Karen's Garden Delights Journal
1st week of October 2011

Eating Celery October is here and the fall veggies are coming into their glory. Once the children discovered that there was ripe celery in the garden, they started snacking on it regularly. Here the boys are enjoying their fresh celery. Oh, it tastes so crisp and sweet right now and a frost will improve the flavor even more. We are also savoring our abundant turnips. The skins are a bit spicy but again, with a frost they will sweeten up. There are still a few tasty peppers hanging on the plants and we are digging abundant sweet potatoes. They produced a wonderful crop this year and now the challenge is to see if I can get them to store well for the winter. They like to be cured in an 80 degree spot for several days and we don't have an ideal location to accomplish that. Then wrapping them in newspaper is the next step. I would be very excited to have my own sweet potatoes for starting new plants in the spring.

Fall Peas Blooming There are a few plants still working hard to produce a crop like these snow peas that are in full bloom. Hopefully there will be enough warm days to push them to maturity along with the row of sugar snap peas and the two bean rows. A frost will wipe out the beans but the peas can handle some cold. Both of these were crops that I took a gamble with in planting them so late. If it looks like they will be wiped out by the cold, I can always gather the pea shoots and blossoms for salad. But my mouth is really watering for snow pea stir-fry!

TKS Cheese Class This has been a busy fall with classes and seminars. This week my daughter and I did a cheese class at Today's Kitchen Store in Wooster. Knowing this would be more of an urban crowd (not a single one of the 14 people had their own cow or goat!), I altered my quiz for the beginning and made some modifications to my talk. Fortunately store bought milk will work fine for all the recipes we shared. Sampling time was extra delicious as I added several ingredients from Local Roots producers to our cheeses. We had yogurt with raspberry jam and granola, dessert cheese on sesame crackers, herb soft cheese in Tom Thumb peppers and the grand finale was warm mozzarella on garlic bread toast along with basil and the last tomatoes from my garden. Pretty amazing!