PUMPKINS: NOT JUST FOR HALLOWEEN
Setting the Stage
With Halloween past, we can now turn our attention to other things pumpkin — eating them. Although the earliest relatives of pumpkins probably originated somewhere in Central America, a typical autumn scene in New England has long been smoldering sugar maples and ashen gray skies creating a backdrop for tawny fields scattered with ripe, orange pumpkins.
Indeed, Native Americans cultivated pumpkins in the Northeast long before white settlers arrived. In those distant centuries, preparation of pumpkins for eating was simple and savory: whole fruits were bedded in the ashes of a fire, then drizzled with animal fat and honey or maple syrup.
White settlers soon adopted pumpkin as a staple, valuable for its nourishment and for being able to keep through winter. Read more
DUSTIN’ THE GARDEN
Sawdust, Great Stuff
Some years one of my last gardening activities for the season is ‘dusting. ‘Dusting can always wait till spring, but then the weather rushes me along with so many other activities. Now I’m not talking about ‘dusting in the usual sense, which is getting rid of it. The kind of ‘dusting I’m talking about is adding dust — as sawdust.
Sawdust is a terrific material for enriching the soil with humus, which sawdust eventually becomes. Leaves, straw, hay, and other once-living things can also do this and do it well, but sawdust has the advantage that it is weed-free and the small particles mix intimately with the soil. Another advantage of sawdust is that its beneficial effects in the ground last a relatively long time.
Sawdust mulched blueberries
Sawdust is also cheap, often free for the hauling, from sawmills, lumberyards, or from your or a friend’s workshop. Read more
CROCUS THAT ISN’T
Startling Beauty
Autumn’s crocus is worth planting if for nothing more than to startle your neighbors. When they ask how come your crocuses are blooming this time of year, just smile and say it’s an early spring.
A bed of autumn crocus does more than just startle, of course; it also paints the fall landscape in soft, bold swatches of lavender, pink, or white blossoms. And, if you so desired, that paint job, depending on species planted, could have begun as far back as August. Not such a bad idea at that, because many flower gardens temporarily sulk in August, waiting to revive in the moist coolness of autumn.
My late summer crocus blooms come from a bulb called colchicum, which is not really a crocus species at all. The plant is called autumn crocus because its blossoms do look like those of crocuses, crocuses on steroids. Read more
