Fall into Gumbo

 All I can say about the first frosts and freezes of the season and their resultant devastation of our remaining hot-weather garden, is "Thank y'all!" 

I've never liked tomatoes before, and suddenly I love them. My experience growing them was nearly zilch, and the garden produced like wild, wild weeds. 

Okra and peppers and several fantastic pots of beans were THERE. Not everything Jack and I started back in the spring amounted to anything, but overall, what a wonderful summer of work we did.

Nothing but grateful from this gardener.

We finished the season with flouish in some of the most beautifully velvety gumbos to ever be created. Our okra - especially the late "Motherland" variety, which didn't start producing until 5 or so weeks ago - was creamier than any okra either of us have had before. In gumbo, it transformed into silky perfection with hearty chicken and rings of andouille sausage. 

I'm not blowing it up, either. This stuff (with a light dusting of file on top) was every bit'a that good. 

Cool Cabbages

October's here, and I'm ready for it. I haven't always welcomed the arrival of cooler weather with open arms, but this year, fall has arrived like an old friend. I'm mostly ready to stop worrying about the cabbage and broccoli plants I've been helicopter parenting since the seeds went into the dirt back in July. 

The cabbage and broccoli in the spring garden were devoured first by deer then caterpillars, and we got nothing. The bok choys were beautiful, but the rest of the brassicas were literal worm food. I tried picking them off by hand on a daily basis, but they were too much, and yes, that task is absolutely as unpleasant as it sounds. 

After giving up on the spring crop, I learned about natural, non-poisonous ways to control cabbage cooties, and without jumping into a whole big thing, I'll just say, "they work." 

You have to stay on top of things, observe the plants everyday, and be ready to spray at the sight of the first worm, but they work. 

Here's where we currently sit:

Bounty from the Garden

These pictures are from a few weeks ago when the fall garden was living its best life. 

We grew a GREAT crop of broccoli and expected to just "eat some along" throughout colder weather until the temperatures really dipped, but our weather was amazingly warm - in the mid-70s for the stretch of days through Christmas - and crowns started rotting on the vine. Boom! In a matter of days, our nearly perfect broccoli overshot ideal ripeness and started getting soft and mushy in the middle. DOH! We picked every bit of it, sharing with Mom, Dad, the Vernons, and the neighbors and eating lots of it ourselves. 

Steamed. Soup. Sheet pan dinner. 

We'd hoped we'd get another picking or two of sideshoots, but as quickly as the temperatures rose to the 70s, it plunged to less than 15, and the broccoli was finito. 

The bok choy was a slightly different scenario and tolerated both warm and cold better than other things in our garden, and was cold hearty even through a dusting of snow. We did finally pick the remaining dozen or so heads last week before the super-cold weather and still have a handful in the fridge. 

Our "regular cabbage" never grew that well but is hanging in through whatever weather we have in heads ranging in size from tennis ball to softball. They're mild and tender and taste great quartered and roasted on a sheetpan. 

Baby Turnips

 Despite the disappointment of the peas, the fall garden DOES have some really nice things happening, and turnips are among them. 

These are some baby ones we pulled to thin our row of purple-topped globe turnips. Jack cooked these whole in the InstantPot with a double-handful of ham-hock flibberts, and they were delicious.

With cornbread.

Peas of Mine

 

(Peas may or may not be shown actual size)

Get it? Peas of mine... peace of mind... 

No? 

Maybe I'm not as clever as I tell myself I am, but it's a better effort than I expected when I sat down to type this brisk fall evening. 

Y'all might remember when I planted about a thousand peas on the hottest day of late August - the 27th to be exact - and predicted the first harvest on or about October 20th. Well, this is it. 

This is actually a third of it, because somebody called ME kept eating precious tasty pods as soon as I picked them, because they are 100% as delicious as I want them to be. These are little, but I had to have something to show for myself for the on-time harvest, right?

I'm trying not to brag too much or be too proud of the way the fall garden project is coming along, because deer, rabbits, raccoons, groundhogs, squirrels, and stuff I don't even know to worry about could eat it all to the ground in a single evening. 

Aside from that, the garden is on the edge of a walnut grove and might be susceptible to jugalone poisoning, which I'd never heard of until we had a bunch of stuff planted already. Here's an article about it from The Morton Arboretum if you're interested:

https://mortonarb.org/plant-and-protect/tree-plant-care/plant-care-resources/black-walnut-toxicity/#!

Back to the peas, though. 

After I picked those, I harvested the last bit of okra - six tiny, blotchy, mildew'ish pods - and said goodbye to the gigantic stalks Dad and I grew over the summer. Some were more than 2 inches in diameter at the ground and grew tall - 7 to 8 feet tall and were GENEROUS with the pods they gave us. They were beautiful in their prime but had gotten spindly and piddling in recent weeks with a frosting of powdery mildew on the larger plants. I worried about that stuff spreading to the pea plants before I could get them whacked-out and dragged-off.

This sheet pan dinner included both, so I guess you could call it a transition in seasons with the last of summer and the first of fall on the same plate. The peppers were from the garden and the other things, carrots (always carrots), mushrooms (ALWAYS mushrooms), and broccoli, from the store, it was perfectly delicious over some brown rice.

(Peas were added at the end to keep them lively. Throw them on, cut the heat, wait 5 minutes, PERFECT.)