The Yellow Farmhouse Garden

We had a pretty decent Butternut squash yield this year. I planted them in a new part of the garden, which I’m sure helped boost the yield. Plus, we had very few insects on the squash. As a result, we now have plenty of Butternut that will go into storage straight from the garden – unprocessed.

If you keep winter squash under the proper conditions, you can enjoy them well into winter. The most important thing to keep in mind is to leave the stem on the squash. This is true of all varieties of winter squash and pumpkins.

Winter squash store best with the stems left on.

If you plan to use them in the next week or two, then it really doesn’t matter if the squash has a stem or not.

Sometimes you can find farmers selling stemless winter squash at a deep discount. Other than cooking them for a meal, you can freeze or can those bargain farmer’s market squash to use later on.

If the stems are breaking off  your squash as you pick them, use your pruning shear to cut the stems from the vine. You’ll find it’s worth the extra effort.

Store your best, unblemished squash  in a spot that will stay around 50F and have about 50 percent humidity. You should be able to enjoy your home-grown squash into early 2013.

Bob

My big job in the garden this week is picking and canning tomatoes.

The tomato crop is a little light this year because of the drought and hot temperatures this summer.

I’ve noticed in my garden that most of the tomatoes seem to have ripened all at once. This is a good thing for canning.

Last week about a quarter of the crop ripened and I was able to can a batch of tomatoes — about seven quarts. This week there is at least four times that many.

Since tomatoes are among the easiest garden crop to can so, they are a good choice to start out with if you never canned anything before.

The best way to store tomatoes is to can them.

People ask me why I can vegetables instead of freezing them since freezing is so much easier. I have my reasons. First, I don’t have enough room in the freezer to hold everything I want to store. Another reason involves security. If the power goes out for a few days in a row, I can lose my entire harvest. That has happened to me more than once through the years. You don’t need electricity to keep canned vegetables.

Last but not least, I get a feeling of security looking at shelf rows of canned vegetables down in our Michigan basement.

Bob

Not long ago,  I came home with a bag of carrots from the grocery store. It was disappointing; every carrot in the bag was bitter tasting. This reminded me of the experience I had many years ago as a new gardener.
Back then I had a plan to grow enough fruit and vegetables to last through the winter. I grew carrots, cabbage, onions, apples and some other produce I wanted to put into storage. I built a small storage space and carefully put my produce away.
All of the fruit and vegetables I was storing had similar storage requirements. They needed a temperature around 32 F and fairly high humidity. It made sense to me to store them all together in the same space.
Later in the winter I took out some carrots to use. They all had that bitter, almost soapy flavor. Later I learned that apples give off ethylene gas. The ethylene caused the carrots to form chemical compounds called terpenes. Those terpenes were the source of the bitter flavor.
Somewhere along the line, the carrots I bought this week must have been exposed to ethylene; probably from apples in a cooler.
That’s a good reason why you shouldn’t store apples and carrots together in the same refrigerator drawer; especially if you don’t plan to use them right away.

Bob