Series – Future Self Journaling – 9E – Bourdain Squash Harvest

Musquee De Provence! The last big harvest of the 2021 season.

Was a big one! It took 2 and half hours from first tomato pull and pick to panting over the bowls of produce I loaded onto my dining room table.

I need another dining room table. Seriously. There is no room on mine. We have a family room, but that is The Sps’s crap overflow area. My dining room has bowls of green tomatoes for frying, a few ripe tomatoes I will dole out preciously over the next week. I few gallons of grapes, that will be made into jelly this week. You will also find too many green peppers, a bounty of poblano peppers and a small down of hot peppers. Thai chillis, Sugar Rush Peach peppers, the Lemon Habanero and the pretty purple Mulata peppers. Not too many golden Toto peppers harvested nor enough Melrose, Corbaci, Jimmy Nardello nor Criolla peppers. I treasure my sweet reds. I will miss you all so this off-season!

The last harvest is bittersweet, yet something I look forward to. The garden is a riot mess once September arrives and I admit I look forward to the fall tidying. A chilly morning before the first hurting frost. The leaves are multi-colored and set me a’smiling. I get to pick the last and largest of the squash that have been sitting on the dying vines, tempting me.

Anyone else play guess-the-weight? This year I grew the largest squash yet. The type was a Musquee De Provence, my “Bourdain”. As it’s a moschata cultivar and therefore impervious to the devil squash borer, this type winter squash actually get full size for me. This year I grew a THIRTY-EIGHT pound pumpkin!!! I was trying to guess the weight, I guessed 32 pounds.

Why do I call this my Bourdain pumpkin? Before Bourdain took his life, I saw an episode of Parts Unknown in Lyon France. One very short segment features a pumpkin stuffed and baked with all sorts of yummies. I HAD to find out which type of pumpkin it was (the episode nor recipe online ever said) so I did research and determined it was the Musquee De Provence, a fairytale type grown and sold primarily in France. So I found the seeds and grew the pumpkin, and Bourdain died and the squash vine borers ignored my lush Musquee pumpkins and then the little squashes survived a hailstorm too. Then I harvested. This pumpkin is delicious, gorgeous and stores for months. It’s my Bourdain squash.

Tell me this isn’t culinary artistry in action.

Anyway, so I harvest all the garden goodies with the exception of the lettuces, brassica veggies and carrots, as they do well in the cold. I anticipate I will be harvesting for another month or so before pulling them. My goal is to have a garden harvest bless my Thanksgiving table before I have to pull the plants. We will see what Mother Nature decides to provide USDA zone 5.

My dining room table is full. I was serious about needing another but where would I put it? The garage is full, the family room is full, the storage room is full and I have stuffed every nook and cranny with all of the things we can’t take with us when we die.

Grateful for:

– full harvest table, with much to eat and share

– we live on a hill and I can look east and see a grove of trees displaying all the fall colors

-Dune 2021! A quite anticipated movie in our household.

-getting started with fall clean-up. I pulled up around 40 plants! That is going to be one very happy compost pile come next year.

Godspeed y’all!

Please share your experiences, sources or research!