Gardeners' Holidays 2021: Harvest Home (Halfway?)

The Gardeners' Holiday associated with the fall equinox is normally a little-bit-of-everything celebration. In late September, the tomato and pepper plants are generally producing at full steam, the basil is just winding down, the late beans and butternut squash are just coming into production, and the raspberry canes are in the middle of their second crop of the season. 

This year, however, we seem to have hit a bit of a lull just as the season was starting. There are currently no ripe tomatoes on the vines, not even among the ever-abundant Sun Golds, and only a couple of just-blushing peppers. Brian harvested all that was left of the basil last night to put into a Pasta a la Caprese, along with the week's whole crop of tomatoes (mostly the juicy Pineapple variety). And the green beans got munched early in the season by a deer that found its way into the garden, reducing our crop to just 15 ounces of the Provider beans and, so far, not a single pod off the climbing French beans. 

The squash plants do have a good amount of fruit on them — and although we planted only the Little Dipper variety this year, not all of them are little. But most of them aren't ready to harvest yet. So far, Brian has only gleaned one tiny squash from a vine that was already shriveled. 

However, that doesn't mean we have no squash to eat. Last year, we harvested a total of 21 squash, and Brian has been very parsimonious in doling them out, wanting to make sure that the supply would last until we were able to harvest more. So we still have two left from last year, and the arrival of the first squash of this year means that we are free to use them up at will. Thus, one of those last-generation squash is feeding us this evening in the form of a butternut squash pizza.

There's also one other crop that hasn't let us down: our trusty raspberries. Although the second raspberry harvest has slowed from its peak, I still got more than a cup of berries off the canes when I went out there this afternoon. And since the berries were probably too ripe to keep around for more than 24 hours, and since Brian and I are going to be busy all day tomorrow (going to a Renaissance Faire that doesn't allow any outside food or drink), we simply had no choice but to eat them tonight for dessert.

Our first thought was to make one of the rare exceptions to our no-dairy-at-home rule and pick up a cup of cream so we could make them into a raspberry fool, but when we got to the store, we found that cream was only available in quarts. That was more than we thought we could reasonably use, so we went with plan B, baking the berries into an apple-raspberry crisp. We'll enjoy that along with some entertaining international TV (we have several episodes of Taskmaster, both the original and New Zealand versions, and a new QI to choose from), then turn in early so we can get a good night's sleep before our day of carousing tomorrow. Huzzah!