Seasonal labor

 

Here we go again – the season of back aches, filthy fingernails, sore muscles, rusty knees, tired arms and dirt.  Not to mention weeds, lots and lots of weeds.  Yet again, I swear I’ll get the better of them this year, I swear I will. 

You’ll see.

I promise.

Geez, who am I kidding.  I'll start off strong and then fade faster than cheap jeans in hot water. 

darn it.....I hate being truthful with myself.

That's It?

Forget the hail tapping on my window and the rolling grey clouds clapping thunder, I’m thinking spring!  This little baby just popped its head up over the weekend.  I seeded it, along with 50 others, last week.  We’ve got tomatoes growing, and all different kinds.  It’s a small compensation for Christophe's comment, “You seeded 50, that’s it?”

“Just for now,” I smirked.  “The rest of the plants will be started in the greenhouse later this month.”  (Back at you; head whip and cocky grin.  Why?  Because he’ll be planting them and then we’ll see about that “only 50” comment.)

The Courge Report

Even after a summer of chasing a fox out of the garden, we had a pretty good courge or squash harvest.  We lost one potimarron plant to the animal’s digging, but the rest made it through the intruder’s nightly drama.  In addition, we planted butternut.  It’s growing in popularity in France and Christophe discovered it the first time a few years ago on our annual return to Chicago.  He was thrilled we finally were able to add it to the garden.

All in all, we have 12 potimarrons, and two more are still ripening in the garden.  Christophe already used one butternut squash, but 12 remain.  In total, we have 31 pounds of potimarron and 28 pounds of butternut – then a friend gave us a pumpkin from his garden which is the ballpark of 20 pounds.  It doesn’t take a math degree to see we have over 70 pounds of squash – the birth weight of a baby hippo.

I can see the Forest Gump-like jokes coming on: squash soup, squash bread, curry squash, sweet and sour squash, squash and squash cookies, the list can get pretty long.  So, bring it on – I’ve got 70 pounds of squash to cook with and can use a few more recipes.

The Patisson

Smaller patissons can be seen forming over the right patisson.

This odd vegetable has graced our garden for the last few years; the patisson.  It is also called the pattypan, scallop squash, granny squash, and the bonnet-de-prêtre.  A first, I didn’t know what to do with it, but I’ve found that the more I use it, the more I find uses for it.  It’s in the squash family, but don’t mistake it for a butternut or acorn.  It’s more like a zucchini, but firmer and nutty in flavor.

Besides running around the kitchen playing Pac Man with them, (Come on, they do look like the ghosts, don’t they?) I’ve stuffed them, put them on pizza, sautéed them, and put them into every dish possible.  We have both the yellow and white varieties, but I find the yellow to be more prolific and more resistant to diseases.  The plant itself can be 5 feet in diameter, so I feel rather successful as a gardener when these giant Amazon like plants quickly fill any empty space left in the garden.  I’ve found little history and background on them, expect, according to Wikipedia, the name comes from “a Provençal word for a cake made in a scalloped mould”.

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