After a very bad spring, the pumpkin plants that I have did catch up in a big way. I already mentioned that, several times. I literally can’t give them away fast enough, I gave out over 30 kg and then I ran out of people to foist them on. Based on previous years, I expected about one-third of what I harvested in the end. I think the compost is to blame for this unexpected bonanza. I wonder what it would be like if the weather was not so cold in May and June and the plants did not grow stunted for the first half of the season.
But as the cold weather approaches and days shorten, the pumpkin plants did catch mildew on the leaves so I decided to cut them down and harvest all that was there. Now we need to process it.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
We have a lot of marrows and pattypans. In addition to what I already mentioned, we also made some canned fruit mixing the marrows with plums (we had to buy those, ours have frozen this spring) and we plan to make some more with apples and pears (we have to buy those too). I am afraid it still won’t be enough and we will end up throwing some away because they spoil before we get to process them.
I came up with the idea of making canned soup. We never did that before but my reasoning was that when we can make canned tomato sauce that lasts for years, we should be able to make pumpkin soup and expect it to last too.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
We started by cutting the pumpkins into small cubes and throwing them into the pot with a bit of salt. They do release enough water to cook without adding any.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
When the pumpkin cubes soften, we either mash them or shred them with a food mixer into a thin paste.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
Sometimes we added cooked carrots and some spices, to have some variety. No two batches were identical. One thing we always added though is boullion soupstock cubes.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
The onion harvest was truly abysmal but I did get at least a few dozen smallish bulbs that were just big enough to cook and add to some of the cans whole.
The result is oversalted and concentrated paste that we put into screw-top jars just like the sauce. When preparing, we plan to thin it down with water to soup consistency, ad some fresh spices and maybe some other veggies (baby carrots, peas, corn) and cook for about 20 minutes before serving. I hope the experiments works well because we already made over 20 cans and we still have to make more.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
Pattypans are not that good for soup, although we did use some to bulk up the tomato sauces. However, we still need to eat those eight pieces in the picture and here I came up with an idea to stuff them not with shredded meat, but with standard stuffing made from bread, eggs, veggies, and salami. It is a whole meal on its own and one such pattypan baked with mushrooms or green beans is food enough for the three of us for two days. But we still can’t eat them fast enough.
To top it off, today I harvested the hokkaido squash pumpkins.
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I planted eight plants but six were destroyed by slugs and one remained stunted the whole summer and bore just one fruit. The other one, however, took off magnificently in July and August and bore about as much fruit as I expected all eight plants together when I planted them. One of these will be made into a dozen or so small glasses of mustard. Two I managed to push into my neighbor’s hands. I don’t know yet what we do with the rest. Maybe some marmalade and some soup too.
Part of the problem is that I also had to harvest the potatoes because it is supposed to rain the next week and it is better to harvest them before the ground turns to mud. As a result, we have a lot of potatoes that also need to be processed quickly – about which I will write tomorrow.
Awesome!
Wow, those are some great looking squash. I’ve never seen a pattypan that large. I’m sure it cans well, though I’ve never attempted to preserve them. Weirdly, North America only calls the orange skinned and fleshed ribbed squashes that are used for baking and Halloween decorations Pumpkins, and all the others are squash.
Mine were doing well until a windstorm hit and several large tree branches fell into my veggie patch and flattened them. They might recover, but there are only a few weeks of growing season left so I don’t think I will get any fruit for my efforts this year.
@Tethys, that is a bummer, I can empathize. If I could give you some of mine, I would, but that is, alas, not doable since we do not have teleporting technology.
The pattypans are larger than usual. Last year I harvested just two pattypans from one plant, so this year I planted ten plants and I was really pissed off when slugs destroyed half of them. But the remaining plants outperformed my wildest dreams and I got four to six fruits from each, and every fruit was almost twice the size I had last year.
We tried with my mother to estimate how many pumpkins I harvested this year (it did not occur to me to write it down since I was not expecting much) and we concluded that it was over 100 kg. There is about 50 kg just in the pictures in this article.
Nomnomnom
Mine were a total loss this year. The slugs ate most of the plants and since I had no time for weeding, the rest was overgrown. With the rather wet weather, there would be tiny courgettes and then they would rot off. Well, better luck next year…
Ah, shit! Over half of the jars with soup spoiled already, so it seems this experiment did not work out well. The tomato sauces, compotes, sauerkraut, pickles -- all of that is OK, but the soups are not. Probably not salty enough. I will try once more, this time with pressure cooker.
Hello.
If I were in the business of growing squash, this summer might’ve drowned me in surplus squash. The last four months have been not only frost free (which is reasonable), but rather warm and sunny, especially at the beginning and end of the season. Finland has absolutely broken the record for the number of hot summer days (officially defined as having daily maximum above 25C). It’s been rather dry, too, which limits the activity of slugs. Now there’s finally some rain, as the persistent weather front slowly moves toward east.
I did grow some cucumbers and tomatoes in my glasshouse balcony. The tomatoes grew very well, and stored some of the harvest in freezer because the big ones were really mushy to begin with, only good for cooking. I’m still harvesting the cherry tomatoes, which were planted relatively late, and they are pretty good to eat fresh.
The cucumbers performed poorly in both quantity and quality, because I was cheap when buying the seeds. For about 5 euro, you’d get a bag of about 10 seeds of a modern hybrid cultivar that produces female-only flowers and high quality fruit. The seeds remain viable for a couple years, which is a problem if you only have space to grow one or two plants per year. Instead, I bought a bag of self-breeding cultivar, which cost only 1.50 euro or so despite containing hundreds of seeds. Turns out it produces enormous amounts of male flowers, but only few female ones, pollination is finicky and end result is barely edible.
I have also begun harvesting the autumn crop of lettuce, radish and other leafy greens. They have barely survived the late summer heatwave. I can’t plant them later, because then it soon gets dark and cold, and all growth stops.
Speaking of the weather, I see from the news that there’s (again) horrible flooding in central Europe.
I habitually look at Europe’s weather map at the Finnish Meteorological Service’s website. It’s not very good at conveying precipitation. Instead, I’ve noticed all summer that there’s a persistent large mass of anomalously hot air over eastern Europe, extending into Finland most of the time. It seems to feed the persistent weather front that’s been frequently dumping heavy rain on western and central Europe. I see this kind of weather pattern more and more, year after year. I recently saw some discussion suggesting that it might be related to the rapid weakening of North Atlantic circulation.
Meanwhile, war-torn Ukraine has been sweltering in the middle of that hot air mass all summer, with temperatures often exceeding 30C. That’s not unusual temperature in Ukraine, but when it happens a lot, that’s both unusual and exhausting for civilians and soldiers. Maybe once I’ve seen this additional burden on Ukrainian people brought up on western media. Unclear if the heat or associated drought has damaged this year’s crops.