Roasting winter squash

This is how I roasted my winter squash for my latest batch of autumnal winter squash soup. First I cut it in half and scooped the seeds out. Then I cut it into segments like this:

I didn't peel the skin off them first because with winter squash sweet dumpling the skin is so tough it's hard enough to cut them, peeling them raw is practically impossible.

I then poured olive oil on them and squooshed them around in it to make sure they were thoroughly coated before baking them for 45 minutes in a 190° oven. They came out all squishy and delicious. It's possible I could have got away with a slightly shorter bake time.

50 shades of carrots

I picked carrots from the line that's supposed to have white carrots in it and got a variety of colours. The pure white ones are generally practically inedible, they're so tough and scrawny. I got the seeds form the allotments where I did my course. They'd produced them themselves. I suspect their white carrots of having mated with orange carrots, hence the variety of colours. I might give it a go from the seed they look like they're trying to produce themselves this year - some of the carrots from the line decided they were annuals not biennials (=flower in the 2nd year) and bolted, so I may get seed.

Autumnal winter squash and ginger soup

When I found two of my squashes lying rotten on the ground, I decided it was time to harvest.

In terms of storage, I've had to compromise. Not having a cool room to put them in (the shed absolutely boils when it's sunny), I've decided to store them as decorations in the lounge.

I've already eaten a couple of them in soup.  It was tasted of autumn (and would have been vegan if only I'd used a different vegetable stock, but didn't make my husband complain about lack of meat so must have been good.)

Here's the recipe (all amounts are approximate and can be varied), you will need a blender or similar device to blend this, although it's probably pretty nice even without blending:

Autumnal winter squash & ginger soup

Ingredients
2-3 tbsp olive oil
1 bay leaf
2-3 tsp garlic, crushed or chopped (I used frozen)
2-3 tsp ginger, crushed or chopped (I used frozen)
1 tsp ground cumin
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1 tsp dried rosemary
2 medium onions, diced
2 large potatoes, cubed into c. 1 cm cubes (skin left on)
500 g carrots, sliced (skin left on)
1 medium and 1 small sweet dumpling winter squash, deseeded and roasted with the skin still on
1 vegetable stock cube
boiling water, enough to cover veg (probably about a pint)

Method:
0. Roast the squash in advance. See link. NB I roasted mine by halving them, scooping out the seeds, smearing them in olive oil and putting them on a baking tray on the bottom shelf of fan oven for an hour at 190 degrees while I was roasting some beef on the shelf above.
1. Heat oil in a large saucepan on a low heat and add bay leaf, garlic, ginger, cumin, nutmeg and rosemary.
2. Add the chopped onions and fry until soft, stirring occasionally.
3. While the onions are sauteeing, prepare (=wash and cube into 1 cm cubes) the potatoes. Add these as soon as the onions are nice and soft.
4. Keep stirring the veg in the pan occasionally and while doing this prepare (=wash and slice) then add the carrots.
5. Keep stirring the veg in the pan occasionally and while doing this separate the squash from its skin and add the flesh of the squash to the pan of veg. I recommend spooning/scraping the flesh of the squash out with a spoon.
6. Crumble in the stock cube into the pan, then add the boiling water to cover of the vegetables.
7. Bring to a simmer, put the lid on the pan, turn the heat down very low and leave on a low heat for 20 minutes.
8. Allow to cool until cool enough for your liquidising device, remove bay leaf and liquidise in batches. If the soup is too thick for your tastes, add more water.
Serve with crusty bread or any other bread you like eating with soup.

I also decided to harvest the final courgette.

It still feels firm and produces a sound that sounds like it's firm on the insides when I tap it, so I think it's still good. I'm going to make curried marrow soup with it. I'm almost certainly going to adapt the recipe, partly as I have no idea what they mean by the instruction "cut the ends of the marrows", partly because I'm using an outsized courgette instead of a marrow and partly because I habitually adapt recipes to match the ingredients I have in the house.
Update: made the soup, it needed two saucepans to fit all the courgette in. It wasn't as nice (or as pretty) as my squash soup and I had to add extra curry powder for flavour (and also some olive oil for texture).
Update 2: both the courgette soup recipes on my blog in 2017 taste much better than curried marrow soup, especially this one, but also this one.

Year 2: lessons learned

I learned a lot of lessons this year, some of which feel very much like year two lessons about running a full vegetable patch and some of which feel a lot more basic. One of my basic lessons (and yet one that I'm still not sure I'm right on) was about the tomatoes. I don't think I put them in a sunny enough spot, as they ripened late and I wasn't consistent enough with the fertiliser, which may or may not have been why they went dark brown and rotten before quite a lot of them ripened. I should definitely have tied them to their canes more effectively so they weren't lying all over the floor. Earlier picking would also have been good. The ones I allowed to ripen on the vine got eaten by slugs.

A more appropriate year 2 lesson is that I discovered that celery matures really late, it's still not ready, so wasn't ready when any of my other salad veg was and no use as part of my summer salads. I'm not sure I'm going to bother with celery again, although I will be able to add it to the lunchtime soups I'm now moving onto to eat up my garden vegetables.
Also, I learnt that lettuce seedlings can only survive my gardens slugs if protected by cloches or copper rings (ideally squash-bottle cloches) and I should have planted them at more regular intervals.

I also screwed up the picking of the sweet corn. I picked it almost all too early or too late. Here's a picture of pretty much the only one I managed to pick at the right time (30 August for the record):

The problem was that because the very tip of it didn't look ripe to me, I thought it wasn't ready yet and left the rest of it longer. I now know better and have posted a post about when it is ready to pick here.
Another lesson: I am incapable of growing decent cauliflower, I won't bother again next year, I gave at least a passing shot at fertilising it, but clearly that wasn't enough. Jury's still out on the cabbage. I can grow it, but I didn't protect it enough from slugs and snails, and also, it's kind of a bitter, and I've noticed I have a distinct preference for the non-bitter, sweeter vegetables, like carrots. I might give red cabbage a go instead though, as that's not bitter, at least not after I've stewed it with apple.

Pea lesson: grow more mangetout and fewer/no peas. You get relatively few peas per plant and also they got infested with grubs, but the problem wasn't yet visible at the mangetout phase. Also, preparing mangetout is a lot less work than preparing peas and the relative costs of both at the supermarket mean growing mangetout saves you a fair bit of money, but peas are much cheaper from the freezer.

Final lesson for this post (very much a year 2, large vegetable patch lesson): I need to make a calendar of when things are due to be ready (like the runner beans) and plan my meals and holidays accordingly. I missed a lot of runner beans and peas because I didn't harvest them at the right time either because I was away on holiday or we were eating something they didn't go with. Kind of the same applies to the sweet corn, in part I left it on the plant for too long because we weren't eating anything it went well with.

When is sweet corn ready to harvest?

I found this tricky. I think I only got it right once (on 30 August) and at the time I thought I was getting it wrong. So, things to look out far are when the tufts go brown like this:

This is not ripe enough:

Also, you should pinch the ends like this while they're still on the plant:

If you can pinch it pretty much together a long way down, there's hardly any ripe sweet corn in it yet. If you can only go a little way down like this, you're good to go. I harvested it at this point and it was delicious. It had a little bit at the top that hadn't quite ripened yet (or at least, that's what it looked like to me), which made me think I'd picked it too early, but actually the ones I definitely picked too late, as they were starchy and rather chewy, also had those bits at the end. I don't know if it was the variety I chose or the weather/(lack of) sunshine in my garden, but none of them ever got full corns further than that.

Still, there was plenty that was ripe and they tasted delicious.

Pumpkin patch

My pumpkin patch is looking good, providing you crop it down to focus on the pumpkins. Seen in the context of the garden as a whole, everything is decidedly past its best.

It has quite an autumnal vibe going on. Best thing I've found out is that those sweet dumpling winter squashes are sweet, delicious and beautiful, and apart from getting powdery mildew, once I'd given the soil plenty of manure, they were pretty low maintenance. I highly recommend them to anyone who has enough space.
I now have a dilemma for next year: do I grow cucumbers again? I ate a lot of them, which made them a good crop for the garden (I've had a lot of things that didn't produce much and other things like chard that produced plenty, but which I didn't eat so much of), but cucumbers are more prone to powdery mildew than the other cucurbits, so they get it first then spread it to the other plants. I'm not sure whether to grow both again or to leave out the cucumbers. If I do grow cucumbers again, I need to check them much more regularly for signs of powdery mildew and remove all the affected leaves or perhaps even spray them with neem oil weekly as a preventive measure. My third alternative is to use a non-organic cure and my fourth is to let it go like this year, which certainly cuts down the prettiness, but doesn't seem to have harmed the squashes. My big problem with the neem oil is that it seems to mess up spray containers and I've had difficulty finding a container that's willing to keep spraying diluted neem oil.