On food you can't buy at the grocery store

Baby butternut squash

Lately I've been thinking about the things I get to eat that I would never experience if I didn't garden.

Here's an example:

The afternoon before our first fall frost was expected, I went out and harvested the rest of the butternut squash, ripe and unripe.

I had read somewhere that winter squash could be eaten unripe, prepared as you would summer squash, so I sliced up the green butternuts and drizzled them with a little olive oil, sprinkled on salt and pepper and a little shredded parmesan cheese on top, and baked them. Worth giving it a whirl, I figured.

HOLY SHIITAKE* that squash was good. Better than summer squash. Possibly better than mature butternut. Green, salty, firm, and creamy. Really, really tasty. CF and my friend Pooma and I ate them with eyelid-fluttering, moan-uttering food ecstacy.

And if the taste weren't enough: they're so darn cute. I don't think you can tell from the photo how adorable these little squashitos were -- the smallest were about the length of my pinky finger and the largest about the size of my fist.

Tiny, unripe butternut squash are not something that you ever even see at farmers markets, much less at the grocery store. (Though I have vowed to change that: expect them around October 2010 at the Red Wing Farm booth at the West Asheville Tailgate Market.)

Baby butternuts are--like squash blossoms, green tomatoes, garlic scapes, beet thinnings, and other leftovers, by-products, and side notes of the garden--delightful foods mostly enjoyed by people who are growing vegetables for themselves.

There is a "waste not want not" spirit to eating things like beet thinnings, garlic scapes, and unripe winter squash -- but eating each of these garden extra-credit items is a delicacy in its own right. It's nice to savor little rewards like baby butternuts at the end of a long, hard-working season of growing your own food.

~~~

*With gratitude to Jonathan Safran Foer, genius author of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, source of one of my favorite insults: "Succotash my Balzac, dip shiitake!" If that were the only sentence Foer had ever written, I would love him. But he is the author not only of searingly original and heartbreakingly beautiful fiction but of the new nonfiction book Eating Animals, about . . .FOOD, food traditions, and the ethics of food! More specifically: about meat, eating meat, and the meat industry. I can't wait to read it.

A Meditation on Gratitude: Thelma Sanders Sweet Potato Squash

I love it when heirloom varieties are named after one of the people in the line of seed-saving gardeners who passed down the seed. It always feels like an opportunity to give thanks for all of the growers of food that came before us.

Thelma Sanders Sweet Potato Squash (a couple of which are pictured in my grateful hands above) is such a variety. We grew this lovely winter squash this year, described by Southern Exposure Seed Exchange as a "family heirloom from Thelma Sanders in Adair County, Missouri." Southern Exposure introduced the Thelma Sanders squash in 1988, and now its available from a number of sources, including Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds and Seed Savers Exchange.

Thelma Sanders has been our favorite squash this summer. With its lovely teardrop shape and caramel-cream colored skin that develops faint freckles as it ripens, its luscious and smooth pale orange flesh, its creamy texture and subtly sweet flavor, Thelma Sanders has stolen our hearts.

As we've savored the taste of this beautiful and delicious heirloom, I've been filled with gratitude for Thelma and all of her seed-saving predecessors who gave us this particular squash variety. With each mouthful, I imagine my circle of gratitude widening to include all of our seed-saving, plant-growing, earth-tending ancestors.

So here's to cultivating gratitude, appreciation, and thanks-giving as we cultivate our gardens: Thelma Sanders, Presente!

~~~

"Presente," which literally means "here" or "present" in Spanish is used in some parts of Latin America as an expression to invoke, honor, or celebrate the presence of someone who is not physically present. Being involved with Latin American solidarity and peace and justice movements over the years, I learned the expression "Presente!" as a way to give thanks for and honor an ancestor, a martyr, or a person whose spirit or memory is being evoked with respect and appreciation. It often seems an appropriate expression when holding a fruit or vegetable whose very existence can be traced to specific people's stewardship of living things.

The harvest continues. . .

First of the butternuts

Thelma Sanders Sweet Potato Squash with okra and summer squash

Creole garlic on its way to pickling

More on brine pickling

Jars of recently brined pickles: mixed vegetables on the left and summer squash on the right.

Earlier this summer, I blogged about one of my favorite old-fashioned, probiotic ways to preserve vegetables -- pickling them in salt water. (See the original post, Coming Home to Abundance for brine-pickling instructions, references, and background).

Brine pickling has been such an ongoing, everyday part of life at our house over the past few months of heavy harvest that I wanted to write a little bit more about it, with specific comments on various vegetables for brining.

This summer, I've brine-pickled cucumbers, squash, okra, onions, garlic, radishes, beets, carrots, and cauliflower, all with good results. Fresh dill, basil, and parsley all pickle well, too, and add great flavor to brine pickles. I have a crock going now of baby squash, the last of the summer carrots, and okra with dill flowers. I'm sure I've brined other things in summers past, but I don't remember them all!

I do remember that I tried fingerling eggplants once with disastrous results (mushy and moldy), so I don't recommend brining eggplant. Other things I DON'T recommend brining include: ripe tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and lettuce. I've known friends to brine watermelon rinds (very delicious) and green tomatoes successfully, too.

I've found that squash and cucumbers do great pickled whole and then de-brined (soaked in cold water), sliced, and stored in a 4-to-1 water/vinegar solution. They'll last almost indefinitely in the fridge that way.

You can store the pickles in the original brining liquid, which is cloudy and full of beneficial bacteria, but it's generally a bit salty for my taste. I like to pour it off and save it to use for other things, including just pouring a shot of it into sauerkraut or pickles when packing into jars for storage.

Okra is really tasty brined whole and either sliced and packed or just packed as whole pods (they look cool that way). This is an outstanding way to keep up with the okra overload when your okra plants are producing faster than you can possibly come up with clever ways to disguise okra for fresh consumption.

Small carrots are great brined whole, and are a surprisingly yummy snack - salty, crunchy, and crisp.

Onions do better quartered than whole, unless they're pretty small. Pearl-sized pickled onions are GREAT.

An easy way to get started with brine pickling is to fill a crock or big jar with all the brine-able veggies that you have lying around needing to be used. Make sure they're washed and prepped as described in my earlier post and then pour a strong brine solution over them (1/2 cup salt to 1 quart water). Press down (I use a plate weighted with a full jar on top), make sure they're submerged, cover, and wait. In warm weather, the pickles will be salty, sour, and pickled in as little as 10 days. It really is like magic!

High Harvest

Clockwise from 6:00: peppers, okra, cherry tomatoes, dill, onions, tomatoes, garlic, japanese long cucumbers, zephyr squash, beet greens and celery greens, orange cucumbers, beets, italian edible gourd, more tomatoes, and carrots.

We are experiencing massive garden overload!

Produce is pouring out of the garden faster than we can eat, preserve, and process it.

It's amazing how generous the earth is. We're trying to remember to have gratitude for all this abundance as tomatoes, cucumbers, and squash overflow out of our kitchen onto every flat surface in the house.

Anyone want some refrigerator pickles or brined veggies? Tomatoes? Help us eat this food!


A garden shot....











Meanwhile, the garden is swarming with pollinators, beneficials, and a few detrimentals (squished a spotted cucumber beetle today). Sunflowers, fennel, and ironweed are surrounded by clouds of buzzing, feeding, pollinating bugs - hurrah!

Bees enjoying a sunflower...

July gardening....

Planting the last of the black beans tonight....after much very butch digging by Solon and Topher last eve (looking quite enthusiastic at right).

And the garden is busting out...see pictures below including very beautiful orange poppies...last night we had the first of the zephyr squash, with sauteed squash blossoms. Yum.

The Dreaded Spotted Cucumber Beetle

We are watching our squash and cucumber plants like hawks...looking out for the D.S.C.B.

They are not picky eaters at all--they will of course eat cucumbers, as their name suggests, but also squash and melons and even hawthorn leaves. I'm very protective of my Zephyr squash that's just starting to come in, so I've been vigilant about the beetles.

More than vigilant. More like a beetlecidal maniac. I prowl the rows, capturing and crushing. There are very few now, but I don't want them to make it to the point in their 6- to 9- week life cycle where they make more beetles. Only two showed themselves today, and both met quick deaths by squishing.

There seems to be some interesting research on drenching the soil with rhizobacteria, which simultaneously promotes plant growth and decreases the production of the phytochemical that encourages the beetles to feed. There are no innoculant blends yet, but it seems like such a great idea--stacking functions--to add beneficial bacteria to the soil and discourage beetles at the same time. There aren't any organic pesticides that are specific to the D.S.C.B. -- just broad spectrum pesticides that would kill beneficials too.

So for now it is prowl and squish. Wish me luck.

Three Sisters

"A long time ago there were three sisters who lived together in a field. These sisters were quite different from one another in their size and way of dressing. The little sister was so young that she could only crawl at first, and she was dressed in green. The second sister wore a bright yellow dress, and she had a way of running off by herself when the sun shone and the soft wind blew in her face. The third was the eldest sister, standing always very straight and tall above the other sisters and trying to protect them. She wore a pale green shawl, and she had long, yellow hair that tossed about her head in the breeze. There was one way the sisters were all alike, though. They loved each other dearly, and they always stayed together. This made them very strong."

~Lois Thomas oral history. In: Indian Legends of Eastern Canada, Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, Toronto (Ontario). Education Division, 1969.

Zephyr Squash

We planted the first of this year's "Three Sisters" beds -- a 27-foot bed of Cherokee Trail of Tears Black Beans and Zephyr summer squash (above) along with some winter squash (Waltham Butternut), sunflowers, and a couple of edible gourd varieties.

Prepping the first bed for the three sisters and their gourd cousins

The traditional three sisters, planted together, are corn, beans, and squash. All three have been grown in the Americas for thousands of years, and the three were often grown together in traditional Native American polyculture gardens.

Across North America from present-day Mexico to Canada, there were traditional agricultural practices centered around squash and her two sister staple crops. A practical and sophisticated example of low-impact, high-yield companion planting, three sisters plantings provided a nutritional complement for the peoples that grew them. Polyculture (the opposite of monoculture) prevented pest infestation and the symbiotic relationship between the three plants aided in the growth of all three, for higher yields and healthier crops.

In our garden, we substituted sunflowers for corn for a variation on the Three Sisters tradition --sunflowers are also indigenous to the Americas, and were grown as living trellises for beans in the same way that corn was. We're growing varieties with edible seeds, and hoping the flowers will help bring birds and beneficials to the garden. Gourds, which have a similar look and growing habit to squash, were not native to the Americas, but were grown in Europe for about 2,000 years before Columbus. The gourds are a bigger departure from the ancient 3 Sisters tradition, but the gourd varieties we're growing are really interesting heirlooms (Cucuzzi and Sweet Honey Sponge), so it was worth not being 3 Sisters fundamentalists.

Cherokee Trail of Tears Black Beans

Beans were domesticated in the Americas more than 3,500 years ago, the youngest of the famous "three sisters" cultivated by indigenous people on the American continents. The older sisters, corn and squash, have been cultivated for at least 5,500 years in the Americas.

Waltham Butternut Squash

Ancestors of today's pumpkins and sweet baking squashes, hard and hearty winter squashes, zucchinis, and crook- and straight-necked summer squashes were cultivated on North American soil at least a thousand years before the Egyptian pyramids were built.

With her two sisters beans and corn, wild and cultivated squash in endless variety was savored, nurtured, celebrated, and honored as "that which sustains" by the indigenous peoples of the Americas. For thousands of years before European colonization, the three sister plant spirits were cherished as green, growing relatives in the family of all living things. Sacred stories, symbols, art, and rituals surrounding the sisters were woven into the spiritual practices of many First Nation cultures.

In some versions of the creation story told by Iroquois peoples, the three sisters were daughters of the daughter of the first woman, Skywoman, who walked across the back of a great turtle, scattering seeds and roots, creating the earth. Other traditions honored a sacred site, a place then called Ogarechny Mountain, where legend held that beans, corn, and squash were first found growing, planted as a gift by a woman from the sky. Still other ancient tales traced the plants to three women bearing gifts from the south: the foods to sustain human life.

The Three Sisters were not only functional staple food crops--they were integral parts of a belief system that honored plants and animals as relatives and understood human beings as part of a community of life. For some accounts of traditional growing methods for the three sisters, there's a great book I'd recommend: A People's Ecology: Explorations in Sustainable Living: Health, Environment, Agriculture, Native Traditions edited by Gregory Cajete (Santa Fe: Clear Light Publishers, 1999).