Thank goodness the winter calm has given me a chance to finally post some news. Following are highlights from my garden this past fall and early winter.
My Christmas Eve tomato harvest. These are Sungolds, the extra-sweet hybrid tomato with a flavor reminiscent of tropical fruits. The plant was still producing in late December because we hadn’t yet had a killing frost (our average first-frost date used to be October 15, but now if you ask me the date I can only shake my head). The fruits I was picking were delicious—sweet, tart, and not at all bland or mealy—until December 30, when frost hit. I’d long since pulled out all my other tomato vines, weeks after they had stopped producing fruit and had turned black and rotten. Cool, rainy weather, not frost, sickened and killed those vines. The most extraordinary thing about the Sungold is its resistance to disease. I hope I always have it in my summer garden, even though I have to pay for the seeds.
Most generous fall crop. This is Florida Broadleaf mustard, said to be a Southern heirloom. I picked up the seeds at a swap and planted them, the first time, in ignorance. What a glorious surprise! The plants grow 3 feet fall before they begin to go to seed. Even the big leaves are tender and mild enough to eat raw in salads. Of course, this mustard is also good cooked; we had it today in black-bean soup. I should never plant more than four or five of the seeds, because we always have too much mustard. Before harvesting for dinner, I must ask, one leaf or two? I suppose the leaves might work pretty well in place of an umbrella. Though I don’t expect the plants to survive the winter, they have already withstood a frost with only slight damage.
Make my potatoes purple. Purple Peruvian potatoes are overtaking my garden, overwhelming even the Makah Ozettes, which the purples strongly resemble. Both these varieties produce big fingerlings with many, evenly distributed eyes and dense, mealy flesh. Both resist scab and other disease. In both Ozettes and Purple Peruvians, missed tubers easily survive the winter and start growing again in spring—or in fall, in the absence of freezing weather. Whereas the Ozettes have tan skins and white flesh, the purples are purple inside and out.
My favorite use for Purple Peruvians is mashing. Peeling them, though, is a lot of work, so I use my mother’s old ricer (that’s what she called it, even though she used it only for deseeding blackberries for jam). A food mill also does the job but cuts up much of the skins into tiny bits, which end up in the purée. As with Makah Ozettes, mashing Purple Peruvians requires more liquid and less potato than you would expect. Use all the water left in the pan from boiling the potatoes, and add plenty of hot milk and cream. Wait a minute or two, and check the thickness. You will probably need to add still more liquid.
I asked Bill Whitson, the plant breeder behind Cultivariable, to tell me the origins of the Purple Peruvian. Like the Ozette, the potato is genetically Chilean, not Peruvian. “It was most likely introduced to the USA from Europe (where it is known as Vitelotte Noire) in the nineteenth or early twentieth century,” Bill told me. “It is probably an heirloom variety from Chile.” For more about this potato, see Bill’s article “A Blue Potato by Any Other Name.”
Maxima pumpkin for Halloween. Jack o’ lantern pumpkins are normally Cucurbita pepo, with slender, hard stems, big seed cavities, and, usually, stringy flesh lacking in sweetness. But when you have an overabundance of Cucurbita maxima–the species that includes Sweet Meat, Buttercup, and Hubbard squashes—why should you spend money on a pumpkin fit only for pigs? A Maxima pumpkin carved into a jack o’ lantern doesn’t have to go to waste. You glean most of the flesh by scraping the inside, for a thinner wall and better lighting once you place a candle inside. You glean the rest of the flesh the day after Halloween, when you remove the candle and any wax drippings, cut the pumpkin into several pieces, and put them on a pan for baking. I think I steamed the scrapings. You might instead cook the scrapings in a pot with a little water.
Don’t ask me exactly what variety you see here. It was probably a cross that sprouted on its own. But the fruit was sweet, creamy, and delicious, and it made excellent soup for All Saints’ Day.
Happy new year to all!