Late Season Harvest

Nice blossom end rot!

The vegetable garden is just about finished. This year I won’t get those wonderful late season peppers that led to my first forays into canning last year; the pickled peppers were so scrumptious we ate just about every single one by December. This year, my peppers are tiny knots of things, half of them rotten before they fall to the ground. I had to buy two giant peppers at the market to make stuffed peppers last week. And I actually planted twice as many plants this year!  The drought and heat really took their toll on everything. Even though the drought is ended now, and we’ve had some lovely mild falls day and cool nights, the garden doesn’t have sufficient time to recover.

So I am gearing up now for the last of the fall harvest. The watermelons never attained the giant size the seed package predicted, but they are sweet, albeit watermelons with the most seeds ever. I have never seen so many seeds in one fruit! It’s like the entire melon is one big seed!

The main harvest even this month will be the sweet potatoes. A neighbor who visited a few weeks ago and who grows potatoes commercially here took one look at my sweet potatoes and congratulated me. If the foliage is any indication, I should get a bumper crop. I can’t wait! I have another week to go, and then I will tentatively dig up a row by hand and see how advanced they are. If the tubers are large enough, my neighbor has instructed me on the fine art of ‘curing’ sweet potatoes. She told me that her grandfather had a special shack out back that he kept warm with a wood fire. Sweet potatoes were placed on cloths on the ground or newspaper and cured in the hot, dry conditions.  Since I don’t have the wherewithal to build a replica of her grandpa’s shack, and she hasn’t built one on her new farm either, I’m following her second-best set of instructions. Lay newspapers on the floor of the garden she and the garage and just place the sweet potatoes there for a week or two. Then layer them in boxes or baskets and store in the basement.  In the meantime, there are the last of the tomatoes to pick and one or two stray beets.

Now the big question remains: should I enter the five county fair?  It starts on September 24, and my friend Patty urges me to just try….enter some herbs, or flowers or what not.  I brought  out my mother’s cake recipe called the Gunkehupft and I can guarantee that no one at the fair will make this buttery pound cake!  It takes an entire pound of butter (no, this recipe isn’t for those watching their cholesterol) and it’s a miracle if I can get the entire ring out of the Turk’s head mold without cracking it but…..I may just have a chance…..or I may enter my patented killer double-double chocolate fudge chunk cookies. I mean, who doesn’t like chocolate and fudge chunks? Or cookies?