I haven’t blogged about the Pickle Patch lately, and the perfect ending for the harvesting season was naturally Thanksgiving.
It seems that our house is the hub for the holidays. I might be retired, but I am kept busy with my three hobbies: ancestry, blogging, and the pickle patch. During the holidays, these hobbies take a backseat until the festivities are over.
Being the hub for the holidays, I somehow have the role of planning the celebrations. This usually entails first sending a text to the kids, giving them the particulars, and even detailing what side dishes we need or they can make. If I don’t plan, I’m not sure my kids would even ask or maybe say they want one of the holidays.
I can relax a little until it is time for Christmas, which, as of today, is next week. Time flies! It is amazing that a lot of our Christmas shopping doesn’t even require us to leave the house. This is actually good for me as it keeps my stress level down.
As for our Pickle Patch Bountiful Thanksgiving, shopping was easy. The Butterball turkey and other essential groceries were just a 5-minute trip to Aldi. The rest, we gave thanks like the pilgrims did, as my Pickle Patch provided us with a bountiful spread of delicious veggies from my fall gardening.
This is my third year, and I have hit the sweet spot, so to speak. Our first year at fall gardening was a bust—nothing grew. The second year was a little better with some Daikon radishes and turnip greens. This year, it was like Goldilocks: just right, except I didn’t plant enough of our new favorite food.
In the fall garden, I planted pole beans, yellow squash, zucchini, icicle radishes, kale, collards, Swiss chard, mustard greens, kohlrabi, daikon radishes, tomatoes, hot peppers, bell peppers, bok choi, turnips, garlic, eggplant, butternut squash, and lima beans. Some plants, like all the peppers and eggplant, hung in there, which surprised me.
Not everything had time to produce, like my Henderson lima beans. They formed pods, but I planted these on a whim as we have a long warm fall. Instead of providing us with food, they will nourish the soil. Their roots will house microbes that fix atmospheric nitrogen into the soil. It’s all good, as whatever I plant there—probably the many tomatoes on our list—will grow better.
The garlic also will not produce for fall, but they needed to be planted for our summer 2025 harvest, which is one of our main ingredients for our dill pickles. As the summer crops died, I started tilling for the fall, where some beds got the cover crop seeds of daikon radishes. We can still harvest some of these to eat, but if you don’t know about cover crops, you will want to try this method.
I started with Daikon radishes last year and had a bumper crop of summer veggies. Or am I just a better gardener? Anyway, I am doing the cover crops again, and some beds have only daikon, while other beds have a blend of mixed seeds of daikon, crimson clover, turnips, and kohlrabi. The last two I had a lot of seeds for, as I thought I needed a pound for my seed planter. I was way wrong and decided to toss them around too!
Basically, you don’t want to leave your soil bare, as cover crops do several good things:
Prevent soil erosion
Add nutrients and mass to the soil
Choke out weeds
I am not an expert, but it makes sense, and it seems to work in my garden.
I know I can go on and on about gardening, but I do want to tell you about our bountiful Thanksgiving. Remember my article about AI and how it helps with ancestry? I now love using AI to create recipes. So, several weeks ago, I was working on recipes and trying some of them out. One, which I will tell you about in a minute, was the star of Thanksgiving. Most of these recipes aren’t typically served at Thanksgiving—we didn’t have green bean casserole or mashed potatoes. Most of the vegetables came from the garden, with a little help from the grocery store. By the listing of vegetables and being November, which vegetables from the list did I use?
If you said butternut squash, kohlrabi, daikon, turnips, bell peppers, tomatoes (red and green), and Swiss chard, then you get a gold star.
The butternut was roasted in the shell with butter, salt, and pepper. This is actually a traditional Thanksgiving dish for us, but this time it came from the pickle patch. Our new recipes, like roasted root vegetables, green and red tomato, cucumber, and pepper salad, and creamed Swiss chard, were the new additions to our Thanksgiving table. To view the recipes I created with Copilot, click on the hyperlinks below in the menu listing.
The star of Thanksgiving was the creamed Swiss chard. It was such a favorite that the kids took all of it home in their doggie plastic containers. Here we have a rule: I give them a big reusable plastic divided lunch box container that they can put whatever they want in, but the only stipulation is that they must bring the container back to use for the next time. It is a small way to save the planet.
When I was starting to think about the menu, I texted the family members who were driving from Virginia to see if there was anything special they had at their Thanksgiving that they might want to make, like a pie or something. They didn’t suggest a food but said we could buy pies. I thought this was funny as we don’t do this in our house. I learned from my own family growing up and also marrying into the family that we make food from scratch. Now, if I didn’t like cooking, then yes, I would buy prepared foods. For any big holidays or gatherings, I text what I am making and what vegetable or dessert they would like to bring. In this case, I told my son-in-law, Chris, my pickle patch partner, to make the roasted root vegetables, and my daughter-in-law, Chrystal, said she could bring corn. The ones not cooking were in charge of setup and cleanup.
It all went like clockwork as I didn’t need to tell the non-cookers to set the table. One thing I do want to mention to make cleanup easy is that we used our everyday dishes. I have come to a point in my life where, after cooking the big meal, I definitely do not want to spend time cleaning my china. Only I can wash it as it was my mother’s china that my dad bought when he was in the Korean War. The china has to be handwashed because of the gold on the plates, which would be damaged in the dishwasher. I wonder how many families even have fine china and glassware in a china cabinet.
Our Thanksgiving Menu:
Turkey
Cornbread dressing
Giblet gravy
Butternut squash
Corn
Cranberry sauce
Pecan pie
Pumpkin pie
Chocolate chess pie
Homemade whipped cream
The secret to any holiday dinner is to do what you can ahead of time. I had sticky notes of all the jobs I needed to do on my kitchen spice cabinet, and as I completed each task, I put them in a pile and stuck them in my cookbook on my cornbread dressing recipe that I started developing in 2001. I finally perfected it in 2012 to the taste of our family. I have to make a triple batch, and we barely had enough for leftovers.
A good example of early prep is about two months ahead of time when we were having soup, I would make a double batch of cornbread. I would stick what we didn’t eat in the big freezer. I knew exactly the weight I needed for the cornbread. By identifying what I could do ahead, like cooking the star of Thanksgiving (Swiss chard), freezing it, and just having to warm it in a slow cooker, I had more time to spend with our guests, like showing them the pickle patch in the community gardens.
When planting the fall garden, I never thought that I would be using the vegetables for Thanksgiving. I hope next year to provide even more from the pickle patch for our bountiful Thanksgiving. Please let me know if you’d like me to post any of the other dishes that were on our menu.
May you have a blessed holiday season and a joyful New Year,
Nancy Dru
