It’s been a good year for volunteer winter squash, pumpkins, sweet potatoes, plantain – and Nelson’s carrots! Our neighbor gave us seeds that grew into this huge black pumpkin. It was the only pumpkin/squash that we planted that germinated. All the rest were volunteers that we tended.
-Nelson broadcast carrot seeds that yielded a bumper crop. Unharvested carrots have their “Queen Anne’s Lace” flower heads.
-Plantain trees are going bananas! Several currently have stalks and the ones featured in the photo represent 1/3 of the largest stalk that grew since I lived here.
-Plantain pups re-homed. Plantain and Banana plants require frequent birth control because they produce a lot of off-spring that grow very rapidly. Ideally we dig them out when they are less than a foot tall – and sometimes we don’t. Then we have to remove them when they’re bigger. If I can dig up a rootball I give them away on FreeCycle.
When they’re too big I harvest their beautiful leaves and give them to our neighbor or a local restaurant for tamales wraps. (I save some to make a treat that Barbadians call Conkies: cornmeal, coconut, sweet potato, pumpkin, raisins mixed with spices and steamed in banana leaves- in the solar oven, weather permitting.)
Tomatoes and beans hate this year’s climate change. We put in a LOT of work to get a puny crop. Cherry tomatoes did much better than larger ones, and all of them were exceptionally susceptible to white flies and aphids. Very few bean pods matured. Most just shriveled so we stopped wasting water on them and dug and returned them to the earth. RIP beans. Hope you’re next journey ’round the sun is more productive.
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