VIEW FROM THE PORCH

"HARVESTING FALL GOODIES"
By Lucinda Strine

With a snap in the air, the farmers' wives are working valiantly to harvest such tasty treats as ground cherries, pumpkin pie ingredients (made of bright orange squash innards) and even knarly unsprayed apples. Can you keep up? I can't! And now the grapes are ready. I recently caught our resident cardinal helping itself to the grapes.

Twice I have peeled, cored and cut wormy apples, once for the most delicious apple sauce I've ever made and again for my fourth cobbler this season with a few gift pears, adding a scattering of currents on top for a little zing! Yum! With spices, a dash of Real Lemon and a cup of oatmeal added to the topping, it was delectable for guests last week. With all the wonderful apple orchards producing so well this year, I'm not sure it is worth my time to harvest unsprayed fruit but I know our elders did.

Delores, our cleaning lady, to whom I gave a package of squash seed, generously shared her gardening talents by bringing over 10 small butternut squash last week. My family doesn't like squash at all, but this year I finally learned that instead of eating this vitamin- rich orange pulp with salt and butter, as we did in my childhood, adding pumpkin spice and sweetener so it tastes exactly like pumpkin pie, makes it a dessert! In fact, butternut squash is the favorite of my Mennonite friends for making this fall treat from scratch. (Thank you, Bessie!) I think the big gray hubbard squash would also work since its meat is also bright orange.

I also gave ground cherry seeds away this spring, since they dried out over winter, setting in the back hallway unshelled.

Christy says she had so much fun with these old fashioned fruit of which most moderns have never heard!

She planted some of them, dried husk and all, plus sent some in answer to an email from a lady who was born and raised in Hawaii, and where the ground cherry is called "poha" and grows wild in the mountains. She now lives in Kansas and yearned to taste them again and try growing them from seed.

Ground cherries are in the nightshade family, which includes ordinary potatoes, tomatoes, eggplant and all colors and shapes of peppers. The nightshade family is know as the Solanaceae and includes some very poisonous members, too.

My nemesis is a viney deadly nightshade plant that bears very bright red poisonous berries that look similar to little cherry tomatoes. I fight and pull it up all summer from my herb patch of lemon balm under the grape arbor and on the shadier side of the house where it winds around the money plants, pink and purple phlox and Rose of Sharon. Not hard to pull up but comes back speedily.

At the homestead, we fought Jimson weed. Christy fights a different weed that resembles ground cherries but never bears fruit.

Another of the family is the orange Chinese Lanterns, sometimes called "smooth ground cherries," that add pleasing color to dried fall bouquets. Chinese Lanterns are the same shape as ground cherries, with five stamens which turn into a five sided thin, papery husk which is first green, but as the fruit inside ripens, it turns first yellow, then orange. The dangling orange lanterns usually remain attached thru the winter.

Christy wrote of the ground cherry fruit about which we know, to a gardening forum and received some most interesting recipes. If you've never tasted a ripe, yellow ground cherry, they have a unique flavor, somewhat like cooked green tomatoes. I always like to use a tiny (about 1/8 teas.) pinch of nutmeg in a recipe. Here is this lady's recipe for jam using this special fall fruit:

Poha (ground cherry) jam: 3 lb ground cherries (poha) 1/4 c water, 1 c sugar per c cooked ground cherries, l Tbsp lemon Juice. Husk and wash fruit. Combine with water, cook slowly for 30 minutes, stirring frequently. Remove from heat and let stand overnight. Measure pulp and juice, combine with an equal quantity of sugar. Return to heat, cook slowly, stirring occasionally for l hour. Doesn't that sound sumptuous?

Lucinda Strine © September 30, 2008

Lucinda Strine shares her perspective from the porch in a small town, and in the country-side of her youth. She has remembrances of simplier times in the country; simplier, but more labor intensive for a good outcome. She reveals historical events and charming tales with the values of days past.

View From Lucinda's Porch includes her light hearted gardening reviews, small town remembrances and how things used to be on the farm.

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