Brian Minter: Harvesting Our Gardens for Thanksgiving

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One of the great joys of gardening, especially at this time of year, is harvesting plenty of food. It’s Thanksgiving weekend and there’s no better time than now to celebrate the abundance of our food gardens by pulling, picking, cutting, cooking and savoring our own homegrown produce.

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Despite our copious amounts of rain, late potatoes, like Russet, Burbank, and Yukon Gold, should now be the perfect size, packed with flavor, and ready to dig. The sweet potatoes should be done by now too. Remember: They should be stored upright in an egg carton at about 60F to allow the starch to turn into sugar.

For salads, the latest vintages of romaine, buttery crisp, and colorful red varieties like Red Express leaf lettuce should be in their prime. Even weird head lettuce might still be available. The last few cucumbers are running out, and yes, while most late tomatoes are green like grass, some tasty cherry tomatoes may be hanging out. Our herb gardens will certainly have parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme, chives, and maybe a little coriander to spice up our Thanksgiving dishes.

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We should still have a lot of options for the main course vegetables. Crispy carrots can be tossed in, especially the colorful Rainbow mixes, and delicious broccoli can be picked, particularly the little heads of broccoli. Green and red cabbages and white, purple or cheddar orange cauliflowers are ready to add color and flavor to any holiday meal.

Although Brussels sprouts, a traditional Thanksgiving favorite, and turnips would benefit from a good frost to intensify their flavors, they could still bring their own unique tastes.

Beets bring a rich pop of color and delight to any meal, and they can hang out in the garden most of the winter. Cylindrical beets are really the best overall. You can also have golden beets, which look fabulous and taste amazing, growing in your garden. You are very lucky if you are growing the Chioggia beet heirloom, with its stunning red and white pattern, or the bright red Bull’s Blood, also an heirloom variety. These two specialty beets will really add color to your Thanksgiving menu.

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Summer squash, like zucchini and scallopinis, are not as soft and pliable as they were earlier in the season, but they are still growing in many gardens and are perfectly nice additions to any Thanksgiving dinner.

If you really want to impress your table guests, hopefully you have some spaghetti squash with vegetables. Its unique meat looks a lot like spaghetti and, when baked and topped with tomato sauce, it presents itself very well as a surprise dish.

Whatever true winter squash you grow, it will really taste great. Both Mashed Potato, a pure white acorn squash, and Festival, a multi-colored variety, taste great. The oval Butternut and Buttercup varieties are smaller, serving size types. Perhaps you’ve grown some of the smaller Delicatas, like Sweet Dumpling, and they should be ready to harvest too. Giant hubbards are tasty and keep well, but can be too large for smaller families. The hubbard Baby Blue still has all the rich flavor but in a smaller size.

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The onions should have already been lifted and stored. Walla Walla onions are the most popular variety, but they don’t keep well. Giant Kelsae onions hold up much better and taste wonderful. Red onions also keep well and are great for seasoning salads and sandwiches. The old Riverside Sweet Spanish onion is one of the best preserved and will continue to be viable for our Christmas meals. The white onions and leeks should still be in the ground and can stay there for most of the winter. Scoop out some as needed to flavor soups and sauces.

Garlic is the tastiest allium of all. Hopefully, you harvested your bulbs in July, and now they are dry and ready to add their unique flavor to your Thanksgiving dishes.

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If you need a little spice for some of your meats, the perennial horseradish roots can be easily dug up and served to warm up a bit. Jerusalem artichokes, with their great nutty flavor, can turn an ordinary soup into a gourmet delight.

You may have some fresh blueberries growing in the ground cover areas. They would be excellent for decorating dishes. Lo-Hugger is my favorite strain, and its berries make a delicious sweet and sour cranberry sauce. They now taste very sour, but will sweeten up after a couple of frosts and are quite nice to eat fresh.

If you have some vacciniums, like lingonberries, their fruits make a wonderful edible garnish as well, as is the spearmint-flavored groundcover, Gaultheria procumbens.

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What does your garden offer in terms of dessert? Well, traditional pumpkin pie is still hard to beat. The smaller sugar pumpkins are the original true pie pumpkins, but most varieties will work just fine.

If you’ve decided to try a novel baking pumpkin and have been growing Galeux d ‘Eysines or the Japanese heirloom Futtsu Black, you may want to consider these as great alternatives to the role that pumpkins have played in baked goods and desserts.

Maybe I would appreciate an apple dessert. Late fall apples should be sized now, full of flavor, and ready to pick. Whether you live in the drier outback, where Ambrosia, Honeycrisp, and Jonagold grow best, or if you live in coastal areas where Liberty, Gala, and Cox’s Orange Pippin thrive, apples are great to eat fresh or in pies and salads. Late pears, like Bosc, should now be sweet and flavorful when eaten fresh or in desserts.

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We have moved away from growing walnuts in our gardens, and that’s a shame. New blight resistant hazelnuts like Jefferson, Theta, Sacajawea and Wepster produce nuts that are a treat to eat fresh or baked. If you’d like some walnuts to serve in the future Thanksgiving, plant two different varieties of walnuts (for pollination) and within three years you will be able to enjoy walnuts from your own garden.

Many gardeners, especially today’s younger gardeners, often don’t realize that numerous food plants extend their harvest times well into fall and winter. Planting a strategic succession of crops can provide a wealth of produce to harvest for Thanksgiving and Christmas meals. The pride, joy, and sense of accomplishment from serving your own freshly grown food is all the more reason to be truly grateful and something more of us should be able to experience.