What I grew in 2017

Beans: [Dvds on strings really scare the birds away!]

• Purple Teepee - Pole beans.   Loved them from 2016.  Easy to shell.
• Kentucky Wonder Pole beans:  Flat and strings.   Prolific.

Flowers:  zinnia (loads!), calendula, cosmos, tithonia [love this!!], sunflowers, batchelor button, agastache.

Garlic:

• Chesnock Red
• German Red

Greens:

• Arugula

Herbs, Annual:

• Basil, Genovese
• Genovese red basil
• Basil, Sweet Blue.   Great bee plant, tea plant and makes the whole garden smell wonderful all summer. 
• Cilantro, Slo Bolt.  Got original seed from BC.  Now I use our saved seed. Mostly it self sows.
• Dill.  Self sows now

Herbs, Perennial [ongoing plantings]

• Lavender - mulched with gravel 2016.  Made a huge difference in how bushy and big the plants got.   
• Thyme - will plant in front of lavender.
• Sage - loves the gravel
• Chives
• Anise Hyssop
• Hyssop
• Chamomile [self sows]- must plant more.
• Alpine Strawberries
• Costmary
• Lemon balm
• Sorrel
• Purslane: volunteers.
• Oregano
• Echinacea
• Comfrey 

Peas:   Sugar Snap.   Did not do well.

Peppers -We're shooting for sweeter, meatier peppers this year.

• Jupiter pepper.   

Radish:   

• Early Scarlet Globe
• French Breakfast

Squash, Summer

• Zucchino Rampicante - Got one.
• the rest of the summer squash got eaten by borers and squash bugs

Squash, Winter: Going to try them in a bed that has been covered in black geotextile.

• got none

Berries

• June bearing strawberries
• Ever bearing strawberries
• Blackberries - good ones from Stark Bros.   Keep all side shoots pruned off up to 3-4'.
• Raspberries - these need a ton of water, so will be watering almost every day.
• Elderberries - Wild.  Wonderful.  

Tomato

• Amish Paste:  Good standby.  Roma type.  Does OK with septoria.
• early girl:  did great.  Deer ate them all at the end of the summer.

Fruit trees

• Sweet cherry
• Sour cherry - good!
• Apricot - none
• Plum - got one
• Peach - none
• Fig [Chicago Hardy] - got about 30.

Sweet Cherry Vanilla Jam

This year I added 20 lbs of sweet cherries to my fruit order and was thrilled at how fabulous they were.   Sweet cherries travel much better than sour cherries [which often arrive brown and running with juice, though delicious.]  Sweet cherries store well, stay firm and the extra few days gave us time to finish the peaches, which arrived first, and deal with the sour cherries and berries.   It was a very busy couple of weeks.   I washed the sweet cherries and put them in ziplocks stacked flat in the fridge.   It was easy to grab a bag in the morning, set it out and I confess we ate many many of those cherries fresh before I had a chance to make anything with them.

But I did make a couple of things with them and the first on the list was a batch or two [or three] of Sweet Cherry Vanilla Jam.  

It. Was. Heaven.   Like my favorite clafouti without the custard.    Soooo good.   Make some of this.  [Put it on chocolate cake.   Or just eat it with a spoon right out of the jar.]

Sweet Cherry Vanilla Jam
www.rurification.com

4 cups pitted sweet cherries, cut in half
1 cup water
1 vanilla bean, cut in half and then sliced open lengthwise
1/2 cup low sugar pectin [Dutch Gel All Natural Lite is my favorite]
1 cup sugar

Put the cherries, water, vanilla and pectin in a large pot.   Bring to a boil, stirring constantly.  When the jam reaches a hard boil [that bubbles like crazy even when you're stirring constantly], time it for 1 minute.    Add the sugar, stir constantly and return it to a hard boil.   Time it for one minute.   Turn off the heat, ladle into jars.   We process the jam in 1/2 pint jars for 15 minutes.   Yield:  2.5 - 3 pints.

For more recipes as easy as these, check out my ebook on the sidebar.  A Simple Jar of Jam: 180+ recipes & variations for jam using low sugar pectin.  Every purchase goes a long way toward supporting the blog.   Thank you!

Garden Huckleberries

I'm trying a new fruit this year in the veg garden - garden huckleberries, Solanum melanocerasum. [Pic:  Rareseeds.com] These are different from the wild huckleberries of the mountains, which are related to blueberries.  If you go to the link above, make sure you read the reviews carefully.  

My neighbor grows these regularly and has had good success so I thought we'd try them, too.   I'm planting them next to tomatoes and basil.    

Garden huckleberries are native to the tropics [Africa] and are grown as an annual here.   They are relatives of tomatoes and peppers and cultivation is similar.   The bushes get 3-4 ft high.  They like rich soil and sun to partial shade.  The fruit is frost tolerant and should be harvested after the berries turn soft and matte [dull] instead of shiny.  The bushes are reputed to be very prolific and self sowing.  These berries aren't very tasty unless you harvest them after frost.  Do not eat them fresh!

 Here's a method for preparing them that I've seen linked to in several places:

Via Sandhill Preservation:

"Garden Huckleberry Recipe:  Place 8 cups of berries in a non-aluminum one gallon size pan and add enough water to not quite cover the fruit. As they begin to boil add a total of 1/3 cup of baking soda (a little at a time) and stir continuously. As you add baking soda, green foam will appear. Be sure to watch this carefully as it will foam up quite a bit. After adding the baking soda, cook for 10 minutes at a low boil. The mixture will continue to foam quite a bit as the berries are cooking. After they have cooked for 10 minutes, drain this solution off and rinse with clean water. The berries will still be somewhat hard. Next return the pan of berries to the stove, add 1/3 cup water and 1/2 cup lemon juice. Watch with amazement as the mixture changes from emerald green to a royal purple color. Cook an additional 35 minutes until the berries are tender and then add 2 3/4 cups sugar, 1 1/2 Tablespoons lemon extract, 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/2 cup tapioca. Pour the above mixture into two 8 inch unbaked pie shells, then add a top crust or lattice and bake as you would a blueberry pie. You can also omit the tapioca and just eat the sauce or use it as an ice cream topping."

Here's a page from Heirloom Organics with growing information.  And another post from Garden Web with some interesting information.

And here's another page with growing and harvesting info from Mother Earth News, with a couple of recipes thrown in.

I've got my seeds started in the cold frame now and I'm looking forward to our first harvest in the fall.  

New Fruit Trees

I got four new little fruit trees from Stark Bros this fall.   They were on sale so I got two plums, a fig [Chicago Hardy] and an apricot.   They're planted on a slope between the studio/veg garden and the upper yard/chicken coop.   We planted 2 sweet cherries and a sour cherry there last year and if they all take, we'll have a nice little orchard of trees whose fruit we can't easily get elsewhere around here.

For rabbit protection, we surrounded the trees with chicken wire and then stuffed them full of leaves for now.   We'll probably top dress the dirt with some chicken dirt to help encourage root growth.  

Uzbek Sweetness Melon

This year I tried two new melon varieties [new to us, that is].  Charentais and Uzbek Sweetness.  

I got both types from Baker Creek  and if you've never perused their melon selection, go there now and check it out.   A. May. Zing.

The cat dug up the Charentais.  Twice.  [Yes, I threw a fit. Plus,  I swore at him.  He was completely unmoved.  Except when I caught him in the act and threw him bodily out of the garden.  Then he moved plenty.]  I planted them again but by the time they came up, there was a lot of competition in the bed from the other stuff in there.  They stuck it out and I do have one tiny fist-sized baby Charentais in there now.  We'll see if it does anything before frost.   It's the traditional French melon, supposed to be the mother of all muskmelon.   I'll try these again next year.



The cat left the other melon alone and the Uzbek Sweetness did just fine in spite of the cooler weather.  I got three nice melons.   It turned bright orange when ripe - I love that color!   Definitely an Eat Me Orange. 

And eat it I did.  

When I bought the seeds, there was no picture, so I was going on faith and I was interested to see that the insides were white with a peach tinge around the seeds. 

These babies are seriously sweet.   SWEET.  The flesh is firm.

I read later where some people consider these sort of like a honeydew but I'm glad I didn't know that before because I don't like honeydew.  I would never have tried it, and I'm so glad I did. 

Uzbek Sweetness is my new favorite melon!   I saved some of the seeds and I'll definitely do these again.

Canning Peaches

Since the peaches are so doggoned gorgeous this year, I decided that the one bushel we'd cut up for the freezer wasn't enough.   So I got another bushel.

Problem:  No room in the freezer. Plus, freezers are sort of dependent on a power supply.   Our power supply is vulnerable to storms and such, so I thought it would be a good idea to can this bushel of peaches in jars.  That way, we'd know we'd have them in a power outage.   Unless the outage is caused by an earthquake, which might tumble them off shelves and break them.    I decided not to think about that. 

Hey, I'm all about denial.  

It only took a couple of hours for three of us to peel and cut them in half and stuff them in the jars.  We decided to can them in water and not add the extra sugar in a syrup.   Rumor has it that the syrup makes for really attractive canned peaches, but these are for food, not the county fair.  

We made a solution of ascorbic acid and citric acid to put on them to keep them from browning and that's the water that we filled the jars with.  Here's how we made the anti-browning solution. 

Anti-Browning Solution for canned fruit
www.rurification.com

6 tablets vitamin C, crushed
1 tsp citric acid
1 gallon hot water

Crush vitamin tablets with the back of a spoon.   Mix vitamin C and citric acid in the water.  Fill jars with peaches.  Ladle solution over peaches.  Cap and process.

We processed the peaches for 30 minutes in a boiling water canner.   

We got 25 quarts of peaches from the bushel.  One jar broke in the canner [and can I just say that I HATE that?  Seriously!   They're Designed To Handle Boiling Water.  Hello!  Brand new wide mouth jar, too.  Gee, thanks, Ball.] 

It takes a LOT longer to actually process the jars for canning than it did to fill the jars with the peaches and get them ready.   Be patient.   Plan on having something else to do close by while you're keeping an eye on things.

Where to get citric acid?   We got ours at Freedom Country Store just north of Worthington on Hwy 231.   You might be able to find some at your local drug store, Walmart, etc.  

Elderberry Progress

All six of my elderberry starts are alive.  This is the happiest one.  We planted it just up from the chicken coop at a place that gets a lot of run-off from the hills in the spring and then the veg garden all summer.

I think it likes it there.

Elderberry Cuttings

I've been wanting elderberry bushes forever. 

For. Ever.

We bought some nice expensive ones years ago, but they died.   Since they grow wild around here, I couldn't justify buying more, so I read up and learned that they start reasonably reliably from cuttings.

Some say you should root them in water with willow twigs [which release a rooting hormone into the water].  Others say you should just stick them in the ground as soon as possible.   

I got my cuttings and stuck them in water with willow for a day -  I don't know if that was long enough to get enough hormone from the willow, but I figured it wouldn't hurt while we decided just where to put them.  

I got 6 cuttings from a neighbor whose wild bush sprouted at the mouth of a culvert, down in the ditch.   

We stuck 4 cuttings next to a wet area that grows a lot of orange grass [Acorus calamus] and we stuck 2 cuttings on the hill between the chicken coop and the veg garden where the garden drainage runs down the hill.   They'll get plenty of water there. 

We protected them with fence to keep the rabbits off them and mulched around them with cardboard so they can get a head start from the grass.  

Fingers crossed that most of them take.    I love elderberries.  

Dormant Cherry Tree

Remember those cherry trees that Eric bought on sale last summer?    They're doing very well.    The Montmorency got sunburned and dropped its leaves fast this fall, but promptly went dormant and formed these beautiful buds.   

Buds are good. 

These buds hold all the promise of Spring.    We're hoping to get blooms next season. 

Solsberry Bog Puddings

While I was making those individual Sussex Pond Puddings, I thought I'd really put a Hoosier twist to it and make some with other fillings.    They were wonderful!





There's not enough goo in these to call them Pond Puddings, so I think we need to adjust the name.   We considered these names:

• Solsberry Wetland Puddings
• Solsberry Drought Puddings
• Solsberry Marsh Puddings
• Solsberry Bog Puddings
• Solsberry Puddle Puddings

I'm leaning toward Solsberry Bog Puddings.   These puddings are soft and boggy, not runny.  Plus, there's a real bog with a beaver pond next to it a mile or so west of us, so it fits where we live, too.   Vote for your favorite name in the comments!

Pastry [Enough for 3 individual puddings]

• 1/2 cup flour
• 1/2 cup fine bread crumbs
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 cup butter or shortening
• 1/3 cup milk + a Tablespoon or so

Combine the flour, bread crumbs and salt.  Cut in the butter or shortening until fine.   Add milk.  Stir together to form dough.   It will be soft.  

Divide dough into thirds.    Roll each into a round disk about 1/4 inch thick.   Cut out one quarter of the dough to save for the top.   Fit the rest of the dough into a cone shape and press it into the cup or ramekin.  Trim off excess dough and keep it for the top.   Fill the puddings.

Roll or press the remaining dough into circles for the tops of the puddings.   Seal, etc. as described here:  Sussex Pond Puddings - Hoosier Style 

Filling:
For our version of the puddings, all you have to do is choose a fruit, then choose a sweetener.   This is a great way to use up leftover bits of fruit and an even better way to use that jam you've been making all year.  This is definitely one of my favorite TTDWAJOJ.   [Things To Do With A Jar Of Jam].

For the fruit, we used bananas, lemons, peaches from a can, and apples.  You can use any kind of fruit, fresh or canned. 

For the sweet, we used brown sugar, maple syrup, apple-pear maple jam, strawberry rhubarb jam and orange marmalade.  You could also use honey, white sugar, turbinado sugar, agave, etc.   These were really good!   Here are the combinations we used.

Lemon and brown sugar.   This is very close to the traditional Sussex Pond Pudding recipe I told you about before. 1/2 lemon per ramekin.  Three tablespoons brown sugar.   Plus the butter.

Lemon and marmalade.  1/2 lemon per ramekin.   Two generous spoonfuls of marmalade that hadn't jelled right.  Plus the butter.  Loved this one!!  

Banana and brown sugar.   Like Bananas Foster without the booze.  One medium banana sliced per ramekin.  2 Tablespoons brown sugar.  Plus the butter.    To. Die. For.  

Peach and Strawberry-Rhubarb Jam.   I used sliced peaches out of a can to see if it would work.   Oh, it worked!  Let the juice drip off a bit before you put the peaches in the pastry.    You could also slice up a fresh peach, of course.  Two generous spoonfuls of jam.  Plus the butter. 

Apples and maple syrup.   About a quarter of a large apple cut up fit into a ramekin if you piled it in.  Since apples shrink a lot during cooking, I piled high.    Two tablespoons of maple syrup.   This was a huge favorite.

Apples and Apple-Pear Maple Jam.   About a quarter of a large apple cut up.  Two generous spoonfuls of jam.  Plus the butter.   Wonderful!

Don't be afraid to mix and match your fruit and jam.   Just because you're using peaches doesn't mean you need to use a peach jam.   Be bold.

Enjoy! 

Pectin 101

Pectin is what makes your jam and jelly jell.  It occurs naturally in a lot of fruit [see below], but as fruit ripens, it loses the pectin and if you want to make a jam that jells, then you need to add pectin to it.

There are a lot of different brands of pectin out there and each brand may have different types of pectin for different types of jam: Instant pectin for freezer jam, regular pectin which requires a lot of sugar, low/no sugar pectin, liquid pectin.

In the past few years, pectin has widely become available in bulk packaging, making it easier than ever to make small batches of jam requiring less pectin than contained in the traditional, three-tablespoon envelopes of pectin. Bulk pectin is also handy for recipes with low-pectin fruit like strawberries and nectarines. Instead of splitting a new envelope, you can just add an extra tablespoon or two of pectin from the jar.

Be aware that not all pectin brands are alike. Each company has its own formula and they cannot be substituted blindly for each other. If you switch brands, watch your first batch carefully and note whether it jells as well at that amount as your other pectin did. In addition, liquid pectin and dry pectin cannot be substituted without changing the whole jam procedure.

I regularly switch between Ball and Dutch Jell low sugar brands. For four cups of fruit, the Ball Low Sugar recipe calls for 3 tablespoons of pectin; the Dutch Jell Lite recipe calls for 1/3 cup rounded of pectin. That’s between 5 and 6 tablespoons and quite a difference from the amount of pectin Ball calls for. In practice, I have found that I can use much less Dutch Jell than they recommend, but I usually need a bit more Ball pectin than they recommend.

How do you know how much to use? Follow the guidelines in the recipes included with your pectin. If you like a softer jell, then use less pectin next time. If you like a harder jell, then use more. Take notes or write them on the side of your pectin container with a pen or marker.

Robin's Rule of Thumb for Pectin: Use 1 Tablespoon of pectin for every cup of fruit in the recipe. Don't use more than 6 cups of fruit in a batch. This generally works for even lower pectin fruit like pears. If you aren't sure, then make a small batch, see what happens and adjust accordingly for your next batches. Use more pectin for low pectin fruit. Use less pectin for high pectin fruit.

Low Pectin Fruits require the addition of a full measure of pectin or a very long cooking time. Don't skimp on pectin when you're using these fruits for jam.

• apricots
• blueberries
• cherries
• elderberries
• figs
• guava
• nectarines
• peaches
• pears
• Italian plums
• pomegranates
• raspberries
• rhubarb
• strawberries 

High Pectin Fruits can often be turned into jam or jelly without adding extra pectin. Note: the riper the fruit, the less pectin in it. Use 20-25% under-ripe fruit if you want to make jam with no added pectin.

• apples
• citrus peels: limes, lemons, etc. with the white pith and seeds. [You can put the pith and seeds in a tea ball or bag during cooking so you can remove them from the finished jam.]
• cranberries
• currants
• elaeagnus [autumn olive]
• Eastern Concord grapes
• loganberries
• plums, not Italian
• quince 

Here's another site with a lot of great info on pectin: http://www.pickyourown.org/pectin.htm

Summer Fruit Salad with Cilantro

I love fruit salads with unexpected twists.  One of the best salads I've ever had was a simple mango salsa. 

Mango Salsa

• 4 mangoes chopped into bite sized pieces
• 1 bunch green onions chopped finely
• 1 bunch cilantro chopped finely
• Juice of 1 or 2 limes

Mix and serve.  It's good if it sits for a couple of hours, too.    Delicious with tortilla chips or as a side dish all on its own.

We took the mango salsa recipe and dressed it up with pineapple and strawberries.  The strawberries, onions and cilantro came out of our own garden.

Mmmmm.

Summer Fruit Salad with Cilantro

• 4 mangoes, chopped into bite sized pieces
• 1 fresh pineapple,  cored and chopped into bite sized pieces
• 2 cups fresh strawberries, sliced
• 1 bunch green onions, chopped finely
• 1 large bunch cilantro chopped finely
• Juice of 1 or 2 limes

Mix and serve.

Fruit

Whenever possible I use fresh, local fruit for my jams.

But the truth is, sometimes you just can't get the fresh fruit you need, when you need it.

Like, in December.

Unless you live in New Zealand.   Which I don't.  And if I did, I couldn't get fresh local fruit in July.  So I'd still be stuck. 

I live in Indiana and there are no fresh local fruits in December.   Except maybe apples, but even they have been off the tree for a while.  Plus, it's hard to make blueberry jam with apples. 

Also, sometimes crops fail.  Like this year our local blueberry people lost the entire crop to a late freeze.  

So I have a choice:

1.   I can whine a lot and go without.  No blueberry jams this year.
2.   I can go to Sam's and buy frozen blueberries.   Which helps support another farmer who might live in California.   Or Tennessee.    And allows us to fill our freezer with blueberries and make blueberry jam whenever I get the urge.   Like in December.

I love having options.

After careful consideration, we decided that option 2 was definitely the way to go.

This month at Sam's we've seen frozen mango, mixed fruit, mixed berries, blueberries, etc.    I'm going to buy a bunch of whatever looks tasty when I see them because you never know when they'll disappear.  

Since I have done enough peeling and pitting of fruit lately to last me for a while, those frozen sliced mangoes are looking pretty darned appealing.   Mango jam is definitely on the list. 

I'll be starting blueberry jams soon.  This year, they'll be made with frozen berries from the store.

They'll still be fabulous.

Rustic Fruit Desserts

I've been wanting this book by Cory Schreiber and Julie Richardson for ages.  I found it on Amazon but hadn't had a chance to look through it in person, so I kept putting off the final purchase.  I finally took the leap and got it for us for Christmas.

Boy, am I glad I got it.

We love fruit desserts - for breakfast.  We have a freezer full of fruit.    We love finding new ways to bake it up.

There are over 60 recipes in the book, divided into the seasons, so that each section focusses on the fruit that you're likely to find during that part of the year.

Page 3 is a list of the types of fruit dishes and definitions for each of them so that you know the difference between a pandowdy and a slump, a buckle and a betty.

Here are the names of a few of the recipes from each season.

Spring:

• Rhubarb and Bing Cherry Brown Betty
• Boozy Dried Cherry, Chocolate and Hazelnut Bread Pudding
• Lemon Buttermilk Rhubarb Bundt Cake

Summer:

• Raspberry Red Currant Cobbler
• Lemon Blueberry Buckle
• Vanilla Spiked Plum Galette

Fall:

• Maple Apple Dumpling
• Fig and Mixed-Color Raspberry Crumble
• Upside-down Pear Chocolate Cake

Winter

• Cranberry Upside-down Almond Cake
• Pear Sauce
• Apple Pandowdy

Then there's a little section at the back of things you can make to keep in your pantry/fridge/freezer that make assembly of the recipes a bit faster.  Here are a few:

• Chantilly Cream
• Vanilla Crumb
• Galette Dough

I'm so glad I got this book.   I highly recommend it!

Pomanders

One of the great joys of this season for me is pomanders.    I love them.   I love them with the white hot intensity of a thousand suns.   Suns which I am desperate to see during this, the darkest part of the year.  

Pomanders smell great, they're easy to make and they last as long as they stay dry.


What you need: 

• fruit:  oranges, clementines, kumquats, apples, lemons, etc.
• whole cloves
• pointed toothpicks, skewers, etc. to poke the holes in the fruit
• powdered spices:  cloves, allspice, cinnamon, orris root

Use the skewer to poke holes in the fruit.  Leave a bit of space between the holes.   [As the fruit dries, it will shrink and the holes will get closer together.]  The fruit will ooze and get you all sticky.    That's part of the fun.  You'll smell great for days.

Put a clove in each hole.  

Smell the divine aroma!

When you've covered the fruit with cloves, sprinkle them all over with powdered spices.   I use equal amounts of ground cloves, allspice, cinnamon and orris root.   Use what you have.  Don't worry if you don't have orris root. 

Cover the pomanders completely with the spices.   They'll help dry the whole thing out.

Over the next few weeks, the pomanders will dry out and become hard.

Put them in an attractive bowl or arrangement and remember to turn them over every day or so to help them dry evenly.   

These stay good through the winter here in the Midwest.    I toss them out when I do my spring cleaning in March, which is when things start getting wet and humid around here again.

Melon - Sakata's Sweet

This was Sakata's Sweet a couple of weeks ago.    They stay small - just larger than a softball.

The one in the photo below is sitting in a regular sized cereal bowl. 

When ripe, they turn yellow-ish and the stem end of the melon starts to crack.

Unlike muskmelons, the stem does not detach when ripe - you have to cut it.    Three of these spoiled before I figured out that I was waiting too long to pick them.

The inside is green - like a honeydew.  The texture of the flesh is rather grainy but it is very sweet.

Delicious, if you like honeydew melons.

Melon - Sweet Passion

They're starting to get ripe!    This is what they looked like last week.....

And this is what they look like when we open them...

These are an heirloom melon that I grew from seed I got at Baker Creek.   I highly recommend these!   They're delicious - very sweet, just like the name says.   They're not too big [about a 6" diameter], so if you get a bumper crop, you'll be able to eat them all.  

Pick them when they turn tan and when the stem starts to detach from the fruit.  

I'll be doing these again next year.

Melon - Prescott Fond Blanc

Prescott Fond Blanc melons are pretty interesting looking.  It's not your typical netted muskmelon.  These are sectioned and warty.    Don't be put off.   They're pretty good and they're very easy to grow.   Of the six different types of melons I tried this year, these set fruit first and ripened first.

These got about 8 inches in diameter. 

Overnight, they will turn yellow.   The stem will start to separate from the melon and you'll know they're ready to harvest.

They have a classic melon flavor, but they're not very sweet.   If you like the less sweet varieties, I highly recommend these.   If you're looking for an easy melon to grow to make jam, these would be great because you'll be adding extra sugar.

Like all melons, Prescott Fond Blanc require a lot of good soil.   I have extremely well drained soil that we amend generously with manure.    The plants are very bug resistant.    They did fine in the heat as long as I watered during the dry spells [at least every three days].

Melons

I grew a bunch of new kinds of melons this year.    Here is how they are progressing...

These are Sweet Passion.   So far they look like smaller versions of the typical American muskmelon, round and netted.   They'll be ripe in week or so.

These are Sakata's Sweet.   They're not getting very big - just a bit bigger than a softball and they're smooth instead of netted.

And these are Prescott Fond Blanc.    Baker Creek loves them, and as I am highly suggestible, I tried them.   They were the first to set fruit.    These are about 10" in diameter, sectioned and a bit warty.    I can't wait to try them.

I also planted Edisto, which is one of the best muskmelon varieties around, but it's taking its time and the fruit is still the size of a golf ball and hairy. 

Once these are all ripe, I"ll post more photos.