Autumn Frost Squash: What I Will Grow Next Year

I have written about this before, but butternut squash is the go-to squash for "pumpkin" pie (and bread).  The canned "pumpkin" you purchase in the grocery is butternut.  I grow it every year, until this season, when the few seeds I had failed (maybe they got too old?).  But, luckily I had been seduced by the glossy photos on a seed house website and ordered Autumn Frost squash.  This squash is a pretty, buff colored squash, more orange than butternut, and just as tasty (some have green markings).  Though it is smaller than butternut, it is prolific and I will grow it next year, alongside the good old Waltham butternut!  By the way, this hard-stemmed squash has never been affected by squash vine borers in my garden (same with butternut and Long Island Cheese)! This is true for all Curcubita moschata squash.

Roast the squash (any winter squash) after you poke it with a few holes (you don't want it to explode!) in a glass dish in a 350 degree oven for 50 minutes or so.  Let it cool, cut it in half, remove the seeds and scrape out the flesh, easy peasey!

Nature's Little Jokes

 Sometimes, nature pays here little jokes on us!  I accidentally pulled these out while weeding.

Have fun out there!

One Reason I grow...

 Botanical Art

I started gardening when I was a kid. Wherever I had a place where I could grow veggies, I did it.  In the mid 2000's, I began taking botanical art classes and earned a Certificate in Botanical Illustration a few years later.  Why? So I could document what I grew, and the produce of others.  In fact, fruits and veggies are my favorite subjects!  Here's one:

Asian Long Eggplant

(Sorry about the photo quality, I need to work on that!)

WTH is this?

 

I try to buy decent potting soil as I pot up a large number plants every year and have many house plants.  Quality, organic potting soil is expensive, so I will sometimes reuse old soil (if I think it is relatively disease- and weed-free), recharge it with finished compost and coffee chaff (a peat and perlite substitute).  In a pinch I bought a less expensive potting mix and did not read the ingredients for the dreaded "forestry byproducts," aka tree bark leftovers from making mulch (I suspect it is swept off the floor).   Shredded tree bark is a bad substrate in which to actually grow plants, it robs the soil of nutrients as it breaks down and provides a great habitat for various fungi.  Well, the photo above was from a purchase of one of these cheap soils.  It is mostly all shredded bark with a little dirt thrown in!  I hope this was a fluke in production, but I will not be buying this "container mix" again (plus the harsh chemical fertilizers!):

The Fig Gods smiled

 

Brown Turkey Figs

One of the first things I planted when we moved to our central Virginia home 20 years ago were three brown turkey fig trees. Positioned on the southeastern corner of our house to protect the roots in winter, they started producing fruit in about 3 years, really hitting their stride at the 5 year mark, producing hundreds of ripe figs per day for weeks. Then "the music died."  Late freezes damaged the young fruit (which is really a flower in disguise) and the subsequent fruit could not ripen in time.  For the last 4 years we got nada, zilch, nothing.

So, then I read up on unproductive fig trees. As the trees mature, they tend to fill in the center and send up straight, unproductive branches.  This shades the tree, reducing the potential for ripening. Last January, our figs trees had a date with a Japanese pruning saw.  I removed much of the interior growth, and the vertical, crossed and dead branches, and took off some of the height.  At first, I was disappointed, the tree grew back lushly and I though we would not get figs. But I think pruning, plus no late freezes, did the trick and now...THERE BE FIGS HERE!

It's....Pawpaw Time!

 

If my reader recalls, I have a thing for pawpaws, ever since discovering them while walking down by the James River...and reading about them, most notably Andrew Moore's book pictured below (a riveting read for us garden nerds):

The pawpaw, and in this case I mean Asimina triloba, not the other 10 species of Asimina, is North America's largest native fruit.  It is the northern most member of a family of tropical plants. The pawpaw is now in commercial cultivation, and many improved hybrids exist.  Fruit from wild trees can have variable taste depending on the tree (and by tree, I mean all the many trees that come from the same rootstock, spread by runners/vegetative growth).  The pawpaw fruit is exceedingly fragile; when ripe it is very soft and does not transport well (and they will not ripen up if picked unripe). You will not find them at your local grocery store, but may find some at a local farmer's market. The best way to have pawpaws is to grow them yourself.  The  flavor of pawpaws is often described as a combination of banana with mango and pineapple overtones.

I lucked out, I grew my pawpaws from seed collected from wild plants-talk about a wild card! Even if you taste the fruit, the flower was most likely pollinated by a genetically different tree, and you don't know what you might get from that cross. Pawpaws are seldom self fertile, as the female and male parts of the flower come out at different times.  I hand pollinate mine with male flowers collected locally.

An added bonus of growing pawpaws is that they are the host plant for the larva of the zebra swallowtail butterfly! 

The top photo shows the fruit, pulp, and the large seeds (do no eat the seeds or skin, they can make you sick,  And, like everything, some people are allergic to pawpaws).  The second photo is of pawpaw pudding, a traditional recipe, sort of a dense cake.  Some people claim that cooked pawpaw can cause digestive upset, but it never has for me, nor can I find good evidence for that claim.

For Virginia growers, Edible Landscaping in Afton, VA offers several named varieties of pawpaws.

Ginger Update!

 

Turmeric

 Ginger

I wrote last season about my success with growing culinary ginger. I was so happy with the outcome (pickled sushi ginger anyone?), that I also ordered organic turmeric rhizomes this year and started some of those plants. Both turmeric and ginger are in the same family, the Zingiberaceae.  

We had a very hot and dry July and I was watering often- the gingers do like their water.  Then we had a hot and wet August and the plants really shot up.  Stay tuned for the outcome, I hope to have ginger and turmeric to share with friends!  By the way, I order my fresh ginger and turmeric roots from Hawaiian sources in February and start them in my sunroom as soon as they arrive (next year I want to try another ginger: galangal!).

A few informational resources on growing your own ginger in Virginia:

http://www.laughingduckgardens.com/2013/04/03/growing-ginger-in-virginia/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gko7DlV_mm0