Happy Halloween!

This picture is from earlier this month, but is appropriately creepy:


Sushi posing next to my home-grown pumpkin:


The inside guts of the pumpkin were much drier and spongier than the jack o' lantern pumpkins you get at the store:


Cleaned out and ready to carve:

I'm cooking the pumpkin seeds with a butter, salt, and Worcester sauce coating.

Angry vampire? Or goofy cross-eyed creature? The white spots are hail pits.


Sitting in the front window:

Final produce tally

Here are some nerdy graphs of my cumulative tomato, zucchini, and cucumber counts for this summer:

From garden pictures

From garden pictures

I hope this will help me plan the garden next year. I accidentally staggered tomato plantings for the sweet 100's this year, which gave a good crop of the little tomatoes until the first frost despite tornadoes, hail, and an unusually wet and cool summer. So, maybe next year I will intentionally make several tomato plantings to hedge my bets in a more systematic way.

Pass the sushi, peas

This is the first time I've made sushi using peas. They are a decent substitute for cucumber.

Yum!

First frost

The first frost was on Oct 18. Here's the tomato plant before it thawed and died:


A marigold covered in frost:

Last tomatoes

Here's the last harvest of tomatoes before the first frost a couple of weeks ago:



Some tasty dried cherry tomatoes:



I got more than 6 cups of dried tomatoes out of the last few weeks of cherry tomato production- not bad!

Leaves are starting to turn.. and random scenery

You can see the leaves starting to turn at higher elevation on Linden's knob:


We've been having cool nights with some fog in the morning. The dew on the weeds in the field is blindingly reflective as the sun comes up over the hills:


Sushi enjoying the morning? Sniffing the air? Trying to avoid getting her feet wet?


At the other end of the day, an excellent sunset:


Which bathed everything in pink and orange light for a few minutes:

Peas!

Hooray, the snow peas are producing pods.


I made stir-fry with the first batch. They are very tasty, and it is exciting to get peas this year after my spring attempt was killed off by a heat wave while I was in Ireland.

Some pictures of black walnuts

Here's what the walnuts look like with their husks on. Ripe ones are yellowish and can be indented with your (glove-covered!) finger. Once they sit around on the ground or the hulls get smashed, they turn brown:


I smash the hulls off by grinding them into the gravel driveway with my boots, or running over them with the car. Sushi cat for scale:

As you may be able to see in this picture, the hull juices stain everything, including the plastic bucket and gloves. These are heavy-duty gloves. I made the mistake of wearing flimsy dishwashing gloves earlier, and ended up with stained hands for a week.

The walnuts dry outside for a while, then they sit on a window screen to "cure" for several weeks.


Right now the nut meats are kinda rubbery. I tasted one and was blown away by its bitterness and fruity, almost apple-like, flavor. They say the flavor develops as the nuts cure. We'll see.

Black walnuts making a big mess

Last week, I started picking up ripe black walnuts from 5 producing trees on the property. Black walnuts have a different, stronger flavor than "normal" English walnuts, and sell for $14 a pound in local stores.
Here's a blog site with pictures of the walnuts and the process to extract the nutmeat:
http://www.bigredcouch.com/journal/archives/2007/10/black_walnuts.html

The reason they're so expensive is because it is a BIG PAIN to process them. The outside hull stains your hands, shoes, floor, everything else. The shells are super thick, and at least for my trees, painfully spiky in some places.

I have about 200 nuts drying on an old window screen right now. We will see how many I end up trying to process. I've been gone for several days so they may have all fallen from the trees and started to rot by now.