Unknown Winter Squash

So due to the fact that I had thrown some winter squash and pumpkins in my lettuce garden at home, in the spring I had lots of winter squash that came up on its own.  Most of them I pulled out since I did not want pumpkins growing all over in my valuable lettuce planting area.  But I did leave a couple of vines that were out of the way and ended up growing out of the garden area anyhow.  One of them was a regular normal pumpkin, but the other one is the plant in question.  When I first seen it I thought it looked like a delicata winter squash crossed with maybe a pumpkin?

 

I grew a lot of winter squashes and pumpkins last year so I am not exactly sure what it would be a mix of, I do know I did not have anything exactly like it last year.  Can not wait to cut into it and see how it tastes.  If it is good I will have to see if I can work on getting a new variety going and save all the seeds.

Mix Your Own Cherry Tomato Containers

I started something new this year with my cherry tomatoes, instead of just having the cherry tomatoes premixed in containers I decided to let customers choose which varieties of cherry tomatoes they wanted to fill their containers with.

 

We have over 15 different varieties of cherry tomatoes, and are available in many different colors and sizes.  We have red, orange, yellow, green, pink, purple, brown, and striped tomatoes.  Also available are pear tomatoes, which are shaped like a pear but are the size of a cherry tomato, we have yellow pear, red pear, ivory pear, and purple pear tomatoes.

Since we did not have a frost on Monday morning like they were saying we could, we should be able to have our cherry tomatoes available for at least one more week.  And if the first frost will hold off for awhile we may be able to keep picking them even longer.  It basically all comes down to the weather as far as how much longer we should have tomatoes for.

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Here are a few more pictures that I took the other day around the farm.

 

One of many many gourds that I will be picking very very soon.

 

A whole bunch of gourds.

 

Some may be hard to see but there were quite a few gourds in this one area.  The bigger green ones are bird house gourds.

Just to let everyone know pumpkins, winter squash and gourds are going to be coming to the market this next weekend, and I will be continuing to pick more over the next couple of weeks.

Recipes from Thanksgiving

First off I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving!
I do not know why but this year unfortunately I did not take any pictures of everything at Thanksgiving. I think because I was trying to keep things a little bit simpler this year. Normally I would be really excited about Thanksgiving, since it is the time of year when I get to cook up a large variety of everything that we grew. This year I was not quite a excited since not everything that I cooked up had been grown by us, because this year was such a bust with all the rain and all.

Any I just thought I would share a couple of new recipes that I tried with you guys. One is a recipe for butternut squash and the other is for beets. Usually I would cook up my butternut squash for Thanksgiving with brown sugar and butter in the oven, but since I am trying to stay away from sugar (due to the fact that sugar always gives me a headache) my old way of cooking winter squash was just not going to work. So I found this recipe that did not contain any sugar and I think it turned out pretty good.

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Butternut Squash Casserole
3 pounds butternut squash, peeled and cubed
2 eggs, beaten
1 cup shredded cheddar cheese
1 medium onion, chopped
3/4 cup milk
1 package crushed Ritz crackers
2 tbls. butter

Place squash in a saucepan and cover with water bring to a boil. Cook until soft, remove and drain; mash. In another bowl combine eggs, cheese, onion, and milk; add to the mashed squash and mix. Transfer to a baking dish. Sprinkle with cracker crumbs. Dot with butter. Bake uncovered at 350 degrees for 45 minutes.
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This next recipe I found on allrecipes.com. When I made it I didn't exactly measure things out just sort of threw it together. I do not think that I used quite as much olive oil and vinegar that the recipe called for, and I also added more garlic than the recipe said. I do think that the beets taste their best the first day that they are made, but that is just my opinion.

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Garlicky Beets
6 medium beets
3 tbls. olive oil
2 tbls. red wine vinegar
2 cloves garlic

Boil the beets until tender at least 45 minutes. Remove the skins as soon as the beets have cooled enough to handle after they have been strained. Slice the beets and toss with all ingredients.
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