Cauliflower and Other Delightful Fall Veggies

It's recipe day!

Our CSA members are getting a treat today: the first of our cauliflower harvest. I've been looking forward to cauliflower ever since I started watching for these white heads on the plants back in August. They're finally coming into their own! Cauliflower is delicious, surprisingly nutritious for a white vegetable (B6 and C, anyone?), and it's versatile. It can be steamed, roasted, served as raw florets in a salad or on a relish tray.

As it happens, an interesting web site that I visit occasionally has Cauliflower for it's food of the week this week. "World's Healthiest Foods" has a lot of information about hundreds of foods, so it's one of the places I go to get info on the quick. Today, one of the recipes they're featuring is 5-Minute Healthy Sauteed Cauliflower. It looks delicious!

But my favorite is Faux-tay-toes. Some months ago, my favorite food author, Dinner Diva Leanne Ely wrote about making some stand-by side dishes healthier, and giving their flavor a new, tasty twist. Mashed faux-tay-toes are easy to make (plus it's just fun to say faux-tay-toes), and my family's been enjoying them for years. All you need to do is steam  your head of cauliflower, broken into large florets, until it's really tender. Then drain it, and grab your favorite potato mashing device: masher, blender, food processor, or hand mixer. Add a touch of butter, a bit of cream cheese, salt and pepper to taste, and smash away until the texture is right for you. My food experiment for the week: I plan to add a handful of finely diced, colored sweet peppers. I'll let you know how it turns out!

More cauliflower are on their way...as are tomatoes, peppers, sweet corn, Brussels sprouts and more! We still have a couple of weeks of harvest here at the farm. And all this diversity of produce makes me want to make a great vegetable soup. My soups are never the same twice. I like to grab a couple of handfuls of whatever vegetables I have on hand, make sure to add a nice big handful of chopped onion and a crushed clove or three of garlic, and then saute it all in the soup pot for a few minutes with a little olive oil. This time of year, I might even add a handful of chopped walnuts or hickory nuts. Follow that up with a nice chicken broth or stock, about a quart of stock per quart of veggies, and I've got a unique, tasty treat every time.

Fall Color in Evergreen Trees? You Bet!

Now is the time when independent garden centers and nurseries all around the Midwest are fielding phone calls from new tree owners asking "Why are my trees turning brown??" Almost every time, once we see the photos, we can reassure them: it's just their fall color. And once you know what to look for, it can be quite a show.

Like the deciduous trees - maples, oaks, cherries and the like - all the evergreens we see around us also go through a fall color change and leaf drop each autumn. The leaves that fall aren't big and splashy, and of course they don't drop from the entire tree either. What happens instead, is that each tree species removes from its branches a certain age of needles every year. For most Pine species, the needles that are falling are either two or three years old. You can see that in the Red Pine shown below:

 

Spruces tend to hang on to their needles for 3 or 4 years, depending on what kind of spruce you're talking about. The White Spruce below is shedding what look to be four-year-old needles. And some Fir trees shed four-year-old needles, while other Fir species, like the Concolor, may hang on to their needles for as many as seven years. Other evergreens like Yews, Junipers and Arborvitae also experience fall needle drop. 

Fortunately for us, the color display can help remind us to pay attention to our trees in the fall. There are three things to manage in the fall: mulch, nutrition and water. Newly-planted trees (those in the ground for 3 years or less) should have mulch covering the root ball and roots for the winter, so they have the benefit of the soil's warmth for as long as possible. If it's there already, just check that it's 3-4" deep and not covering the trunk. If a little more is needed, October is better than November for an application - retain as much of that heat as possible.

Watering new trees doesn't necessarily end just because the air has cooled. Dormant trees are still using water, just not as much as they were in the summer. Performing a soil moisture check willhelp deicde whether to irrigate - they may want water right up through November 1.

Lastly, while you're putting on some water, a fall dose of root stimulator fertilizer is great for those new trees. A product with indole-3-burytic acid in a liquid or granular form can be applied to the surface fairly easily.

The fall color show provided by our evergreens can be a lot like the one we get from our deciduous trees. The range of color shades, as well as the timing and texture of the needles that drop all combine to add a bit more drama to the season. While it never hurts to ask us about it, I think it's one more reason to enjoy Autumn!

Tree of the Week: Kentucky Coffee Tree

This week seemed like a good time to link to our Tree of the Week list, and what better way than to link directly to one of my favorite trees? I just love the Kentucky Coffee Tree. Not only is it unusual and beautiful, it has a bonus for a plant geek: a really cool Latin name, Gymnocladus dioicus (hear it pronounced here). Legend has it that Native Americans and settlers drank a beverage made from the roasted seeds as a coffee replacement, which led to land developers using the tree as a marketing tool. That didn't last long, as the drink didn't come close to coffee's drink-ability!

Native to the Midwest, KCT has a nice light to medium green leaf color that contrasts really well with the shade that the leaves give, making a very "woodland" feel under the tree. That leaf color turns yellow in the fall and in some years is very striking, then the leaves, which are doubly-compound, come off to leave behind a strong, coarsely-textured outline.




Ok, so what's doubly-compound? Well, the leaf is composed of a stem, which has smaller stems coming off of it. Those smaller stems, in turn, contain leaflets. There are dozens of leaflets per leaf, and the whole structure is about 3' long!




Now for my favorite part of the tree: its fruit. The seeds (on female trees only!) come in a great big, bean-like pod that starts off a lighter green than the leaves, and then as it matures becomes a deep, rich, russet or chestnut color. They hang on the tree most of the winter, breaking off and apart late in the season. The tree only grows a couple here and there while it's young, then as it gets to be a 10-12" trunk diameter or so, you start seeing them pop up around more of the tree's crown. As it grows older, the tree fruits heavily only every 2-3 years.


So, back to Tree of the Week. We feature dozens of species of trees in this listing of good - and not so good - trees to plant in our area. Kentucky Coffee Tree is one of them, and we like to go through the list for a weekly feature. Descriptions are a bit more objective than you see here, but we try to provide a nice overview of how the tree can perform in the landscape. Enjoy!