Over the years, Your Home Kitchen Garden blog has presented some of the topics I wrote about in my book, Yes, You Can! And Freeze and Dry it, Too. Brenda Haas talked with me about it on a special live broadcast of #gardenchat from the Garden Writers Association Symposium. Here Brenda speaks with a representative of Corona Tools.

While my home kitchen garden deteriorated from neglect (and nasty elements), I spent a week at the Garden Writers Association annual symposium. There, I had the great pleasure to meet Brenda Haas whom I’d known for more than a year on Twitter, but had never met in person.

Brenda manages a weekly online conversation called #gardenchat. At 9 PM EST on Mondays, gardening enthusiasts log on to Twitter and post questions and comments, creating dozens of wild, intersecting conversations. I always enjoy #gardenchat, even when the subject is ornamental plants, and it’s a great privilege to know its curator.

The #gardenchat Special

Brenda had scheduled a special #gardenchat broadcast to take place at the Garden Writer’s conference. For this, she did a series of interviews using Ustream.tv, and they went out live while a tweetup of garden enthusiasts took place in the next room. I was one of the interviewees!

The Youtube video embedded in this post is a big chunk of the conversation I had with Brenda at the conference. There’s a lot of background noise because there was a party in the adjacent room, but you can hear our conversation if you like. We talk about several of the topics I wrote about in Yes, You Can!

Technorati Tags: book, canning, preserving, yes you can

The homeowners here make no apologies; they planted a home kitchen garden in their front yard, so live with it. I’m glad I live in a community where food plants don’t offend people’s tastes.

There has been a lot of fuss recently about turning front yards into home kitchen gardens and I’ve been making a lot of it:

• I was happy to report in April about Ivette Soler’s, The Edible Front Yard, a book that encourages its readers to replace their useless lawns with home kitchen gardens that both look good and produce food.
• I posted in early July about the nonsensical government of Oak Park Michigan prosecuting Julie Bass for growing vegetables in her front yard.
• Most recently, I railed during a radio interview about the crime we’ve committed against our planet by planting lawns in every yard, and I explained my plan to replace my lawn with food. (The interview wasn’t yet in the archives when I wrote this post, but it should be there soon.)

During these months, I’ve enjoyed watching the progress of a new garden that appeared this spring in my neighborhood. Yep: it’s in a front yard. We walk past it occasionally on family walks with the dog, and I’ve watched the plants grow from seedlings into young adults. It warms my heart and I hope the homeowners expand their planting bed in the coming years.

Perhaps six weeks after I shot the earlier photo, I captured my neighbor’s home kitchen garden growing strong. Someone is going to have a lot of tomatoes to deal with, and that’s way more awesome than having to deal with a useless lawn.

Technorati Tags: front yard garden, julie bass, oak park, radio interview, vegetable garden

Near the farm stand and looking back toward the main road, you see a home kitchen garden of staggering proportions. A single Amish family plants and maintains this garden to feed itself and to stock the farm stand. I’m sure they spend an enormous amount of time cold-storing, canning, drying, and pickling produce to keep it through Pennsylvania’s cold winters.

My home kitchen garden is off to a horrible start this season on account of endless rain we experienced until mid May. I wasn’t able to plant anything because my garden soil was saturated. Seedlings I’d started indoors became leggy and weak, and I ended up planting lettuce on my deck rather than in my garden. Of course, just when the lettuce leafed-up, the rain stopped and temperatures soared into the 90s (Fahrenheit).

So, with my lettuce bitter and bolting, my brassicas failing, and my tomatoes and chili peppers still getting used to being in a garden rather than in seed-starting planters, strawberry season is upon us.

My Strawberry Panic

I grow enough strawberries for a bowl of cereal. So, I rely on local farmers to grow strawberries for me. As in every year, when the first local strawberries appeared at the farmers’ market, I cooked up strawberry shortcake and we had only that for dinner one night. Then life got in the way.

You might be able to see slight depressions in the soil rows between the plant rows. This furrow reflects the action of horse-powered tilling. A horse can walk these soil rows, pulling tools that turn the soil and prevent weeds from getting established.

For two weeks, I had no time to process produce, and I feared strawberry season was slipping away. In fact, produce vendors at the local flea market had no local strawberries last Sunday, so by Monday I had worked up a lather about having missed out. I went in search of a farmer (with a farm stand) selling strawberries.

Believe it or Don’t

Where would you go if you hoped to find a farm stand with fresh berries? My thought: Amish Road. I’m not kidding (my son thought I was kidding); we live within about five miles of Amish Road. And… Amish Road runs through an area where several Amish families have farms.

The first farm stand I found was one road over from Amish Road, and it had strawberries. But strawberries quickly became a secondary issue for me. The farm stand sat behind a roadside home kitchen garden that would make most kitchen gardeners green with envy. Of course, an Amish family may grow enough produce to eliminate their reliance on grocery stores… and this family grows enough to feed themselves and to sell to passersby.

That house at the far end of the kitchen garden isn’t the Amish family’s house. The white building on the left edge of this photo is where the Amish family lives. The farm stand is across the driveway from the front door of the house—I suspect so the family can work inside and emerge quickly when a car drives up to the stand.

The woman running the farm stand pleasantly told about hassles the rains had caused for them, and graciously gave me permission to photograph the garden plot. I couldn’t do the kitchen garden justice! It was at least 200 yards from one end of the garden to the other, and about 75 yards from side-to-side.

Simple Strategies for a Large Kitchen Garden

My photos reveal that the vegetable-to-weed ratio in an Amish home kitchen garden favors the vegetables. The reasons are simple:

• Rows between vegetables are wide and a horse can easily walk there without stepping on the plants. So, periodically, the farmer hooks a horse up to a cultivator and the horse drags the cultivator along the rows.
• Rows are very long. This lets a horse get up some speed while dragging its cultivator and it doesn’t have to make a whole bunch of quick turns. There’s poetic simplicity in being able to weed a year’s worth of peas in a single pass.
• Mulch keeps the weeds down with almost no effort. In this case, the farmer laid down a long sheet of plastic and poked holes through it for onion sets. The onions have grown up through the holes while the plastic has smothered whatever weeds might have taken root.

While I was shopping for strawberries, the Amish farmer was harvesting hay. It was an awesome load, and I couldn’t resist snapping a photo.

I love this kitchen garden and I admire the energy and intensity its Amish owners must have to plant it and maintain it each year.

Technorati Tags: amish, farm stand, strawberries, weeding

The big squash is a neck pumpkin that grew in my home kitchen garden in 2010. The small squash is a homegrown butternut squash for the sake of comparison. Yes: seeds from that neck pumpkin may reach you by mail in February if you hop over to Your Small Kitchen Garden and sign up according to instructions there.

Your Home Kitchen Garden’s sister blog, Your Small Kitchen Garden is giving away food! Food? OK, it’s giving away seeds from which you can grow food. The promotion started a few days ago and runs until February 13, 2011.

Seeds for Your Home Kitchen Garden

Neck pumpkin, Pennsylvania Dutch Crook Necked Squash, Long-necked squash… get them all through the Small Kitchen Garden giveaway. Actually, these are all names for the same squash. Plants are very resistant to Squash Vine Borer and they produce fruits that resemble butternut squash only generally much larger. In fact, I’ve seen neck pumpkins that weighed more than 20 pounds!

Neck pumpkins are common in central Pennsylvania, but I’ve never seen them in other states. When you buy a neck pumpkin at a Pennsylvania farmers’ market or a farm stand, there’s a pretty good chance the farmer will ask, “Making pie?”

I pick tomatoes before they ripen. This one is probably an Andes Horn paste tomato. Minimally, it’s an heirloom paste tomato that tastes great raw or cooked. It’s mostly meat, nearly seed-free, and in my experience is hardier than some other popular varieties of tomatoes. Get 20 or more seeds to grow some of your own by visiting Your Small Kitchen Garden and signing up according to instructions there.

I’ve used neck pumpkin in pies, and I’ve also served it in all the ways I serve butternut squash. Butternut squash is a tad smoother and it has a richer flavor, but neck pumpkin tastes just fine.

My neck pumpkins grew to about 12 pounds this year, but the seeds I planted came from a 20 pound behemoth. The giveaway includes enough seeds from one of my neck pumpkins for you to plant at least one hill of squash.

Andes Tomatoes from Your Home Kitchen Garden

Also in this year’s giveaway are seeds from my crop of Andes paste tomatoes. I don’t know for sure that my tomatoes are of the Andes variety, but they match descriptions I’ve read and they look identical to photos of Andes. I started with seeds from some tomatoes a neighbor gave me, and the seeds I’m giving away came from my second year’s harvest.

Supposedly the model for the alien pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, blue hubbard squash can look quite gnarly. I’ll dissect this modest blue hubbard over the weekend so seeds have time to dry out before I mail them in February. You can get some of the seeds from this squash to plant in your kitchen garden. Visit Your Small Kitchen Garden Seed Giveaway to learn how.

I love these tomatoes. They are indeterminate and have performed extremely well in my garden… and they taste terrific.

Blue Hubbarb Squash

The blue Hubbard squash is among the most beautiful of squashes. It’s exotic, and you might even feel that a whole fruit is ugly. However, the meat of a blue Hubbard runs from blue/green toward the skin, to yellow toward the center of the fruit. It’s gorgeous.

The meat is also delicious, having a squashier flavor than butternut; I like blue Hubbard for my pumpkin pies and other baked goods, but it would be terrific mashed, grilled, or baked.

Technorati Tags: blue hubbard squash, free seeds, giveaway, neck pumpkin, paste tomato, tomato, winter squash

I don’t mean to mislead in the post’s main text; there are actually more than a dozen blossoms on my Christmas cactus. This shot captured just one blossom aglow with sunlight against the backdrop of my kitchen garden under snow.

It’s Garden Bloggers Bloom Day (read about it on Carol’s blog over at May Dreams Gardens), and my Home Kitchen Garden is under snow. When I limit my definition of “garden” to that plot of land where I plant stuff in the spring, I have nothing to share on this winter Bloom Day. However, I’ve always defined my garden as the entire collection of plants that I tend—wherever they may be.

So, this bloom day, as did Carol on her blog, I present my Christmas Cactus. This plant started as a cutting from my daughter’s cactus back in summer of 2008. So far, the only care it has received is watering. Oh, and I turn the pot from time-to-time. It’s kind of a practical joke. I imagine the plant when sunlight comes through the window the next day: “Hey! I thought I had my leafy stemmy things all pointing in the right direction, and now this?”

I love that you can see the anti-rodent fence that surrounds my vegetable bed in the background of the photo… and snow on the ground in front of it. The snow provides insulation for a thick layer of autumn leaves my kids raked onto the soil. The leaves will break down a little quicker now that there’s snow on them.

While there are no other flower blossoms in my home kitchen garden in January, I snuck in two other photos that were begging for attention. I hope you enjoy them.

All I know about the names of ornamental plants I learned from designing golf courses for the old Mean 18 game back in the 1980s and 90s. Drawing on that extensive education, I can say with authority that I have always liked pampas grass… and this stand of it looks pretty awesome even so far into winter. If it’s not pampas grass, please drop a note to Accolade, the company that produced Mean 18.

The sun sometimes streams through our living room window in late afternoon. One day last week (I know: not a true Bloom Day photo), it lit up this handmade ornament, and I captured a few shots. This one makes me think of flowers in someone else’s garden. Today I stowed the ornaments in the garage and started thinking seriously about spring gardening. Still 2 months before I should start seeds. Sigh.

Technorati Tags: bloom day, blossoms, christmas cactus, flowers, ornaments, pampas grass

Cookie press, jerky shooter… in my mind, it has become a cookie shooter. This very affordable kitchen implement is a caulking gun for cookie dough.

There is nothing to do with gardening in my home kitchen garden these days. It’s all about staying warm and trying to enjoy the holidays. We’re very big on Christmas cookies, and my wife usually bakes more than a thousand cookies of a dozen or so varieties. I also bake some, specifically two types of cookies I loved as a child: Cut out sugar cookies with stained glass windows, and spritz cookies.

This year, I set up my computer on the dining room table and visited with many imaginary friends as I mixed spritz cookie dough, shot cookies onto cookie sheets, and added dusting sugar and other sprinkles as decorations. I got a few questions from imaginary friends, and I offered that I’d upload photos to answer some of them:

Why do they call it a Spritz Cookie?

I don’t know. I like to believe it’s because the inventor of these cookies was Hans Spritz, a young baker in the mountains of Bavaria who, except for these cookies, has been obscured by time. I Googled the name, and one web site, The Cilantropist (a name that I love), provided a lot of personal history and way too much detail… but all it added about the name “spritz” is that it’s short for “Spritzgebackenes” which, with my limited knowledge of German, I translate to mean, Cookies invented by a man named Spritz.

A cookie shooter should come with several extruder plates that restrict oozing dough to specific patterns. The most seasonally-appropriate extruder plate for Christmas cookies creates little evergreen trees on the cookie sheet.

What is a Cookie Press?

While digging around the kitchen for my cookie press, I found a cookie press I couldn’t identify. Then I found the cookie press I’ve had for years, and I realized that the other cookie press was a “jerky shooter” that had come with a food dryer I’d used when I wrote my book, Yes, You Can to be published in the coming spring (the link leads to Amazon where you can order it now for delivery once it’s available).

A cookie press is a caulking gun for cookie dough. Instead of a rubber nozzle that squeezes caulk into a continuous snake or ribbon, a cookie press has interchangeable  extruder plates each intended to produce a unique design. Here’s how it works:

1. Fill the tube of the cookie press with a soft, sticky dough.
2. Put an extruder plate on one end of the tube and a pistol-grip plunger on the other.
3. Pull the trigger on the pistol grip until dough starts to come through the holes in the extruder plate.
4. Stand the cookie press on a cool, ungreased cookie sheet and pull the trigger once and then pause.
5. After a second or two passes, lift the cookie press straight up. Extruded dough should stick to the cookie sheet.
6. Decorate cookies as you wish before baking.

I Dub Thee Cookie Shooter

As a result of mistaking my jerky shooter for a cookie press, I decided that from that day forward, I’ll refer to my cookie press as a cookie shooter. Can’t help it, it just sounds right. You call yours what you like. If you don’t have one, look for them at department and cooking stores. One of my imaginary friends said she bought one last year for $9.99. This is a very low price to pay for a very useful kitchen implement. Amortized over the years I’ve owned my cookie shooter, it has cost about 60 cents per year. By the time they pry my cookie shooter from my cold, dead hand, I expect that number to be about 20 cents per year.

I prepared a video that shows how I work with a cookie shooter. Please have a look to get an idea of how this all works. As well, here’s the recipe I use when I make Hans Spritz’s famous cookies:

Ingredients

1 and ½ cups butter (Not margarine or shortening. Use butter or go home.)

1 cup sugar

1 egg

2 tablespoons milk

1 teaspoon vanilla

½ teaspoon mint extract (the more traditional recipe calls for almond extract)

4 cups sifted flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

Spritz cookies barely change shape when they cook, and they shouldn’t change color. If the darken in the oven, they’re likley to taste burned.

Beat the butter and sugar till they’re smooth. Add the milk, egg, vanilla, and mint extract and continue mixing. Stir the baking soda into the sifted flour and add it gradually to the butter and sugar. Continue mixing while adding and for a bit longer until you have homogenous very soft dough.

Divide the dough into four parts and add two drops of food coloring to each part—usually a different color for each. Use a strong-handled spoon to mush the coloring through the dough until each portion has uniform color.

Load your cookie shooter, shoot dough onto UNGREASED cookie sheets, decorate, if you like, and bake for 8 minutes at 400 degrees Fahrenheit. If the cookies start to darken, you’ve cooked them too long.

Let them cool on the cookie sheets. Then pop them loose with your fingers.

CAUTION: If you make your spritz cookies minty like mine, don’t store them with other types of cookies. All the cookies in a container will pick up the mint flavor after just a day or two of storage. This isn’t a problem if you use almond extract instead of mint extract.

Here’s a video that demonstrates how to shoot Christmas cookies onto a cookie sheet:

Technorati Tags: baking, Christmas, cookie press, cookie shooter, cookies, spritz cookies, video

A pot of diced green tomatoes and apples with raisins and a chopped orange, spices, brown sugar, and vinegar will thicken into mincemeat as it simmers for about three hours.

Frost has finished off my home kitchen garden, and that’s OK. I was really tired of tomatoes after a prolific season, but I was still silly enough to collect the green tomatoes that remained after the plants died.

Those green tomatoes, and about two dozen apples from my tree languished in bowls for weeks until this weekend past when I finally got around to making mincemeat. With Thanksgiving nearly upon us, and expecting a small group of college students hailing from around the world, I thought a traditional mincemeat pie would be in order.

Green Tomato Mincemeat

Actually, traditional mincemeat pie contains meat and suet (fat). I’ve never liked the stuff, but can tolerate it. Several of our guests this year are vegetarians. They won’t eat the turkey or the stuffing I cook in the turkey, and they most definitely would not eat traditional mincemeat.

This mincemeat has simmered for three hours and twenty minutes. While hot, it’s a bit runny, but as it cools it will thicken just like jam and preserves. A pie shell will hold about a quart of mincemeat, so I pack it into one-quart mason jars and cook it for 20 minutes in a boiling water bath. If you’re about to make pie, let the mincemeat cool before filling a raw pie shell with it. Add a full top crust, and bake at 400F degrees until the top crust is golden brown – about 30 to 40 minutes.

Fortunately, green tomato mincemeat actually tastes good. Some recipes suggest that you add suet when you make it, but thank goodness you get an excellent product when you use only tomatoes and other fruits. I made a video that shows how to assemble the mincemeat and to can it. You don’t need to can the mincemeat if you’re going to use it right away; store it in the refrigerator for up to a week, and use about a quart to fill a pie shell.

Mincemeat Worth the Effort

As I said: I’ve never been a fan of mincemeat. I’m a fan of this stuff. I’ve actually filled a small bowl with it and snacked on it happily at my desk. I’m looking forward to having a slice of pie on Thanksgiving. Prepping the fruits for the mincemeat could take about an hour, and cooking takes another three to three-and-a-half hours. Canning, if you heat the water in the canning pot as your mincemeat finishes cooking, adds another 20 to 30 minutes to the cooking time (process filled jars for 20 minutes).

Here are the ingredients you’ll need to make your own green tomato mincemeat:

• 3 ½ lbs green tomatoes
• 3 ½ lbs apples
• ½ lb or more of dried blueberries (Optional. I had some I wanted to use up.)
• 2 lbs raisins
• 1 seedless orange
• 1 tablespoon grated fresh ginger
• 2 tablespoons ground cinnamon
• 2 teaspoons ground cloves
• 2 teaspoons ground nutmeg
• 1 tablespoon salt
• 4 lbs brown sugar
• 1 cup cider vinegar

The video runs just over 6 ½ minutes. If you make up a batch, please let me know how it comes out:

Technorati Tags: apples, green tomatoes, harvest, mincemeat, pie, tomatoes

After harvesting a few pathetic miniature broccoli crowns from my home kitchen garden, I left the plants to continue growing and harvested a few meals’ side shoots. While the harvest was very disappointing, the plants’ growth was impressive. The largest grew more than eight feet tall. Frost found a few florets on that first cold night and glittered in the early morning sun.

My home kitchen garden is shot. We’ve had some frost and we’ve had a few deep freezes. This year, I felt no panic about frost; I’ve been overwhelmed with tomatoes and chili peppers so I was kind of looking forward to a night cold enough to shut it all down.

On the morning after that night, I shot a few photos. They capture what I love about the first frost in my home kitchen garden.

Broccoli flowers attracted pollinators through much of the season. The first frost of autumn looked a bit like an aphid infestation on the stems supporting the blossoms.

The winter squash plants on that first freezing morning of autumn in my home kitchen garden looked as though they were forged from ice.

The leaf bud end of a winter squash vine looked otherworldly with a crystalline growth encasing it.

Hours after the frost melted, the tomato, pepper, bean, and squash leaves in my home kitchen garden were limp and discolored. One day earlier, this section of the planting bed had lain under a dense canopy of winter squash leaves. Only weeds survived the cold night.

Technorati Tags: autumn, broccoli, frost, squash, winter squash

It’s hard not to like a heap of ripe field pumpkins. I’ve used such pumpkins to make pies, but they’re rather bland. I recommend them instead for seasonal decorations, carving jack-o-lanterns, and feeding to pigs.

My home kitchen garden is quite modest in size, yet I squeeze an enormous amount of produce from it. This season, I planted way too many tomato plants in way too little space, and harvested at least 300 pounds of tomatoes (I wish I’d kept a tally… in peak season I harvested 15 pounds of tomatoes per day).

When I grow too much produce, I muse a lot about selling some of it at a farm stand or a farmers’ market. I give a lot away, and I preserve what I think we’ll use in a year. And, despite the hassles of dealing with so much produce, every fall I develop winter squash envy, feeling a great urge to add more varieties of winter squash to next year’s garden.

Winter Squash 2010

This year I planted four types of squash: Butternut, Neck Pumpkin, Blue Hubbard, and Kobocha. Sadly, vine borers decimated the kobocha and the blue hubbard; I got no viable fruit of either type. On the other hand, the butternut and neck pumpkin plants were healthy and prolific.

Delicata has tender skin that many people eat along with the squash’s flesh. From descriptions, this squash sounds very tasty. Each squash is about the size of a quart canning jar, though perhaps a tad thinner.

I gave away one neck pumpkin, and have three on my dining room floor. They weight about 10 pounds apiece. I also have a quickly-diminishing heap of butternut squashes; we’ve eaten it grilled several times, and I stir-fried a wok-full of sweet & sour squash that went nicely alongside beef & broccoli. With Thanksgiving just a month away, I anticipate cooking up some “pumpkin” pies (using squash instead of pumpkin), and I’ve been on a soup-making kick lately, so I expect to be making squash soup in the near future.

Squash Fix for a Kitchen Gardener

Baileys Farm Market, about eight miles south of here, sets out an impressive selection of winter squash each fall. I took my camera and visited this past weekend, hoping to capture some of the magnificence of their squash display.

Carnival squash is colorful and similar in character to acorn squash. I love the textures in this photograph.

I love the colors and shapes of Turban squash. We had at least one in a decorative cornucopia as a centerpiece each Thanksgiving at my parents’ table. We probably ate a few of them when I was a kid, but I don’t recall… and I haven’t tried any since.

Wading through the field pumpkins at Baileys is entertaining in its own right, but even a very experienced kitchen gardener is likely to discover new things. My photos reveal only some of the winter squash treasures I saw this weekend. It was so hard not to bring home five or six samples of squashes I’ve not tasted. There’s a reasonable chance I’ll visit Baileys again before winter and pick up a few squashes to taste and to seed next spring’s home kitchen garden.

My favorite item at Baileys was a rather uninteresting squash: it was more or less round, mostly orange, and warty. The squash itself wouldn’t have held my attention, but according to the sign, the variety was simply, Orange Warty Thing. Apparently, this is a very eatable squash, but people tend to use it more as a decoration than as a food.

I’d never heard of Triplet Pumpkins before I visited Baileys, and a few cursory Google searches turned up no references to this squash. The color is similar to that of Blue Hubbard squash and the texture of the skin is vaguely pumpkin-like. However, Triplets are twisted and lumpy. The orange squash in the foreground is Hubbard.

I’d never seen a Cushaw squash until about two weeks ago when they showed up at the farmers’ market I frequent. I was fascinated by the colors and patterns, and was happy to find a large bin of them at Baileys Farm Market. I had also never heard of banana squash (top-left in the photo) and encountered it for the first time at Baileys.

Technorati Tags: butternut squash, carnival squash, delicata squash, pumpkins, squash, winter squash

Opening once again with basil blossoms! My porch basil started flowering over two months ago. This is a small habit plant intended for container gardening, and I’m done with it. The plants were tiny, the leaves ridiculously small, and I’ve had way more satisfying results planting regular old basil plants in containers. Even a standard-sized plant, stunted, provides a better yield than the container basil did. Still… pretty flowers.

Yikes! Summer blew through my home kitchen garden while I was writing a book about preserving produce. The book is on its way to the printer, and I’m still getting a grip on the blogging I failed to do.

Here it is Garden Bloggers Bloom Day in October, and I’ve been preparing blog posts about what went on in April and May. Despite the book-writing distraction, I did plant a kitchen garden—in fact, I expanded my garden this year. And, while we had our first frost two nights ago, even the basil survived in relatively decent shape; much still grows out there, and there are flowers… though my photos for this bloom day show little different from the past two Bloom Days.

It doesn’t matter! There are flowers in my home kitchen garden, they’re beautiful, and I shot them. Please enjoy.

The broccoli I started from seed indoors last February produced poorly at first, but it eventually put up side shoots and other growth that extended some plants as tall as eight feet. The floret production was too sporadic to keep my interest, so I’ll be trying a new variety of broccoli next season. Flowers from the unharvested side shoots attracted all kinds of interesting insects from July through today (notice the cluster of insects on the left side of the main stalk; I don’t know what they are, but they weren’t particularly energetic on this 48 degree day.)

A small stand of cilantro has just started flowering, so it’s not likely to produce seeds before cold stops it. I’ll be curious to see whether the plants overwinter and try to produce seeds next spring; I’ve had younger plants over winter very well, but I’ve never had mature and growing cilantro plants at the start of winter.

There’s dill in every stage of growth in my home kitchen garden. The stems, leaves, and flowers look exotic to me, but having such fine-textured leaves and flowers, they are challenging to capture well in photographs. Several giant dill heads already dumped thousands of seeds in the garden, so I doubt I’ll need to plant this herb in the spring.

Several overly-optimistic plants simply don’t understand what all the recent cold means. The neck pumpkin plants put on a secondary growth spurt, and there have been nearly a dozen new fruiting flowers. This one almost certainly wasn’t pollinated: no insects flitted about in the cold as I was taking pictures today. It seems pointless for me to pollinate the flower manually as any fruit that sets now will just freeze and die within three weeks.

Many of my pepper plants continue to flower, and examining them reminded me that I need to harvest the ripe peppers before we get serious frost. I’ve delayed because peppers keep very well on the plants; they may be full-sized and ready to eat green in July or August, but they can continue to ripen for months until you’re ready to use them.

Even the tomatoes continue to try to make fruit. I’m guessing, but I believe I’ve handled over 400 pounds of tomatoes this season. At peak, I harvested an average of 15 pounds per day. Even now I’ve 30 pounds of ripe tomatoes awaiting attention on my dining room table, and there may be 15 to 20 pounds still on the vines. Thank goodness today’s flowers have no chance of producing viable fruit before a killing frost shuts them down.

Technorati Tags: basil, bloom day, blossoms, chili peppers, cilantro, flowers, herbs, neck pumpkin, peppers, squash, tomatoes