Mid-September in northern Ohio means we are in a race to get food from the garden to the pantry before a frost. Normally the first frost date here is on the 20th of October, but the last few nights have gotten chilly- in the low to mid 50’s. The temperature has come back up now, but many of the tender plants have started to wind down. Fall is in the air, and the plants know it.
The green beans are getting starchy, and losing their sweetness. I picked some for dinner tonight and saw that their days are numbered. Soon we’ll just leave the rest to dry on the vine. Two months ago I was worried we might not have many beans, but now the freezer has enough to last six months, and I’ve canned some into dill beans. I was hoping to get another 10 quarts of dilly beans, but I don’t think that will happen.
Some of the beans I’ve already been picking dried. Cowpeas are only so-so as snap beans, and I quickly just let them go to seed since they are much better as a soup bean. The trail-of-tears, turtle beans, ricebeans, greasy grits beans, and turkey’s craw beans have all been left to dry. I’m starting to pick them and use them, mostly just to try them out since I haven’t grown any of them before. I’m surprised at how different each kind tastes. So far the ricebean has been the family favorite. I like how quickly it cooks, and everyone in the family enjoys the taste. Leftover ricebeans turned to mush when I reheated them for too long, but the mush was still good if you thought of it as a gravy along with the fried ham, carrots and potatoes. One of these cooler days I’ll put a handful of all them in a pot and see how they do all together.
The tomatoes are slowing down too. I’ve put up about 40 quarts of stewed tomatoes with herbs, 30 jars of a homegrown version of Ro-tel, and plenty of salsa, since they are all quick to do and so useful. Now that I don’t have to do so many tomatoes so often, I can make some of the more slow-to-cook sauces for pasta and pizza. The slow cooker goes all night to cook down the tomatoes into a thick sauce, and the house smells of tomato, garlic, onions, summer savory and basil for days on end. On busy days, I just pour some of the simmering sauce onto baked (microwaved) potatoes, for a version of a Runaway Potato, my favorite dish from the now-closed Alice and Friends restaurant in Chicago.
Some of the winter squash are ready to pick now. We’ve eaten the ones that have had less perfect skins. They go bad pretty quickly if they aren’t hardened off or if the skin has blemishes, so we’ve been using them up now. My favorites are buttercups and sunspot hybrids- I love the dry, chestnutty sweet flesh, but I find that butternuts keep longer. The small delicatas only last a month or so, so we try to finish them off by Thanksgiving. It looks like we’ll have a couple of big blue hubbard squash too. Those we’ll try to hold onto until Christmas, since they will be the main ingredient in our ‘pumpkin’ pies. I’ve also got some turban squash that are looking turbanish. I’ve never grown them before. They are supposed to store very well. Crossing my fingers that they’ll be good tasting too. I would love to find more winter squash with that sweet, dry flesh of the sunspots, preferably something open-pollinated so I can save seeds.
Last year the squash stored very well. We had lots of butternuts, and they lasted until early spring. If I had grown more, I think they would have stored well until the warm weather. I was surprised to find that the squash got better tasting the longer they were stored. By February they had gotten really rich and full of flavor. The last one we ate in April was so good we kept asking each other if it really tasted that amazing. It did.