Week #36 & #37: Squash & Sweet Corn & Sauerkraut...YEAH!

Happy Fall everyone! Well, according to the calendar, fall doesn't start for another week, but in nature the season is well underway with birds migrating south, while in our area wagons full of field tomatoes are a common sight as they make their way to Heinz and other processing plants.  Elsewhere in the county, apples are now weighing down their trees, and grapes are ready to be picked for wine along the Lake Erie north shore.

Here at home we cut all of our Acorn and Butternut Squash off the vines.  Some of the Butternut Squash we discovered had gummy stem blight, while some of the Acorn Squash had a lot of squash bugs on them.  The squash bugs are just a nuisance and we brush then off, however the gummy stem blight gives our butternut squash reptilian like skin. The blight can be carried over in the seed and our squash seeds are from last year when Marianne's Gramma and Mom had squash, but they said there was no sign of blight.  Perhaps, like the late blight in the tomatoes, the wet summer created the perfect conditions.

Some of this year's harvest of Acorn and Butternut Squash.

 



Gummy Stem Blight on Butternut Squash

 



Speaking of the late blight, we removed the old tomato vines and burned them as it is not recommended to turn them over in the soil as the blight can survive overwinter.  Regardless, we will not be planting tomatoes or potatoes in that plot anyway in 2014.

We picked some sweet corn and BBQ it.  The texture is dense but it tastes very good. It probably would have tasted better a week ago when it was younger, but we were hoping the corn would keep growing bigger as the ears were really small.  This was not the case.

 Nothing says "SUMMER" better than sweet corn with salt and butter. YUMMY!

We finally ate some eggs this week.  They taste absolutely incredible and are a lot better than store bought eggs. We are starting to get seven a day now! 

The sauerkraut that has been sitting in the basement for over a month now has now been placed in jars and pressure canned.  It is a nice side to have with sausages.

Things are starting to slow down more as we approach the middle of September.  Once the corn is done, we just have the rutabaga, along with the occasional pepper and carrots left to pick.  Oh, wait...There is one more thing out there that we forgot to mention for the last few weeks. At the beginning of the season we planted edename (edible soybean)plants and we noticed that out of the 25 seeds we planted, only 3 plants came up.  What ever happened to those plants?