Baby Veggies

Trying to keep track of developing fruits can be difficult, especially with the squashes where a giant fruit can develop seemingly over night.

Here's a 'Waltham' butternut squash. It's already the size of my thumb, and it hasn't even flowered yet.

'Cinderella' Pumpkin

I was really surprised by how large these 'Costata Romanesco' zucchinis got prior to even flowering! 

 I've yet to let any of these 'Yellow Crookneck' squashes get much larger than this. They're so cute at this size.

This is a teeny tiny mexican sour gherkin. The plants are just covered in them!

This 'Corsican' gourd flowered really early this year, so this particular fruit should get fairly sizable by the end of the summer.

I'm assuming this is a 'Tepehuan Canteen' gourd. I've never grown it before, so I'm not entirely sure what they look like.

These tomatoey looking things are actually potato fruits. You can plant potatoes from their true seeds, but most people use what are called "seed potatoes", which are actually small tubers.

I'm pretty sure this is 'Cream of Saskatchewan' watermelon. I'm also growing 'Blacktail Mountain', which has much darker skin

Blooms of Another Kind

This past weekend was sunny, warm, and gorgeous! I took advantage of the weather and cleaned up some of my hard-shelled gourds from last year's garden. The gourds have been hanging out in the garage developing a nice bloomy rind (kind of like cheese). Eventually they will dry out completely and become very hard.

The mold bloom on each gourd is almost like a piece of art!

This Bule-type gourd with bumpy skin is particularly interesting!

You can see where the skin has split on this gourd. After scraping off the moldy skin, each gourd will take on a light tan color. It's amazing that they can go from something so gross looking to something decorative (that you wouldn't mind sitting on the dining room table).

Hard-shelled Gourd Harvest

I've been growing hard-shelled gourds for about four years now. I love them! It's so much fun watching the plants grow and the fruit develop. Gourds come in so many fun shapes and sizes too!

Here's my gourd harvest for 2011 (plus one more little cream of saskatchewan watermelon). I'm slightly disappointed because there were a few new kinds I tried that didn't do well. I'm not sure how many bushel gourd seeds I started (probably about 12), but I only got one plant to survive and produce a single fruit...but at least it's enormous! This is the second year I've tried growing corsican and penguin gourds and I still haven't gotten a single fruit. I even ordered new corsican gourd seed this year (and got 0% germination both years). I also tried, and failed, to grow snake gourd and swan gourd this year. I think the only types I can rely on are birdhouse and baby bottle.

I'm pretty excited about my lone bushel gourd. It's bigger than a basketball! I'm not sure what I'll do with it yet...perhaps make a couple bowls?

I lost a couple nice birdhouse gourds to slugs this year. I've never had slugs tear into my gourds before! Luckily they only ruined two fruits. The others seemed almost completely untouched.

Keeping Up With My Speed-Of-Light Life

I've been up to all kinds of gardening and cooking-related mischief late last week and over this weekend! Hopefully I'll have time to write about it all soon.

In the meantime, here's a quick rundown of what I've been doing and making:

• Acted as a tomato matchmaker (I can't wait to share this with you)
• Foraged for about 9 pounds of wild black raspberries (and I have the scratches to prove it)
• Scouted out some potential wild grape foraging locations
• Pitted cherries (I don't even want to know how many more pounds I have done)
• Made both black-raspberry and black-cherry vinegar
• Made both black-raspberry and black-cherry shrub
• Made both black-raspberry and black-cherry jam
• Made both black-raspberry apple and black-cherry apple crumble (can you guess what I'm overloaded with?)
• Made a yummy garden cucumber salad
• Collected an egg that I highly suspect to be a double-yolker (we'll see)
• Started hand pollinating my hard-shelled gourds (it's a nightly ritual)
• Ate the first fava bean of my life (and I don't appear to suffer from favism)
• Got a great idea for a new blog (that may or may not come to fruition)

Starting Squashy Crops

I put my first seedlings in the ground this weekend (mizuna and cilantro)! I also direct sowed snow peas, daikon radish, lettuce, spinach, and onion sets.

On top of that, I also started all my squashy-crops (pumpkin, watermelon, melon, zucchini, scallopini, cucumber, and ornamental gourd) and some fava beans and cat grass.

Mizuna

Cilantro

A variety of cucumbers, and squashes sown into peat pellets for easy transplanting.

Photo Friday

I have two crates full of gourds in my basement just waiting for created projects. Any ideas?