Pumpkin patch

Sometimes it feels as though our town is a throwback to another time.  There are no franchises here, no stoplights, and the farm stand uses an honor system for accepting payment.

A simple pleasure to visit this pumpkin patch on a sunny afternoon.  Here are the girls weighing their options for the best pumpkins.  

Esme finally found her favorite, which is just her size.   

Color and texture

This unexpected combination makes me think that purple, green, and blue are my new favorite colors.

Hydrangea, sedum (Autumn Joy), and rosemary. 

End-of-Season Garden Soup

The garden is closing itself down, I'm afraid. The sunflowers, once boasting heights of 12 feet, have toppled, or are listing, and victims to the crows. There are tomatoes, but many are only half-ripened, and the vines are starting to shrivel. And the squash are calling it quits. There will be no more growth on the butternut, or the acorn, or the spaghetti squash.
So we're harvesting. We found a few beautiful zucchinis, a bucketful of greenish-red tomatoes, fistfuls of fennel seeds, a few perfect banana peppers, and some bright green herbs.
The herbs are my favorite, I must admit, and so I was glad when we decided that the perfect dinner would be an end-of-season garden soup, heavy on the basil and cilantro.

Here is the recipe. If there were a taste for green, this soup would be it.



End-of-Season Garden soup:

1 cup fresh basil and cilantro
1 package fresh rice noodles
1 cup half-ripe tomatoes, chopped
2 cups carrots (baby carrots or carrot slices)
1 small zucchini, julienned
4 medium banana peppers, chopped into rounds
2 cups chicken broth
2 cups water
2 tablespoons rice vinegar
3 tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons salt
1 avocado, chopped into 1-inch dice


Chop the vegetables and the herbs. Divide herbs in half, setting one half aside for the finish.
Heat the broth, water, vinegar, sugar and salt until simmering. Add the vegetables and the first half of the herbs, cook for 15 minutes. Add the noodles and cook at a low boil for 10 more minutes, or until the noodles are soft.

When the noodles are done, the broth is finished. I like to serve the soup in bowls that are filled with the avocado slices and extra chopped herbs. If you can wait, this soup is even better the next day, as the flavors have a chance to blend...

Harvest time: part one

The garden is full of goodness this time of year, and I'm going to share my goodies with you--well, photos of them, at least.

This photo is a bit rough, but I like it--the texture and variations in color are really interesting to me. It looks how it feels under your hand--sort of bumpy and sticky and smooth all at once.

Anyway, this is just one of the enormous sunflowers that grew this year--the tallest is over 12 feet tall, and the heads are the size of dinner plates. I have no idea what made them giants this year and not last year, but they are glorious to look at. And the seeds are good, but very labor intensive. Drying them out and salting them is no big deal, but eating them is another story.


Following the model of how to make pumpkin seeds, we soaked them in saltwater overnight, then salted them, and baked them for 4 hours in a low oven. When they were done, they smelled great, and so I just popped a few of those salty little guys right in my mouth, like roasted pumpkin seeds. Which they are not. After hacking and sputtering out a few of the shells, I figured out --uh, you don't eat the shells. No kidding. Which is why I have never seen sunflower seeds sold this way in the store. Come to think of it, even the birds leave the shells on the ground...


After hulling a few to get the meats, we agreed that while the seeds are tasty, they might not be worth the effort right now. Looks like we'll be saving the heads for the birds to eat this winter. Sharing the harvest, as I said.