Above, clockwise from lower left: Aunt Molly's ground cherries, Boston marrow squash, red Russian kale, green and ripe small sugar pumpkins, Aunt Ruby's green tomato, sweet basil and giant Italian parsley, white custard squash; center in jar: calendula oil.
Ah, Autumn! The air is bright and dry. The crops are coming in... the pumpkins and winter squash are ripe... wait! It's only July 30th. Bright and dry, yes, but what is with those ripe pumpkins and winter squash??!
To review the unusual high/low points of the weather thus far intn 2010: No hard frost in the ground here since early March. 15" of rain in two storms over the last two weeks of March. Dry, dry, DRY weather most of the time since. Bloody stinking hot summer, too. Pumpkins startied to ripen in early July, and now they've been picked nearly a month later. What next?? Snow in August? Daffodils blooming in January? It's shard to know what to think.
In fact, we nearly got two crops of pumpkins this year, but I goofed. See the two green ones at top, left? I didn't realize they were attached to the same vine on which the oldest of the pumpkins was growing. The vine got damaged in the process of picking the ripe one, and I had to pick the rest green. We will grill them like a summer squash, which I did last year with some prematurely picked butternuts and delicata squashes; they were delicious.
The calendula oil in the photo was made over a few weeks. Into olive oil, I put the petals of calendula as the flowers opened. The sun "cooked" it. Calendula is great for the skin, so a topical oil is a wonderful way to go. I chose to grow a variety with the highest amounts of medicinal resins for this very reason (resina calendula from Fedco).
