskem River right away, I also planted some of my new varieties. Sonoran and Shilla are both reputed to not store for a long time, so I decided to plant them early as well. I noticed my Georgian Fire is starting to get a bit of green to them, meaning they're about to sprout. I went ahead and planted my GF planting stock and am trying to eat up the rest before my other eating garlic.

The rest of my garlic varieties don't seem to have any sign of rotting or sprouting yet, so I didn't feel any urgency to plant any of them. I had some extra room left in the bed I had prepared, so I went with Lorz Italian since I only have one bulb of that.

I also couldn't resist unwrapping Ajo Rojo, a Creole variety, which I heard are some of the most beautiful garlics. Peeling away the white outer wrapper revealed a perfect single ring of cloves in beautiful rose-colored wrappers. I'm very grateful to my swapping partner for sending me such cool garlic varieties! Creole garlic is supposed to keep well, so I'm in no hurry to plant these, but I guess since it's unwrapped now I should plant it next.

The problem is that to plant any more garlic, I'll have to till up some more dirt. Not looking forward to doing that in the mosquito-infested sauna out there. You saw what I had to go through to plant my potatoes! Ugh. But with such a homogeneous forecast for the next 7 days, with no sign of any relief from the heat and humidity, maybe I'll just have to hunker down and get it done.

A Cold Front and Pictures of my Toads

I am sitting here with the air conditioner off and the windows open. It is wonderful!

Friday we had a significant cold front, after the driest August in decades. It brought lots of rain and cooler temperatures. For the next seven days at least we are forecast to have highs "only" in the upper 80s to low 90s, and lows in the high 60s. That's ten degrees cooler than it was for most of August.

My toads are probably very happy, since I haven't seen them since the rainstorm on Friday. I've got two now, and on hot days they got into the habit of burying themselves in the soil of the container plants I have on my back porch. I think it's because that soil was being kept moist while the soil in the yard was bone dry. Here we have a picture of the flat of broccoli I planted that the toads decided was a nice place to hang out. On the left of this picture is the big fat one I showed you before. On the right is a smaller one that's started hanging out with the big fat one. I don't know much about toad social behavior. Do toads have friends? How territorial are they? Do toads pair up in couples? I mean, is this a boy toad and a girl toad that want to make baby toads? That would be nice.

Can you spot the toad in this picture? This is why when I move my plants around, sometimes I am startled by toads suddently jumping out at me. They're almost invisible when they bury themselves in the soil with only the tops of their heads sticking out.

I think the toads must have gone back out in the yard since I haven't seen them in my plants since the rainstorm. The yard is nice and muddy now for them. I think in the future, when it gets hot and dry again, I might put out a pan of wet soil just for them. Now I know who's been uprooting some of my potted plants. This plant was ok, but I've found smaller plants before that looked like they had been squashed or dug up, like some animal had been rooting around in the pot. Mystery solved!

Thai Green Curry

I almost didn't manage to snap a picture of this before it was all eaten! But it just seems like a food blog post is incomplete without a picture.

I used up a zucchini I had from the Farmer's Market to make a batch of Thai Green Curry. I based it off of this recipe from Tigers and Strawberries. Apparently I have trouble making recipes exactly to the letter, so I'm not sure if my version counts as the same recipe or not. Either way, I give Barbara the credit for teaching me how to make Thai curries through her blog.

It's really quite easy to make once you have the green curry paste. You can buy Thai curry pastes in jars, but I made a big batch of my own using Barbara's recipe when I had a lot of basil, cilantro, scallions, jalapenos, and lemongrass in my CSA bag (I mean, really, with these ingredients, it's like Fate is just begging you to make Thai curry). I made only a few adjustments to the original recipe. I left out the green Thai chiles since I didn't have any and used more jalapeno instead (which probably made the curry paste less hot, but that's ok). The only galangal I could find was dried galangal powder from Penzey's, so I used that. I also didn't have any shallots, so I used onion instead.

I also don't have a fancy Sumeet grinder, so I made it in my food processor. Barbara seems to insist that the curry paste must be perfectly smooth, but I admit that I skipped smoothing it out in a mortar and pestle and just ground the dry spices in my spice grinder (really a coffee grinder that's been designated as a spice grinder), ground the wet stuff in my food processor, mixed it all together, and left it like that. It ended up looking a bit like pesto. I figure it still tastes the same, right?

The last time I made Thai green curry paste, I made a triple batch and froze it. That was months ago. I honestly don't remember when I made it. (I also made an extra big batch of Thai Red Curry Paste and did the same thing.) I was afraid that by now it wouldn't be good anymore since its been living in the freezer so long.

Well, it turned out just fine, so if making your own curry paste sounds daunting, set aside an afternoon to make a big batch and freeze it. Then you'll have curry paste for months.

Once you have the curry paste, whether homemade or store bought, making the actual curry is very easy. I scaled down Barbara's recipe a little since it was just me and Daniel, and used one can of Goya brand coconut milk. I skimmed off the cream and put it in the pan, and then added two tablespoons of thawed curry paste. After that was bubbling a bit and making the house smell wonderful, I added the rest of the coconut milk and two lime leaves I plucked off my lime tree (it's not a Kaffir lime, but a Key lime, so I have no idea if that's "allowed", but it hasn't killed me yet), about a tablespoon of honey, and a few good squirts of fish sauce. Then I simmered that for 15 minutes to let it thicken while I cooked up some Jasmine rice (Jasmine rice has a wonderful sweet flavor that I was surprised boring old rice could have at all).

Basically, the Thai curry making procedure is to make a sauce of coconut milk and curry paste, and then throw in whatever other stuff you want in your curry. You then cook that stuff in the sauce until it's done, adjust to taste with sugar, fish sauce, and lime juice. At the end you can garnish with cilantro, basil, and mint, and there you have it. It's really easy and is that fun sort of "add a dash of this, taste, add a sprinkle of that, taste," kind of cooking. If your curry paste is already made, which is the hardest part of the recipe, then the rest makes a fine weekday dinner to just throw together. Not only that, but it will make your house smell WONDERFUL. Daniel caught me inhaling the rich, coconut-lime-spicy-herbal perfume and said, "are you getting high off curry?" Maybe I was.

What "other stuff" do you put in green curry? Well, Barbara put in chicken breast, eggplant, zucchini, mushrooms, onion, green beans, and pea pods. Any of those are great, but my curries don't usually have that many ingredients because I don't usually have that many different vegetables on hand. It really depends on what I end up with from the garden, CSA, or Farmer's Market. This time I made it with one zucchini, four mushrooms, half an onion, and a chicken breast (again, this is cooking for just two people, so I scaled it down compared to Barbara's version). I've used eggplant, pea pods, and green beans before, and they were good too. I bet cauliflower or broccoli would be good as well.

You can also change up your protein. In addition to chicken, I've made green curry before with shrimp, tofu, and salmon. This time around I used one chicken breast that I cut off the chicken myself. I think from now on I'm going to be cutting up my own chickens, especially since I buy free-range chickens, and free range boneless skinless chicken breasts cost about $11 a pound. A whole chicken, on the other hand, costs around $3.50 - $4 a pound.

It really makes me re-think the humble chicken breast seeing how little breast meat my whole chickens yield. Chicken breast is considered to be a pretty cheap source of protein at the grocery store, but after cutting up this chicken, those two little boneless, skinless chicken breast halves looked so small and delicate compared to the rest of the chicken, especially the meaty legs. I wonder if industrial chickens are like industrial turkeys - bred to have unnaturally huge breasts to the point the birds can hardly walk. I suppose it would also be reasonable to believe that chicken legs off free range birds, which actually got a chance to run around and use their legs, would be meatier in comparison.

I suppose the solution would be for me to learn how to de-bone chicken thighs! I actually prefer chicken thighs to breast meat for Chinese stir-frys, because I think they take the high heat better. In the meantime, the chicken breast now seems like a luxury cut of meat to me, like the tenderloin of pork or beef, and I think the wonderful, perfumed sauce of Thai green curry is the perfect vehicle for such a delicate meat. All you do is simmer it gently in the curry sauce for a few minutes until it is just cooked, and has absorbed all that wonderful flavor.

Thai Green Curry seems exotic and gourmet while at the same time being surprisingly quick and easy to make if you already have the curry paste. I'm glad I have that good supply of Thai curry paste in the freezer. I still haven't used up all my green curry paste, and I also have that red curry paste. Red Curry is made the same basic way as Green Curry, though of course it tastes different because of the different ingredients in the curry paste, and I suppose there are some vegetables and meats that taste better in one than in the other. Barbara put carrots and sweet potatoes in her red curry, which I did too when I made it, using chicken as the meat again, though I would like to try it with a red meat like beef or pork. I'm not sure why matching colors works so well with cooking, since you'd think that color should have nothing to do with flavor, but it often does. Like have you ever noticed how red wine goes with food and white wine goes with white food? So Thai curries might be the same way.