Happy Thanksgiving!

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It's already that time of year in Canada when we celebrate the harvest and our Thanksgiving weekend.

It also means it's Pumpkin season. Beautiful Pumpkins of all sizes and shapes can be bought at markets everywhere in the area and it's a real shame that most simply use them for decoration. They are so inexpensive (and will be even cheaper after Halloween) that they should definitely be used as food instead of their canned counterpart (which for the most part are made with Squash....NOT Pumpkin).

Local Pumpkins ...wonderful food!

Preparing pumpkins for pie or soup or even as a side is relatively easy. All you need to do is quarter them and clean them of their seeds (save them for roasting or even to plant your own Pumpkins next Spring....they're so easy to grow). We bake them until tender; at this point, the skin is then very easy to peel. Two medium sized pumpkins will yield almost the equivalent of a dozen cans of prepared Pumpkin/Squash and that's only for the price of $3 at most.

So for us, this means it's Pumpkin pie season in the Tea Room. We have however decided to put a twist on our pie by using some of the remaining Maple Syrup we processed earlier this Spring. So for a while, we'll be serving Maple Pumpkin pie.

Maple Pumpkin pie

When using real Pumpkins, you'll find your pies will be less sweet and lighter in texture....but of course no less decadent (particularly with a dollop of fresh cream).

Elsewhere on the farm we're actually still harvesting tomatoes. This should be the last of this year's crop. As such, it's also time to save our seeds.

Ready for picking....for the last time this year.

We recover our seeds by scooping them out of some of the best specimens. For each variety, we place the seeds in mason jars with a bit of water. We cover our mason jar with a cloth or paper towel. We leave these in a warm spot to allow the gelatinous part of the seed to decay (it takes a couple of days). We then wash the seeds and dry them in paper towel.

Collecting Tomato seeds for next Spring.

We were really pleased with our tomatoes this year. We certainly had a great return and all of our varieties performed rather well.

Meanwhile, with all the time spent on the Tea Room, our Growing Dome work has not progressed much. However, with the anticipation of the first frost this year, we decided to quickly salvage some of our Water Spinach. This Asian semi-aquatic plant has done extremely well in our raised beds; it was now time to get some cuttings and attempt to propagate them in the dome. The idea is to use this plant in our Aquaponic set-up in the long run. We're just not sure how it will winter in this passively heated greenhouse.

Water Spinach cuttings in the dome.

Aside from these cuttings, we only have one plant left in the dome. A Zucchini seed must have gotten away from us and fallen into an unused pot! In any case, the plant is doing extremely well. In fact, it is now flowering and showing signs of fruiting. It will be interesting to see how long this will last into the Fall.

A "run away" Zucchini plant is thriving in the dome.

We'll close this week with a quick pic of the latest find for the farm. We got our hands on a beautiful old barn door. Our idea is not to use it as a "door", but rather as a canvas for a large painting we want to display in the back of the barn once the renovations are complete.

A perfect "canvas"