I hope you're not all bored with garden talk, because all I do is pick and preserve produce these days.
This is the mystery fruit that appeared in July. It didn't look like anything listed on my gardening spreadsheet. (Yes, of course I have a gardening spreadsheet, as well as planting records that go back to 2015). Friends on facebook were divided as to whether it was a melon, which needs to be picked in the summer, or a squash, which should be left until late fall. I later remembered that one of my friends is a research scientist at USDA (the US Department of Agriculture, for those of you outside the US), and he determined... it was cucurbit. Which was not immensely helpful, as that plant family includes squash, melons, and cucumbers, so I still didn't know when to pick it. Eventually I guessed it was a melon, from a second fruit that an animal had started consuming, so I picked it and crossed my fingers that I had guessed correctly.
And it turned out to be a melon! The inside looked like a cantaloupe but tasted like a muskmelon, and the thing weighed more than ten pounds, so I've been eating it for almost two weeks. It has a nice flavor, so I saved some of the seeds and can hopefully grow it again.
This creature lives in my raspberry bushes. Wikipedia tells me that praying mantises are carnivores, so so I guess I don't have to worry about him going after the berries that are ripening right now.
I've been considering getting a food dehydrator, but they are really expensive and hard to find used. I just learned that I can use my car for this purpose. It works surprisingly well, and I have dried tomatoes, figs, and chili peppers. For all my efforts to save money, I am essentially drying food with a $10,000 dehydrator, but it's not like I was using my car for driving this summer anyway.
I grew butternut squash instead of sweet potatoes this summer because I realized I like squash a bit more, and both should store well in the winter. However, since squash grow above ground, I lost a few to a hungry groundhog. I decided to pick them all, even if they were not quite ripe and hope they'll all be edible. I'm working on a solution for the groundhog situation but it will take some time to implement.
5 comments:
Arrrggg! Groundhogs!! We have a family under our neighbor's shed. I have decided not to fight them any more. They always win. I have discovered that they don't each Vinia, but love pansies and mums - and of course anything at all that I tried in my mini-garden...
Another splendid harvest - you have the edge over the UK when it comes to warm weather crops like melons. We can grow pumpkins out of doors, but melons are a challenge, even when we use the unheated greenhouse.
Because we eat so little and whatever we plant produces so much, we pretty much allow whatever is eating any particular produce have their way since there is more than enough usually for both they and us.
Mystery solved. It looks delicious.
I would love to have had melons instead of bug-attracting flowers be the surprise plant addition this year. I had no idea dehydrators were expensive: we got one as a wedding gift and I faithfully use it every year to dehydrate apples, the only produce that grows in abundance enough in the Netherlands to bother picking.
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