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Tuesday, October 27, 2015

Samhain - Harvest Festival

Dear Neophyte,

Samhain is on Oct 31st, starting at sundown, and goes till Nov 1 ending at sundown. This is a threefold holiday, and I've been preparing for it all month. Today I focused on the harvest celebration as I did my preparations.
Gearing up the for festival means harvesting the last of my garden, which was a lot more than I got last year! I don't have pictures of the basil, but the rest of the pictures have individual descriptions.

Heirloom Romanesco Zucchini from Italy. These zucchini are small, sometimes getting just fatter than your thumb, and if you pick them early enough they are prolific, with new blooms shooting up twice a week. I had two dozen from one plant alone, and the seed packet said I'd only get 16 at most. You can also eat the blooms.
A lot of people forget that zucchini is a squash, which makes it a gourd. This is what zucchini looks like if you let them mature on the vine and just stay there. They were hard like wood and hollow on the inside already. If they stayed on the vine they'd have gone all orange.

Heirloom topepos. The leaves are so light because despite the lack of sunlight and frost last night this plant is still trucking along.

Tomatoes or peppers? The answer is pepper. They get their name (topepos) because they look like tomatoes, but are actually small sweet peppers. I plan to stuff with sausage, cheese and breadcrumbs, then bake for the harvest festival.

Mystery salad plant! A year and a half ago I got a home mix of salad seeds from a friend in my shamanism class. I planted them but never ate any. I went to seed and came up again the next year. I still didn't eat any. This one is the survivor, having set seed, died, and come back again three times this year. At this point I'm seeing if it'll squeeze out the mustard plant which is also self-sewing in the same box.

Heirloom Ping Tung eggplants. This was a learning experience as I have never grown eggplants, let alone in containers. They stayed small (the purple one is about 3 inches long), and when I tried to let them grow more they went past maturity and into yellow seed stage (three of them like that in this pic). Lesson learned: eat while small.

These will be DELICIOUS in my Samhain feast! Ellen says she loves the colors :)

Salutations,
Sesh

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