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.

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.

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.

When the pumpkin cubes soften, we either mash them or shred them with a food mixer into a thin paste.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I took a few day’s break from working on the cutting boards and associated machinery because my car is in repair. Without it, I cannot buy the necessary materials, and it’s not worth ordering these online. I also cannot buy groceries until the car is repaired, so yesterday I baked bread, and today I baked pizza. It was under guidance from my mother who told me what to do and what ingredients to use etc. but I think I can claim most of the credit because I did most of the actual work and I did in fact knead the dough.

The bread looked kinda meh going in.

But it looked splendid going out. I had it for dinner and it tasted absolutely fabulous. Not even the best bread bought at a supermarket can beat a home-baked loaf.

The pizza looked as usual going in. I.E. a mess.

And it did not look any better going out since pizza is one of those foods that looks like someone already ate it.

But it tasted great too and after that lunch, I could not move for several hours and still have left over for dinner.

I also harvested about 45 kg of potatoes. The small patch near my greenhouse dried up about 90% already so I decided to dig them all up. 45 kg is a reasonable harvest considering that in this patch, I planted mainly leftover tiny/green potatoes from the previous year and about 5 kg of those that I could not fit into the main potato bed. Of these 45 kg about 34 kg were in good enough shape for storage and 11 kg need to be eaten or otherwise processed asap.

Thus after the very crapy start of the year it at least appears I might get my money’s and time’s worth out of the garden after all. I already harvested enough pumpkin to can them as canned fruit (ala pineapple), pickled (ala gherkin), and sauerkraut ersatz to last for two years. I am still not even on the money due to the huge amount of molluscicides I had to use at the beginning of the growing season, but I should get there easily now. It would be strange if I did not get at least 100 kg of potatoes from the main patch and I will definitively get more pattypans and pumpkins still.

Tomatoes outdoors got consumed by mold despite my best efforts. The weather was simply too wet and I could not spray them with fungicides all the time. At least the potatoes appear to have resisted it and the tomatoes in the greenhouse are shielded from rain and fog and thus so far resisted too. While annoying, it is not too big a loss. The weather was so cold and wet that the tomatoes outdoors did not grow above my knees anyway whereas those in the greenhouse are up to my shoulders, as shown in the picture. I hope those in the greenhouse do not catch it because if the weather stays reasonably warm, I could harvest tomatoes at least till the first frost. I would very much like to try my hand at homemade ketchup and dried tomatoes. It looks promising. The first tomato started to blush on August 2. and as these things usually go, others followed quickly after that. It takes about two weeks for a tomato to fully ripen therefore sometime toward the end of next week I should start harvesting.

Like every year for the past few years, I planted beans along the south wall of our house. Those appear to have thrived and I can look forward to at least a few kg of shelled beans and some canned bean pods. Although I hope most of them ripen and dry – we still have not eaten all the canned pods from last year.

Did you have any success this year in your gardens? From what I read in the news, most people around the world do not experience abnormally cold and wet summer this year, quite the opposite. I would not mind the wet, but the cold is bumming me out. One of the strangest things that happened due to the cold weather is that some of the corn I planted in the spring started to grow only about two weeks ago. It appears that wet and too cold or dry and too hot are the only two options we have now. We haven’t had what I’d call a “normal” summer for about a decade by now.