Smashing pumpkins
"Isn't there a band
called Smashing Pumpkins?" I asked Mark as I slammed a hammer into
our mature summer squash to extract the seeds.
He laughed at my
pop-culture illiteracy and told me that during World War II,
potential enemy saboteurs would be quizzed on popular culture and
jailed if they failed. I definitely wouldn't make the
cut. I've used up all those brain cells that ought to be
devoted to TV characters and pop-culture icons by memorizing plant
names and bird calls...
...and the
intricacies of seed saving.
If you'd like to join
the ranks of the terminally uncool, you can learn to save
cucumber and squash
seeds in past
posts. To protect your cool status, though, you'd probably
be better off reading one of those glossy magazines in the
supermarket checkout aisle.
Or explore more posts by date or by subject.
About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Mom --- In order for the seeds to plump up well, you let summer squash sit off the vine for two or three weeks. At that point, the rind is more like a gourd than like a pumpkin (although not as thin as a gourd), thus the smashing instead of cutting. One book recommends using a shovel to cut them open, but the hammer did well.
The insides smell very pumpkiny (thus the name of the post) and I'll bet we could have eaten the flesh. But we figured the chickens would like it better, and they did!
Hi Anna and friends,
Thanks very much for the onions. Got here yesterday :).
One of the most interesting pieces of skin art I've seen was a realistic image of Moya on a random woman's back one night at a Cibo Mato concert.
Best organic, sentient space ship EVER!
@Roland - I LOVED Stargate (SG1, Atlantis, and Universe wasn't awful...), and so Ben Browder and Claudia Black was like chocolate in my peanut butter. Those are still my favorite episodes, as much as I like McGuyver. Ha!
The Peace Keeper Wars was good. Some of the costumes/makeup didn't look quite right because it had been so long since they'd put it all together, but it wrapped the series up really well.