Thursday Squash

A Red Kuri Squash in the Garden

This is my first year growing winter squash, and rather than the traditional butternut, a Red Kuri is what I chose to try out.  Apparently they are like small red pumpkins, or sometimes they stay yellow, with a very tasty nutty flavor.  Trying oddball things like this is one of the aspects of home gardening that really appeals to me: I'm not limited to what the markets choose to sell.

Another excellent example of that is garlic.  There are two kinds of garlic in the brand-name stores here, and maybe another five more at the farmer's market, but this year I planted four totally oddball varieties in my  search for the perfect garlic--and I think I may have found it: Romanian Red.  My RR's are producing large bulbs right now, enough to make it possible for me to save the largest cloves and replant them without buying new seed stock.  An additional bonus is the garlic scapes that I just harvested and pickled--I had no idea what a scape was until I grew my own garlic, and now I wonder how I lived this long without them.  They're only in season for a brief period in the spring, and each hardneck garlic plant produces only one--so they're relatively rare.  But oh my god, how delicious with scrambled eggs, or pickled!

I laugh, with a smile, at how tame my life has become.   Tomorrow I am going to go to the local food bank to see about volunteering possibilities.  Since I stopped with the Mountain Rescue gig, I've been sort of aimlessly looking around for ways to give back to the community again.  My tendency to overplant and the obviously huge amount of Red Kuri squashes that I'm going to have made me consider ways to give the produce away--and the food bank accepts gardener's donations.  And that made me wonder if perhaps I could do more than just that.

And now I'm googling ways to become a certified master gardener...