Local Delicious

Before, with teepee

Yesterday was the day.

The surest signal of Fall.

The day the teepee came down.

The last of the beans are long finished but only now after a few days of rain and autumn chill am I resigned to taking down the teepee for the season. The transition to winter gardening has officially begun.

Also in true autumn fashion, after the record size beans harvested this year I saved some seeds for next.

After, without teepee

I recently enjoyed my first Grubb’s Mystery Green tomato, which remains green with a tinge of yellow near the stalk even when it’s fully ripe. (Pssst. For gardens at risk of theft it’s a handy way to fool passersby into thinking it’s not ready, thereby ensuring you’ll enjoy the food you’ve laboured over.)

I harvested a single red tomato from my other large plant a few weeks back, before I put the plant out of it’s misery, RIP. The red one was about the same size as the tomato below and had a similar texture . While it smelled delicious, the red one’s flavour was quite bland.

This green tomato, on the the other hand, tasted just as amazing as it smelled. I ate it drizzled with truffle infused olive oil, a sprinkle of crumbled feta cheese, and a pinch of fleur de sel (a natural, unprocessed salt).

Verdict in two words: Yum. Yum.

Grubb's Mystery Green tomato

Not all of my gardening this year has been riddled with blunders and mystery. In fact, I’m rather proud of how much food I’ve cultivated in the garden as a novice gardener.

Below is some of the bountiful harvest I have been enjoying all summer, often in a quick and healthy stirfry.*

Yellow bush beans, green pole beans and snow peas

Tomatoes, green and yellow wax beans and broccoli

Carrots, rhubarb, mint and parsley

A tiny fraction of the beet greens I've harvested this year

Three of my largest heads of garlic, approx. 3" diameter

Carrots still in the ground, yet to be savoured

A full head of broccoli is a beautiful sight to behold

The rhubarb patch after the first harvest -- can you see a difference?!

*Note: All it takes to make a delicious stirfry is a little (or more) organic butter or cold pressed olive oil (both are optimal sources of the good fat you need in your diet), a bit of this and that — whatever you have on hand from the garden. Add a dash of salt and a squeeze of citrus and you have a quick, healthy dinner.

Verdict in two words: Yum. Yum.

Everyone has funny carrot stories, how carrots grow in weird and interesting shapes. Here’s my favourite of the season, a Betty Boop carrot:

Betty Boop Carrot

This spring I planted half a dozen acorn and half a dozen spaghetti squash seedlings that I duly nurtured on my windowsill for a couple of weeks before transplanting them into the garden.

Sadly, only one of the acorn sprouts has embraced it’s job of growing me some squash and has begun taking over the garden.

On the upside, I’m thrilled to report it has at last sprouted some “girl flowers” and been pollinated (I didn’t leave that to chance) resulting in two little squash-in-progress. I feel like an expectant mother.

I suspect the failure of the four other surviving squash is my fault. I left the only two spaghetti squash that weathered the transplant a little to close together for too long. Same with the two acorn squash.

Apparently squash like a little leg room,but I didn’t have the heart to “kill” one of them until too late. By the time I made the untenable choice of which sibling to murder, I fear it was too far along in the season. I now have only runt plants with tiny flowers to show for my pacifist approach.

Let’s just say it’s a very good thing I don’t actually have to rely on my gardening skills to eat, or I’d be very hungry come winter.

When I posted the photo and story about the freakish Strange Seeding Strawberry the other day, a lot of people asked what was going on and commented that they’d never seen anything like it. But no one could shed any light on the mystery.

See, typically strawberry seeds need to overwinter (a.k.a. freeze) in order to germinate. Having them germinate on a strawberry that was still attached to the plant seemed more than a little unusual.

Well, I’m all about local so I decided to give our very own Driedeger Farms, a local strawberry farm dating back to the mid-1940′s, a chance to weigh in on the topic.

Rhonda responded to my query asking a few identifying questions that I couldn’t answer about what kind of strawberry it was. “Uhm, a red one” was about as specific as I could be.

In the end Rhonda did her research online and found me an article on how to grow strawberries where the comments below referred to strawberries being planted in soil and sprouting that way. I appreciate that, but it was a bit disconcerting that the strawberry expert relied on eHow.com, even more so when her parting comment was, “It was definitely interesting to see them in their ‘natural’ state.”

I can cut Rhonda some slack given that strawberries naturally propagate via runners and on a 65 year old farm it’s not likely they’ve needed to rely on seeding in quite some time.

But it still doesn’t explain why a strawberry that has neither been frozen nor planted in soil, sprouted on the vine.