Gardeners' Holidays 2025: Late Harvest

With the days growing shorter and temperatures dipping ever lower, Brian and I have spent a lot of the past few weeks getting ready for winter. We've had our boiler tuned up, put our warm comforter on the bed, and gotten our flu and COVID jabs. I've stashed away my light cotton socks and filled up my sock drawer with my warmer wool and acrylic ones. My wearable blanket and pressure cooker space heater have already been pressed into service. And, out in the garden, we've harvested all the tender crops and pretty much everything else.

Sadly, this didn't take very long. Our gardening year appears to be ending not with a bang, but with a whimper, particularly in the squash department. After last year's 42-pound bumper crop, we thought we'd hit on a winning strategy by sticking to the Waltham variety, but this year it fell completely flat. Our four vines produced only six squash, including one so small you can't even see it in the photo. In total, they weighed just 14 pounds, one-third of what we got last year. 

This has me questioning whether our all-Waltham approach is so wise after all. Maybe next year, it would be a good idea to hedge our bets by adding a second variety, such as Burpee's Butterbush. Even if it's less productive overall, it could be something to fall back on if the Waltham is a flop again. Or perhaps we should upgrade to Fedco's new "primo strain," Wig Out Waltham, which promises "the best in yield and consistency" for only marginally higher cost.

However, there is one bright spot in our fall harvest. We currently have a pretty good haul of one crop that we didn't actually plant: black walnuts.

Every fall since we moved to Highland Park, I've noticed the ground in certain areas being strewn with these odd sort of greenish balls, roughly the size of an egg. Sometimes, I'd see one split open and what looked like a blackish nut poking out. However, I vaguely assumed they probably weren't edible because no one seemed to be gathering them. It wasn't until this year, when there were so many of the green balls underfoot that I had to kick them off the sidewalk to keep from slipping on them and tumbling arse-over-teakettle, that I bothered to investigate the matter. After a little research, I learned that the green balls are indeed the fruit of the black walnut tree, and while they aren't themselves edible, the nuts are.

Mind you, it takes a bit of work to get at them. First, you have to strip off the husk—carefully, as it can stain almost anything it touches. Then they need to cure in their shells for a couple of weeks to develop their flavor. And once they're ready to eat, you can't just crack them with an ordinary nutcracker; to get through their extremely hard shells, you have to bang them with a hammer, crush them in a vise, or even back over them with your car. But according to aficionados, their strong, earthy, bittersweet flavor is well worth the effort.

So, over the course of several walks, both in our neighborhood and while visiting friends in Virginia, we gathered up a whole bunch of these little walnut balls. I removed the hulls from a few of them by stepping on them and rolling them under my foot, but Brian threw caution to the wind and tore most of them off with his hands, which, just as the article warned, retained greenish-brown smudges for days afterwards. Then he spread them out in small batches in front of the dehumidifier in the laundry room to dry. It took a few weeks, but eventually we ended up with a quart or so of cured nuts in their shells—about 40 in total.

Then came the really hard part, both literally and figuratively: getting those shells open. Brian cracked the first one by putting it in a vise and tightening it until it snapped (the shell, not the vise, although it felt like kind of a close call which would give first). We each sampled a bit of the nutmeat and found it...odd. It was a bit like a regular walnut, but with a sort of funky, musty flavor underneath. Not bad, exactly, but weird. I kept nibbling at mine, trying to figure out what to compare it to, and the best I could come up with was to say it's a bit like a strong cheese but without the saltiness. Brian tried cracking a few more (taking about ten minutes to get through four nuts) and toasting them to see how that affected their flavor. The toasted nuts smelled absolutely lovely, powerfully nutty and rich, and their flavor was a bit darker, but that odd mustiness was still there. 

These nuts were so different from anything else we've tasted that we weren't quite sure what would be the best way to use them. I did a bit of searching and found several recipes at Southern Living, both savory and sweet: an ice cream, a pasta dish, a sweet bread, a pie, and a salad. To get a better idea of how the walnuts might taste in a sweet dish, I tried sprinkling some cinnamon sugar over one and found that the combination worked quite well: the sugar and spice seemed to soften the funkiness of the walnuts, making it just one element in a more complex blend. Then, for a savory counterpart, I tried one with a bit of our homemade spaghetti salt, and the effect was much the same: the mustiness blended into the background instead of dominating the flavor. So I think that will be the key to enjoying these walnuts: blend them with other strong-tasting ingredients so that their musty, earthy quality will become an interesting element of the flavor rather than the primary note. This recipe for maple-Dijon roasted Brussels sprouts with walnuts might be a good place to start.

Gardeners' Holidays 2021: Berry Fest

Technically, the Gardeners' Holiday for June 2021 should have been last Sunday, on the summer solstice itself. But we spent that whole day out of town celebrating Fathers' Day with my dad, so we weren't able to spend any time in the garden or eat anything harvested from it. So this year's Berry Fest is coming a week late.

Fortunately, there are still plenty of raspberries left on the canes to celebrate. We're harvesting between half a cup and a cup per day right now, and there are still lots of berries left that have yet to ripen. We'll probably be gathering in this first crop for another couple of weeks at least before it peters out, and then we'll have the second harvest to enjoy in September. In fact, if anything, the canes might be growing a little too well; the area inside our raspberry trellis is turning into a bit of a jungle. Brian went out today and pulled a bunch of stray suckers that had sprouted outside the boundaries of the bed, but when it's time to prune out last year's canes, we'll probably have to remove some of this year's as well just so we can reach everything.

We also have a new berry harvest to celebrate this year. Despite the fact that two of our honeyberry bushes perished last winter and we only replaced one of them, we have already managed to harvest about half a cup of berries off the four survivors. The bird netting we put over the plants seems to be succeeding in keeping away marauders (both two-legged and four-legged), but the gaps in it are big enough to allow us to slip a couple of fingers in to pick the berries that appear biggest and ripest. We aren't yet getting a large enough crop to justify taking the netting off completely and covering the ground with cardboard so we can shake the berries down onto it, but according to the FAQ at Honeyberry USA, we can expect to reach that point in another year or two.

And, to round out this fruit fest, we're beginning to get our first few plums of the season. Most of the ones on the trees are still green, and most of the ones that have fallen on the ground haven't been in any shape for eating, but a few of the ones we've gathered from around the base of the Opal appeared to be full-sized and close enough to ripeness to make them worth trying. We also picked up a bunch of slightly smaller or harder ones that looked like they had at least begun to blush before they fell, so we are keeping those outside the fridge to see if they ripen up enough to eat. 

At any rate, it is a reassuring sign that there are plums on the trees that are surviving long enough to ripen. Despite weekly spraying with copper fungicide, we haven't completely licked the brown rot; we're still seeing quite a few plums either drop prematurely or turn into brownish "mummies" on the branch. But at least there are some that have stayed healthy and haven't been toted away by squirrels. I'm not counting my plums before they're hatched, but there is at least a chance that the harvest from the three trees — first the Opal, then the Mount Royal, and finally the Golden Gage — will keep us in fresh fruit until our second crop of raspberries comes in.

As it happens, we're not actually doing anything special with all this fruit today in honor of the Gardeners' Holiday. We haven't yet managed to find an ideal alternative to whipped cream for a raspberry fool, and failing that, the most satisfying thing I could think of to do with all these berries was to eat them straight up. But we are including a little of our garden produce in tonight's dinner: some summer lettuce for a salad and one tiny fingerling zucchini, the first of the season, which we can fry up with a little garlic as an appetizer. And the raspberries will get their star turn next month, as Brian has already turned one batch of them into jam for this year's anniversary cake.

While he was at it, in fact, he even made some jam from berries that weren't actually grown on our property. He has now gone back to working on campus part of the time, and one afternoon during his lunch break he decided to wander off in search of the nearby pawpaw patch he discovered a few years back. The pawpaws weren't ripe yet, but he discovered there was a large mulberry tree right next to them and gleaned about a pint of fresh berries from it. (Pro tip: full-strength vinegar turns out to be good for removing mulberry stains from a handkerchief that's been used as a berry container.) After we scarfed these down, he decided to go back for a second batch and try turning it into jam. He didn't can it, just cooked it down and stuck it in the fridge for future use. So if we really want a fruit-based dessert to make our Berry Fest dinner complete, we can always try a bit of that on some toast.

Gardeners' Holidays 2018: Harvest Home

Well, we finally made it through this brutally hot summer. For once, fall weather has arrived right on time according to the calendar, and my house is already decked out in its fall colors, with a little basket of autumn leaves on the side stoop and a row of Jack Be Little pumpkins in the front.

That means it's also time for Harvest Home, the Gardeners' Holiday that celebrates the peak of the fall harvest. This year, however, we celebrated it in an unusual way: rather than feasting on produce from our own garden, we did a little foraging. Or at least, Brian did.

A couple of days ago, one of his coworkers showed up with several pawpaw fruits that she said had come from a tree located close to their workplace, just outside of the campus boundaries. Pawpaws, for those who don't know, are a native fruit found throughout the entire eastern half of the U.S., as far west as Texas. The landscaper we consulted about our yard back in 2012 actually suggested a pawpaw tree as a possible good choice for our front yard, but we were reluctant to commit to a tree whose fruit we'd never actually tasted. You see, pawpaws are pretty much impossible to find in supermarkets, because they're too delicate and fast-ripening for large-scale shipping. So the easiest way to get a taste of it is to find a tree growing wild, as Brian's coworker did. (That may be changing, however; according to NPR's "The Salt," interest in pawpaws has grown dramatically in the last couple of years, to the extent that some have labeled it "the hipster banana." In fact, right after we both tried them for the first time on Thursday, we discovered a bin of them at the Whole Earth Center that identified them as the produce of a local farm—something we'd never seen in there before, as far as I can recall.)

From the outside, these weren't much to look at: sort of mottled, brownish-green ovoids about the size of my fist. According to a video Brian found online, there are two ways to eat them: you can slice them or just cut them in half and scoop out the pulp. (The peel isn't edible, but there's no good way to remove it from outside without destroying the squishy inner portion.)

So he sliced one open, revealing soft, creamy-yellow flesh studded with large, dark-brown seeds about the size of an almond. We each sampled a cautious spoonful, not really sure what to expect. A piece I found on NPR's "The Salt" described them as "a cross between a mango and a banana," with possible hints of pineapple, but to me, the flavor wasn't mangolike at all, though the soft, slippery texture was a bit reminiscent of a slightly overripe mango. It was more like banana than anything else, but with a distinct perfumey quality—I really can't think of any other word for it—that was unlike any fruit I'd ever tasted. I honestly found it a bit off-putting, but Brian liked it enough not only to finish the fruit he'd started, but to go out in search of the tree the next day and scavenge a couple more. After eating one more of them today, he says he's still kind of on the fence about it; he mostly likes it, but he can't decide whether that odd perfumey element to the flavor is appealing or disturbing.

Nonetheless, he's intrigued enough by the fruit to save the seeds from the ones he's eaten so far, carefully keeping them moist and cool in the refrigerator as The Survival Gardener recommends. He admits he's not sure yet where he could plant them; the site described them as an "understory tree" that likes to grow in the shade of larger trees, so he thought perhaps the shaded back corner of our yard (currently home to a massive pile of concrete chunks left over from our patio project) would be a good spot for one.

However, I'm not sure it's really worth devoting space in our yard to a tree neither of us is sure we like, especially when the California Rare Fruit Growers site says "Avoid heavy, wet, alkaline soil." I think a better use of the seeds might be to seek permission to plant some along the Meadows Trail, a short hiking trail through woods adjoining the Raritan River just outside of Donaldson Park. That would give everyone in town—including the local wildlife—a chance to try this unusual fruit, rather than saddling us with a whole harvest to dispose of on our own.

All in all, I'd say that I'm pleased to have had the opportunity to try this unusual native fruit, but I'm in no hurry to eat it again. However, if Brian persists in his plan to grow them—and succeeds—I'll probably give them at least one more try. Our old edition of The Joy of Cooking, in a single brief paragraph on pawpaws, says "The taste for these, we feel, is an acquired one"—so I should probably make at least a little bit of effort to acquire it.

Money Crashers: Ultimate Foraging Guide

About five years ago, I mentioned on this site that we like to pick and eat dandelion greens from our yard. This is an example of foraging: picking and eating wild food, where "wild" means anything that hasn't been planted on purpose. Brian and I aren't exactly habitual foragers; our scavenging is generally limited to weeds from our own yard, plus the occasional berry that we can pick while out walking. When it comes to supplying our own food, we rely much more on plants that we've actually planted and watered and weeded.

Nonetheless, I think foraging is an interesting and definitely ecofrugal idea. It's not merely getting food for free; it's getting food that was grown locally (in your own neighborhood) and organically (with no fertilizers or chemicals of any kind), without even using any water beyond what it gets from the sky. The carbon footprint of those dandelion greens we put in our salad wasn't just small, it was probably negative, since they actually absorbed carbon while they were growing.

But foraging also, quite clearly, has its risks. The most obvious one is eating something that could kill you, or at least strongly disagree with you. But it also has legal risks, since you can get arrested for picking someone else's plants without permission, and moral hazards, since you could inadvertently damage the environment by picking too much of a plant that's crucial to the ecosystem. And even if you don't harm the environment, there's still the question of how much you can reasonably take and how much you're morally obligated to leave behind for others.

In my latest Money Crashers article, I explore all these different aspects of foraging. I discuss the benefits of gathering your own food, along with the risks; I provide details about some common foods that grow in the wild; I discuss some basic rules for foraging safely and ethically; and then, since I can't possibly tell you everything you need to know in one article, I conclude by providing links to other sites and resources where you can learn more. But I hope that my article serves, as least, as a good, broad introduction to the subject, one that will whet your appetite for more information about the delicious and cheap bounty of nature.

Ultimate Foraging Guide – Edible Wild Plants & Food, Benefits & Dangers

First Picking

Just about a month after First Washday, we celebrated another spring milestone: First Picking, or the first meal of the year to contain something harvested from our own yard. If you think late March seems awfully early to be harvesting anything from the garden, you're quite right; our garden beds are still empty, except for a few holdovers from last year (a stubborn parsley plant and a few leeks that finally decided to germinate this spring after I'd given them up for lost). Even our perennial crops, asparagus and rhubarb, have only just begun to show their heads in their separate little beds, and it will probably be a few weeks at least before any of them are ready to pick.

No, the edibles harvested from the yard for last night's dinner weren't actually planted there; they grew up all by themselves. In fact, they're probably growing in your yard, too, whether you want them to or not. I'm referring, of course, to the lowly and much-maligned dandelion. This tough little weed is the bane of many gardeners because it will grow anywhere and is practically impossible to eradicate. However, as the saying goes, when life gives you lemons, make lemonade—and when your garden gives you dandelions, make salad.

Dandelion greens are supposed to be at their best this time of year, when they're young and tender. Picking them is tricky, because if your yard is anything like ours, the dandelions are mixed in on the ground with twigs and crabgrass and fallen leaves, all of which you have to pick out of the dandelion leaves before you can use them. The greens also come out covered in mud, so you have to wash them very thoroughly. I put them all in a big bowl of water and then completely drained and changed the water three times before I considered them clean enough to eat. I also had to remove the roots, the blossoms (you can eat those, but it's a different recipe) and the tougher stems. However, once you've done all this prep work, the actual cooking is pretty easy. We used a recipe gleaned from Mother Earth News, although it's basically just a variant on the generic recipe for greens that appears in Mountain Cooking, a collection of traditional recipes from Appalachia:

Chop four slices of bacon (in our case, certified humane bacon from Trader Joe's) and fry it until crisp. Pour off all but a tablespoon of the drippings (Note: if you don't eat bacon at all, you can just heat up a tablespoon of olive oil) and add a diced red onion, or a couple of chopped scallions, to the skillet. Stir in 2 teaspoons of brown sugar and 2 tablespoons of cider vinegar, then pour the hot dressing over your greens to wilt them. Toss, and add salt and pepper to taste.

And there you have it: fresh, organic, extremely local (less than 100 feet), seasonal greens for free. Can't get more ecofrugal than that.