Garden Notes: October 2022

I love October. In September, we hope for relief from the blazing summer heat, but in October, there is a noticeable drop in temperature. It's the month when we start watching for an early frost, and it's the month when the leaves begin to change color. (For my October fall color photos, click here.) It's the month when all our homestead critters are frisky and full of antics. Kitchen and garden projects have slowed down so there's time to enjoy the changes. Most of my cooking is done in the house now, rather than my back porch summer kitchen. October is when we light our first woodstove fire of the season and the first of the canned summer goodness is opened and consumed. The only downside to October, is that it's typically a dry month for us.

Rainfall 

• 12th: 0.05"
• 26th: 0.125"
• 31st: 1.375"
• Total: 1.55 inches

Temperature

• nighttime range: 31-63°F (-0.5-17°C)
• daytime range: 58-80°F (14-27°C)

First Frost

We had scattered frost on the morning of the 18th, and a blanketing frost on the 19th. So the summer garden is officially done. 

Marigolds sporting our first frost.

Planting & Growing

The fall garden is planted, but it's been dry, so it's not growing well. I've been watering some of my seedlings, but chickens got into the garden and scratched up quite a few beds. Anything that survived all that may have a chance! How long it lasts will depend on how cold or mild it is this winter.

Harvesting

Early October yields (before the frost) were meal size pickings.

Sauteed okra, onions, and cherry tomatoes

Orange Glo watermelon

No waste with watermelon. Chickens and goats love the rind.

Kale, collards, and daikon leaves

Greens steamed in butter with some grated carrot

Oregano, rosemary, and thyme (in my olive oil kept feta cheese).

Asian persimmons on the tree

The variety is Ichi-Ki-Kei-Jiro. I chose it because it said to be heat and drought tolerant (which it has been!) It's a fuyu type, which are ready to eat when they turn orange (unlike the kind that are astringent until after frost). This is the first real harvest we've gotten from it. It's about time too, since I planted it in 2015!

Scooping out the gel and removing the seeds.

Persimmon ready for ???

Persimmon pancakes

Freezing the extra in muffin pans.

When frost became imminent, we harvested everything that might suffer damage.

Last of the peppers. These are Giant Marconi.

Last of the green slicing tomatoes

Hugelkultur sweet potato squash

The last of the cushaws.

The mature squash have a home in the pantry. They are like pumpkins in terms of preparation and flavor. The green ones taste like summer squash, and can be prepared the same way.

A tender green cushaw seasoned and sauteed in butter.

But green winter squash don't keep well. The littlest ones still have tender seeds, so they were sliced, blanched, and frozen. The larger green squash, like this one,

Immature (green) cushaw

have large, but immature seeds that are tough.The skin is still tender, so the seeds were scooped out and the rest of the squash was cubed and canned.

Canned "green" winter squash. Eat like summer squash.

I planted three types of sweet potatoes. These are the Georgia Jets.

Taste testing the sweet potatoes required a sweet potato pie.

Overwintering

I'm trying something new this year. I found a YouTube video on how to overwinter pepper plants (https://youtu.be/x09X87UCZTI). I'm giving it a try.

Pepper plant pruned, potted, and ready to come in.

I only had two pepper plants this year, both purchased as 4-inch potted plants. This particular plant looked quite poorly most of the summer, and I kept thinking it was going to die. But the healthier looking plant died instead, and this one really perked up after a good rain and cooler temperatures. It was producing well until first frost threatened. So, it became my overwintering experiment. It would be great to get an early start on our peppers!

Challenges

The problems this time of year aren't so much bugs or disease, but lack of rain and critters. That includes birds (including naughty chickens), chipmunks, skunks, or groundhogs. In fact, we found a young groundhog had set up it's winter home in one of the garden beds! Dan found the hole, and I came face to face with the groundhog chowing down on a chicory plant. We didn't want it demolishing the garden and we hate to waste anything, so the groundhog became . . . 

Garden Groundhog Soup

Now you know why I was looking for a recipe for groundhog. My small harvest amounts were perfect for making this soup. I added peeled tomatoes, onion, green beans, yam berries, cowpeas, kale, tatume summer squash, and previously canned bone broth. Our favorite winter lunch is soup, so here are four lunches, ready to heat and eat.

Okay, I think that's it. At the beginning of the month, I didn't expect this to be a very long post. But first frost changed that! 

How about you? Is your garden just ending, or just starting?

Garden Notes: October 2022 © October 2022

by Leigh at http://www.5acresandadream.com

Summer Days in the Garden

When the daytime highs reach the mid-nineties, (mid-thirties C), something in me switches to pick-and-preserve mode. It just seems like that's what I ought to be doing, and it is!

We're enjoying fresh steamed beans & I'm canning
canning as many as I can. These are Tendergreens.

Summer squash is doing well. I only have about 3 or 4
plants because we all know how prolific it can be!

I've tried a number of varieties over the years, but the standard
yellows seem to do best. Love these sauteed with onion & basil.

I planted cushaw for winter squash where I planted clover as a
living mulch. Cushaw has always done well for me, although
the clover is beginning to wilt from the hot dry weather.

I have two varieties of tomatoes, Homestead and
a  Roma type. The Romas are struggling with
anthracnose, unfortunately, which seems to be
a recurring problem for me with paste types.

I have one row of sweet potatoes that seem happy. For the past couple
years, however, I've grown my own slips and never gotten very many.
I'm not sure why, but would honestly love about 4 - 6 times as many.

Okra is a favorite and doing well. We eat it
oven fried and it freezes without blanching.

Lots of cucumbers too! We're eating plenty fresh
and I'm restocking my shelves with lots of pickles.

My several rows of popcorn are doing well. 

Field corn. Half of the patch has done well, the other
half has no ears! I suspect nitrogen deficiency. I
plan to cut those plants back and dry for stover.

Amaranth has only done so-so. This is a
feed crop for me so the more the better.

No shows for me this year have been Swiss chard, which I planted twice! No joy with watermelons either. I had half a dozen indoor starts that didn't make it, and neither did the seeds I planted directly in the ground to replace them.

In the fruits and nuts department, we had no peaches or almonds this year, even though there were plenty of blossoms! No strawberries either, because I lost all my plants in last summer's horrific heat and drought. The apple harvest will be okay, although less abundant than last year.

This Gala is still a little green but has good flavor.

Pear trees have produced only a few, so I'm not expecting much of a harvest there. A first this year will be my Japanese persimmon!

First time for fruiting this year, four of them!

I planted it in my first hedgerow two years ago and confess I haven't given it a lot of nurturing. It's had to struggle on it's own but it's survived and beginning to produce! We have a wild persimmon too, but it's so tall that the only way to get fruit is the ones that fall to the ground. Critters both tame and wild keep the area pretty well cleaned up, however, so there's never any left for us. Even so, those fruits are small compared to the Japanese variety!

Another first will be crabapples.

I'm thinking pectin and jelly!

This is the first year I've gotten more than only 5 or 6 of them!

Blueberries and figs are my old faithfuls.

Even though it's been cooler this summer and with more
rain, the blueberries haven't produced as well as last year.

Figs are usually ready for harvest in August.

So there's my mid-summer garden report. How about you?

Summer Days in the Garden © July 2017 

by Leigh  at http://www.5acresandadream.com/

Fall Foraging

Beautiful autumn weather seems to be meant for foraging.

Good pecans this year

I've gathered quite a few pecans, and so far they're all good ones.

Shelling pecans for Thanksgiving's sweet potato casserole

We have a number of pecan and hickory trees, and interestingly, they all produce different size nuts. The squirrels love pecans too, so there is competition for these.

Only a few persimmons left on the upper branches

There is competition for persimmons too, because deer and possums love these, probably other critters too. Our persimmon tree is tall, so the fruits look like dots on the branches. I can only collect the ones that fall to the ground. I can see the top of the tree from where I sit at the milking stand. It is visible out the door and above the treetops. I managed to get some last year, but this year, there isn't much left.

We are having a bumper crop of acorns!

Acorns

These are from white oaks. In some places, the ground is completely covered with them. I collect them to feed to my goats when the winter forage pickings get slim. They aren't especially rich in protein, but they do add roughage, carbohydrates, and fats to their winter diet, and they love them. We could eat them as well, though I haven't tried that yet. (For more information on processing acorns, read Jackie Clay's article, "Harvesting The Wild: Acorns").

I've also managed to collect a few wild rose hips.

Wild rose hips

I showed you my rugosa rose hips in my "Last of the Summer Harvest" post. These are teeny in comparison; all seed and no fruit. I tried making jelly of these, but it turned out pretty badly. That's one of the reasons I planted the rugosas. Plus those hips are easier to collect.

The goats love the wild ones though, both leaves and hips. We used to have tons of wild rose bushes before we got goats. Most of our bushes were cut back when we added fencing. What remains the goats eat. Only a few are out of their reach and these are from those bushes. I gather what hips I can, to dry and feed to them during winter for vitamin C.

Some things, like the acorns especially, may seem a tedious thing to gather. But a pocketful here, and a pocketful there, make for a pleasant way to take a break from other chores, or to spend a few minutes outside when I'm doing indoor projects. It reminds me to be thankful too, for all the little things. Acorns included.

Fall Foraging © November 2012 

by Leigh at http://www.5acresandadream.com/

Persimmons

About a year ago or so, our next door neighbor told us there was a persimmon tree in our woods. When we first went looking for it, it was surrounded by brush, shrubs, and smaller trees. We didn't do anything about it that year, but this year, I cleared out around it. Starting at the end of October, I was rewarded with a few persimmon fruits.

Ours is a native persimmon tree, Diospyros virginiana, commonly known as American persimmon. Smaller and seedier than the commercially grown Japanese persimmon, Diospyros kaki, they are nonetheless considered "best" by Joy of Cooking authors, Irma Rombauer and Marion Becker. So they say in their persimmon pudding recipe anyway. Hopefully that makes up for the extra work it takes to extract the pulp from them.

From the looks of things on the ground around the tree, persimmons are a great favorite of our local wildlife. Even without the competition, my chances of getting very many seemed slim, considering that it's a mature tree and all the persimmons are waaaaaay up there.

Dan brought out the extension ladder and managed to shake a few more out of the tree. I ran these through my Foley food mill, but much of the pulp clung to the seeds so that I didn't feel I was getting much. I froze what I could, and added a little more every couple of days. I learned to go persimmon gathering in the late afternoon, as there would be nothing but discarded seeds if I went in the morning.

According to Slow Food USA, the anglicized word “Persimmon” is derived from an Algonquin word which means "dried fruit". The seeds are sometimes roasted to make a beverage similar to coffee. Here in Appalachia, the dried seeds are said to be brewed to make beer, though I've never heard of anybody doing that. The pulp can be used a lot of ways, including breads, cakes, cookies, pies, puddings, muffins, ice cream, sherbets, butters, jams, jellies, and fruit leather. Persimmon pulp can be dehydrated, canned or frozen.

By the end of November I had nearly 4 cups of pulp the freezer. At the top of my list is a persimmon pie! More on that soon.

Persimmons © December 2011 by Leigh
at http://www.5acresandadream.com/