Saving Lettuce Seed

It was a breezy afternoon - just right for gathering lettuce seeds. Lettuce seeded in the Spring was harvested first as thinnings, then outer leaves here and there, and finally by cutting whole heads. When warmer weather finally arrived and the lettuce started to bolt, I pulled most of the plants incrementally to give to the chickens. But I also left a 3-5 plants of each variety to set seed.

So I've been watching those plants, waiting for just the right time to gather seeds. I knew it needed to be soon.  I need to make sure they've had enough time to mature viable seeds. The seeds of Black-seeded Simpson, aptly named, are easy to see when mature - nestled at the base of the fluffy little flower pods. But if I wait too long, the birds will beat me to them. High winds can blow the seeds away; rain can pound them off the plants.

The easiest way to get the most seeds, reasonably clean, is to just bend the plant tops over a tub and rub the seed pods between my hands. Old lettuce stalks produce a white sticky sap that irritates my skin, so I wear gloves. Each variety is in a separate space, carefully noted at planting time, so I harvest and process one variety at a time, but you could also create your own greens seed mix by just harvesting everything together.

After gathering, next comes the threshing. I rub the gathered seeds and chaff between my hands to break up any clumps. A coarse sieve filters out bigger immature buds and stems, and I pick out anything moving (no chemicals, so there is an occasional bug or worm).

Then, winnowing. I pour the seeds and chaff back and forth between two tubs. If it's really breezy, only a foot of pour space is enough; with less breeze I might go three feet high to pour. It's a bit scary to see how much stuff blows away at first, thinking you're losing all your seeds, but have faith.

The relatively high sides of the tubs keep bouncing out to a minimum. I sometimes blow directly on the chaff, hand-picking out of the far side of the tub. Before long, I have relatively clean seeds that can then be poured into envelopes (recycled, of course), labeled, and tucked away until next Spring. I pulled all the lettuce stalks and gave them to the chickens, and eventually they'll end up in this fall's compost pile.

Clockwise from top left: Ruby, Black-Seeded Simpson, Bibb, Buttercrunch, and Romaine. I also harvested dill and arugula seeds (not shown).

More Autumnal Chores

The cupboards and pantry are filling up with jars containing this year's harvest. One of the pints of yesterday's tomatillo salsa didn't seal, so it went into the refrigerator, joining the jar that wasn't quite full. There was room in a top corner cupboard for the rest.

That top cupboard shelf also holds my apple cider vinegar jar. It had been almost 2 months since I'd fed it, and as long as I had the step-stool right there, I figured I might as well take care of that too. The five gallons of this year's cider are still burbling away, in the fermentation bucket on the counter. It could be a couple more weeks before it's finished. So I went down to the cellar (skimmed the scum off the pickle crock while I was down there) to fetch a bottle of last year's hard cider.

There was a thin fresh layer of mother on top of the vinegar in the jar, plus quite a few layers of dead mother piling up in the bottom. So with well-washed hands, I pulled out the fresh mother plus one more thin one, putting them into a clean bowl, then reached in and pulled out the rest of the dead layers to throw out. I diluted the bottle of hard cider with half again as much water, poured that into the jar, and dropped in the thin pieces of fresh mother. Topped with its cheesecloth lid, the jar went back into the dark cupboard to continue its magical process of turning alcohol into tasty vinegar.

Aries went with me for the drive this morning, up to Tahoe to get the mole-removal stitches out of my arm. Doc said everything looks good and the lab reports say benign, so I'm good.

This afternoon, Aries was once again busy over at the compost bin. He'd cleaned out the chicken coop earlier this fall, and most afternoons has been out there raking leaves as they fall. He still had one last wheelbarrow load of finished compost for me, so this afternoon I dug that into part of next year's "early" bed, and raked it out smooth and level. I set out garlic and shallot cloves, from this summer's harvest, and winnowed, then sowed, spinach and arugula seeds from the dry plants I had hanging in the shed. Everything tamped down and laid over with wire to deter hungry birds, they now wait for winter's snows to water them in.

This Year's Corn Patch

I really need to get better organized with my garden seed storage - not the actual storing of the seeds, but seed expiration dates. I know some of my seeds are too old. I find it hard to just throw them out, though. I also have seeds that I grew once or twice, and then they never seem to make the cut again when it comes to plotting out my growing space.

Time to sit down and clear things out. Sowing seeds that no longer germinate just wastes time, and my growing season is short enough as it is. Hanging on to seeds I'll probably never plant is silly too. Time to whittle my seed storage box down to what I know I like, will grow here, and then keep up with it.

What brought on this rant is the sorry state of this year's corn patch. Wanting to spread the harvest out over many weeks, I have packets of seeds with varying maturity dates - plant once and harvest in succession. But this also means only planting a few of each type each year, so some of those packets are getting up in years. Some, this year, didn't germinate at all; others were down to less than 30%. Luckily, I track what is where (or should be, anyway), so I do know which packets to toss out for the birds.

I think I was able to salvage my corn harvest for this year, though. I've been trying to move more and more to saving my own seeds, so have been giving various non-hybrid varieties a trial or two in my garden. Hometown Seeds has a prepared package of emergency "survival seeds" - a packet designed to store in your freezer, with enough seeds for 3-4 seasons worth, or enough to get an entire block of neighbors growing their own fresh food (a good idea, in my mind - if things really did deteriorate to a genuine emergency state, I don't think I'd want to have the only food source in sight). I've seen other survival seed packages listed online, but I live in a rather rigorous growing environment. Just because something grows well in the Great Plains or Florida doesn't mean I'll get a crop from it. But Hometown Seeds is in Utah - the same Great Basin, high-desert, environment as my home. If things do well for them, they should be good here too.

So, one of my corn rows was their Golden Bantam 8 variety. Those seeds are great! Every one of them popped right up (however, growing well is only half the trial - they have to pass the taste test too). And since I'm used to the lower germination rates of other seed sources, I'd planted too many of them. Corn, being a grass-type plant, can take transplanting though, so that's what I did. I dug out every other GB8 plant and moved it over to fill in the gaps in three other rows.

Not quite enough, though. I still had two almost empty rows. But while grocery shopping the other evening, I checked out the little seed stand there. I found a packet of Trinity Hybrid - at 64 days, the shortest days-to-harvest I could find. I got them in the ground night before last (with lots of protection from hungry birds until they get up and growing). I'm hoping, with the hot days now, that they'll be up in no time . Our first frosts can come anytime after mid-September, but will sometimes hold off until early October. So maybe, just maybe, they'll have just enough time to set a crop.

Of Cabbages and Kings

Yesterday, I got seven and a half pounds of cabbage, from ones that split and heads too little to store, shredded, salted, and packed into a crock for sauerkraut (how-to here). My cabbages grow in the same bed as my root crops. I stop watering for a week or so before digging the carrots, beets, and potatoes. But I've had problems getting enough moisture out of the cabbage, and don't like feeling like I'm bruising it instead of just packing it down.

So this year I tried soaking the heads overnight first, and then letting them drain/drip dry in the dish drainer this morning. That worked great - the cabbage shreds were crisp and crunchy, and once tossed with the salt started to sweat right away. When I packed it into the crock there was plenty of brine. I put the crock into the cellar, where it will slowly ferment over the next couple of months. I've still have 4½ nice big cabbages for fresh eating this winter too.

While I was in the kitchen, Aries picked the apples from our MacIntosh and Liberty trees (those are my potted fig trees in the wagon - not normally grown in Nevada. Right now, they're being moved in and out of the garage until they go dormant, and then they'll spend the winter in the cellar). We got a lot of apples, but they were all so small, some bird-pecked, and some of these late apples had worms in them (the earlier Freedom apples were much better; and the birds got all the Gravensteins, our earliest apple, this year). We also gleaned three baskets of heirloom apples from an old tree on a lawyers' office lawn in the old section of town before the snow. They're beautiful, big apples, but three-quarters of those were wormy too. I picked through them, and put the good ones in the cellar. We're going to make a batch of hard cider from all the rest. I'll write about it when we do. After he finished with the apples, Aries started cleaning up the garden - pulling out all the plants that froze, shredding them, getting them into the compost bin.


I can't believe he did it again!
Black kale, Tuscan, dinosaur, Lacinato - whatever you call it, it's supposed to be the king of kales for taste and texture. Last year, I had one plant, that I stuck in with the peppers and tomatoes after a pepper plant died. I was really looking forward to having a wonderful winter green for fresh eating. But after the first freeze, and Aries had cleaned up the garden, my beautiful kale plant was gone! He'd pulled it up along with the dead plants. "Couldn't [he] see it was a thriving plant, not dead?" He said he was sorry - he didn't realize it was something I wanted. What else could I do but forgive him?

This summer, I set out three black kale plants, this time, in with the rest of the greens and hardy plants. They grew great. The aphids didn't bother them, neither did the recent snow - all three were strong healthy plants almost two feet tall. And today, all three were gone! Again! His defense: "they didn't look like food."

Aaarrgggh! It's thriving, in a vegetable garden - what else would it be! I still can't believe it - especially since he left a puny little chard plant growing right next to them, and some weedy bitter overgrown mustard plants down the way a bit (he also pulled up all my lettuce plants I had purposely let go to seed so I could harvest the seeds - ok, they did look pretty weedy; and the last head of cauliflower - now that had to look like food). Sometimes I just don't understand how that man thinks!

Ok, I have to get over it. What's done is done. On another note: Two nights ago, the full moon rose over the middle of Prison Hill. Our house is pretty much square with the compass points, and the moon was due east, straight out from the deck and our big window. Then tonight, when I went out to close up the chicken coop, the moon was coming up waaaaay over to the northeast, clear over above the north end of Prison Hill. I couldn't even see it from our big window. Even though I've noticed the same thing before (was it this time of year? maybe), it's hard to believe the moon's orbit wobbled that much in only two days (they haven't bombed it yet, have they?). Or is the Earth wobbling on its axis? Maybe that's why we're having earthquakes and tsunamis? Can the ancient Mayans be right after all?

Braided, Tied, and Hung to Dry

After a couple of days outside in the shade, it was time to get my garlic harvest into shape to store. Usually, when garlic is almost ready to harvest, the leaf tips turn tan and the green tops flop over, right at the soil line. When that happens on a few of the plants, I'll bend the rest of the crop down too and pull the soaker hose away to let the soil dry out for a few days before digging up the bulbs.

This year, my garlic didn't do that. The tops just dried out and all turned tan at once, still standing upright, and earlier than usual. They're really nice-sized bulbs - I got five pounds of garlic from a 2' x 4' patch. But having to pull dry plants out of still-damp soil means I don't know how well they'll store this winter. When garlic is harvested with the tops still somewhat green out of dry dirt, as it cures the wrapping layers stay intact, protecting the cloves inside all winter and into the spring. But the outer layers were already so dry that they flaked away as the dirt dried, leaving less wrapping around the bulbs. I'll have to keep an eye on the bulbs later this season, and if they start feeling shrunken inside the wrapping I'll have to do something - probably make garlic powder by peeling and dehydrating what's left.

But I prefer fresh garlic, and Mother Nature meant for it to last through the winter to grow anew in early Spring. So I'll try curing and storing it as usual for now. I didn't want to chance rubbing away any more layers, so my garlic braid isn't quite as pretty and shiny-white as usual. I just cleaned off the dirt a bit and trimmed the roots with shears. The bulbs too dry to braid are in a basket on the counter to be used first. I use braided garlic from the bottom up in order to keep the decorative aspect nice as long as possible, so I started braiding with smaller bulbs, those with cloves starting to separate, and those with the least wrapping layers. I add in bulbs to the right, left, and center as room is available, keep braiding a bit more at the top, and then bend the braid to the back. Then, using a short length of string, I tie tightly close to the top bulbs (the stems will shrink as they dry), criss-cross wrap a few times and tie again higher up, and then knot a hanging loop. I'll leave the braid out in the open kitchen to cure for a couple of weeks, then move it into the cooler, darker pantry to store. Then, I'll just have to keep an eye on it, watching for withering. The two biggest, nicest bulbs, those with the long stems not part of the braid, I'm saving to break apart to plant come October.

Short Season Tomatoes and Peppers

Summer's finally here, and daytime temps are reaching up towards the 90's. But high desert nights cool off down in the 40's in June, and the 50's all summer long. Add to that a frost-free season averaging only a little over 100 days, and crops like tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, and okra can be a bit difficult to grow here.

Forget vine-ripened Brandywine tomatoes - they'll still be green when the nights turn frosty in mid-September. I grow Early Girl for salads and sandwiches, and Sweet 100 for snacking, usually grazing on them right there in the garden. Both are hybrids, so no saving seeds, but I like the taste of each of them so buy a packet of seeds every few years. I also plant at least six paste tomato plants - my main crop for canning in many different guises. I started with an Amish Paste tomato, and about 20 years ago started saving seeds from the biggest, earliest fruit each summer. I consider it my own personal heirloom now - I call it CC (for Carson City) Paste. Many of my pepper plants are also grown from saved seeds - I just smash open one of the peppers hung to dry in various ristras. I haven't yet been able to save viable seeds from my eggplants or okra, so I buy seeds for them. Black Beauty eggplant and Clemson Spineless okra do well here.

I start all my fruiting plants from seed in late March to early April. The tomatoes get transplanted once, into deeper pots burying part of the stem, in early May. The plants are still quite small by the end of May, but I think that lessens the transplant shock and once into the garden they'll settle in quicker. I start hardening them off just before Memorial Day - setting them outside for longer periods each day, bringing them back in at night.

I rotate the type of plants - early, fruiting, vining, roots & brassicas, corn & beans - around through my five garden beds so that the type of bed will be the same every sixth year. Tomatoes, in the fruiting bed, and potatoes, in the roots bed, are in the same family however, so I try to put the tomatoes in a different part of the bed than where the potatoes were only a couple of years ago. In early June, it's time to get everything into the ground. Each of my 50' planting beds get an inch of compost and a light dusting of my all-purpose fertilizer mix (equal parts bone meal, blood meal, and greensand) every Spring, so I level the surface and lay out a soaker hose.

Into each planting hole, I also add some crushed eggshells (for calcium), some Epsom Salts (for magnesium), and a bit extra of the fertilizer mix. Then I get the hose, fill each hole with water, and start setting in each plant. Most of the plants are set in as deep as they were in their starting pots, but tomatoes will form roots on any part of their stem if it's buried. So I pinch off some of the lower leaves and set them in even deeper, leaving only the top couple of leaves above ground. More and deeper roots on the tomatoes help alleviate problems that our temperature swings and dry climate can cause.

Next come the cages. The little cone-shaped tomato cages really aren't big enough to support my tomatoes, but they work great for the peppers and eggplants. For the tomatoes, I've made cages out of welded hog wire fencing. For extra support (we do get some pretty good winds out of the west), each of the tomatoes gets a metal stake (2.5' for the determinate paste tomatoes, 6' for the indeterminate Early Girl and Sweet 100) pounded into the ground, and then a cage, the same diameter as a plastic five-gallon bucket, goes over the post and is secured with a twist-tie. And then, the secret for getting a decent harvest from these long-season plants: a Wall-o-Water (WoW) is placed over each cage.

The Wall-o-Waters are stored through the winter in a five-gallon bucket in the shed. Once they're in place over each caged plant, I sit on the up-ended bucket and start filling each little tube. It's tedious business, but a pistol-grip nozzle on the hose makes it easier. It's tricky to get the WoW's to stand up when you first start filling one. If you have new ones without leaks and no cages, put a five-gallon bucket upside down over the plant, the WoW around the bucket, fill tubes on alternating sides until all are full, and then pull the bucket out. Okra doesn't need the support of a cage when growing, so if I don't have enough cages I'll make sure the WoW's over the okra are ones without leaks (I clip on old clothespins to mark which ones have leaks - one pin means only a leak or two, two pins means they'll work best over the big tomato cages). I have a piece of smooth wire fencing in a perfectly-sized circle I can use to support the WoW when filling. It's even easier than using a bucket, but make sure all the wire ends are bent to inside the circle. Once filled, the WoW is self-supporting. But I've found having cages inside each one make things easier, keeps the ones that have leaks from falling over, and provides extra support in our winds.

The WoW's, even the ones with leaks, provide wind protection and a warm little micro-climate inside to get my little plants off to a good start. Around the Fourth of July, our nights are warmed up enough to get the WoW's off the plants. It takes two of us to lift them up and over, off the cages. The water inside is dumped onto the plants, and the WoW's hung up on the clothesline to drip-dry, then stacked up, rolled up, and stored away in their bucket.

New Things for the Garden

I sat down with my box of garden seeds this morning, checking to see what I'm lacking, and then put in an internet order for the seeds I know I can't find locally. One hybrid I just had to have was Joi Choi, the only bok choi I've found that doesn't bolt to seed once our summer heat gets here. I also wanted Kuroda carrots, an Asian type that handles our summer heat nicely, yet keeps well in storage until the following summer. And I'm trying Delfino Cilantro in my on-going search to find the slowest one to bolt.

I also ordered seeds for a few more heirloom vegetables. I'm trying to move more and more to heirlooms, so I can save even more of my own seeds. This year, I'm trying Lutz Green Leaf for my beet crop, and Danish Ballhead for storage cabbages. I found the things I wanted in the Jung Seeds catalog.

I like additions to my perennial plant selection even better. I ordered a Wolfberry herb plant, also called a Goji berry. It's supposed to be a hardy, drought-tolerant, vining perennial shrub, and the berries, high in anti-oxidants, are commonly dried like rose hips. Sounds like it will fit right in around here. I wanted a couple more blueberry plants. I already have a dwarf Northland that is doing ok in a little bed where I've added sulfur, plus mulched with pine needles and coffee grounds, to make the soil more acid. Blueberries are supposed to do better with three varieties cross-pollinating each other, so I'm trying a dwarf Northblue and a Rubel to complete that planting group - I need to find varieties that can both take the heat of our summers and survive our freezing winter weather without snow cover.

Then, I'm trying something new for my sweet husband. He likes to make beer, getting the ingredients from a brewers supply place in Reno, but has always wanted to play with home-grown hops. So I ordered both Nugget and Willamette plants. Before they get here I'll have to decide if I want to just grow them as summer privacy screening on the fence and treat the hops flowers as a bonus, or set up a trellis system designed for efficient harvesting of the flowers. I've thought about growing them up a string outside the south side of the chicken pen to a pole just inside to give the chickens some more summer shade, or maybe I'll design a hops arbor. Aries is pretty good at figuring out how to make my design sketches a reality, and we've got quite a bit of salvaged wood for building projects.

Leeks for the Lazy Gardener

Most home gardeners growing leeks start them from seed each year, or just buy transplants. Some smaller varieties are said to mature in 90 days, but the big inch-or-more wide ones like you'll find in the markets take almost 200 days to grow to that size. In order to get a pencil-sized leek seedling ready to set out in April, you'd have to start the seeds in January, tending and transplanting and keeping them under lights. That's too much work for me. I prefer to let my leeks start themselves.


Leeks, if left to themselves, are actually hardy multiplying perennials. Many members of the allium plant family are, and I take advantage of that fact so that we can eat home-grown onions year-round. I have a permanent allium bed around one corner of my garden. In that bed, I grow perennial clumps of bunching onions for Summer scallions (background right), plus clumps of walking onions (background left; sometimes called top-set or Egyptian) for the earliest Spring scallions (I've started eating those this week - more about them here). I always replant some to replace each of the clumps I use each year. The center part of that background bed is my leek nursery; this year's eating crop, set out last year and over-wintered, is in the foreground.




















I started with a few of my biggest home-grown leeks years ago, transplanting a couple of the last plants left each year and then just letting them come back year after year until I need them. But if your local market has leeks with the root section still intact you can use those too. In fact, you can have your leek and plant it too. Just cut off the root section and bury it somewhere it can grow undisturbed for a year or more. The following year the root will send up a seed stalk, and also some little leeklets. Every year thereafter, if left undisturbed, the clump of leeklets will increase. I let the seed stalks grow too. They add a nice ornamental edging to that corner of the garden.


Early each Spring, I transplant a clump or two of the biggest set of leeklets into my regular garden, setting the plants in at least 6 - 8 inches deep (pruning by poultry, as seen here, not recommended - I need to clip some wings). In June, each transplant will send up a seed stalk, and I break off the flower bud on the top. By August a new leek plant has grown up alongside the broken stalk. By October, the remains of the seed stalk have dried up and are easily pulled out, leaving only a big beautiful leek plant. The leeks continue to grow, slowly, into at least December. They then spend the rest of the winter out in the garden - either buried in snow, or as is usually the case, exposed to the wind and below zero temperatures in the barren ground. The long-season leeks, the kind you want to be using for this type of over-winter growing anyway, are extremely hardy.



















I might dig a few during the darkest days of winter, but usually that time of year I'm cooking with my globe onions from storage. But now, with my yellow onions almost gone, the leeks I transplanted a year ago are an especially welcome addition to our meals. Besides, their lighter and mellower flavor just seems to go better in Spring dishes. We'll eat fresh leeks for the next couple of months. By then, they'll be gone and it will be warm enough for the corn and bean plantings to rotate into that bed. The last couple of leeks get moved over to the nursery section to grow and multiply for future plantings. If you've got a little space for a permanent leek nursery, try this method and you'll never have to buy plants or contend with seeds again.

First Onions of Spring

I still have a few yellow onions stored in the cellar. I've found Copra onions, purchased as plants from my local garden center (they'll be in next week, they said), keep very well when well-cured in the fall, and grow well in my climate in my regular summer garden. Those (and shallots - my own, set out in the fall) are my winter-time storage cooking onions.

For lunch, I had a package of imitation-crab surimi, so I decided I'd make some crab salad to put on a bagel. I diced up some celery to mix in, but it still needed something. It's starting to feel like Spring, and I'm starting to crave Spring foods. I needed some green onion. So I headed out to the garden to forage.

I have to admit - I'm a lazy gardener. If I can get my plants to grow themselves instead of me starting them from seed each year, I'll do it. Luckily, onions and other alliums are so easy to keep going that I have a special perennial bed just for them around one corner of the garden. The bunching onions are up, but I want to give them a chance to multiply. I'll eat those in the summer. In very early Spring, I go for the walking onions (sometimes called top-set or Egyptian).

Last fall, I planted the little top-set bulb bunches in spaces left by those I'd harvested. They're just now starting to grow (left side, below the hose). But I also leave some big clumps alone every summer. Right now, the big clumps I didn't touch last year have multiplied - each onion making two or three new ones - and they're already up and growing strong. Later when the heat of summer gets here, each onion will be more than an inch thick. Then, they'll start to get tough and really hot-tasting, and send up stalks topped with little bulbs. But right now, peeling away the tough red outer skin reveals a sweet little scallion - just what I needed.

Pumpkin Pie Leather

This time of year, my home-grown fresh-food options are things that store well. Apples, potatoes, beets, winter radishes, and carrots are in the cellar. Garlic, onions, and shallots hang in the pantry. Leeks and kale are still out in the garden. Seeds store well. Last year I let a few Daikon radishes and cole plants go to seed - sprouted, they add a tasty zing to winter meals. But we have one more fresh foods storage spot here at Firesign Farm.

Winter squash, cured in the fall out in the dark garage, spend the winter in crates in the corner of our bedroom. The cellar is too cold for squash, the pantry too warm. But with our only heat the wood stove in the living room, this far corner of the bedroom is perfect. I grow a few different types of winter squash. The difference in sizes and tastes allows for variety in our winter meals. The smaller butternuts are nice microwaved and mashed like sweet potatoes. The acorn types are good baked and stuffed. But then there are the bigger squash. They store the best, lasting until May or June, so there's no hurry to use them. They're so big that once I cook one, we're eating it for days. I try to cook one big squash every week or two. The bumpy Hopi are new - I'm still playing with them. I usually use the pink banana squash for any recipe calling for pumpkin, but last summer a friend gave me a couple of pumpkin plants so this year I have pumpkins to play with too.

To cook a big squash, I split it in half and remove the seeds - saving some to plant, the rest to soak in salt water and then roast. Some have peels so hard I have to beat an old knife through with a hammer. I put the pieces, cavity-side down, in a roasting pan with an inch of water added and bake at 375º for an hour or until the skin can be pierced easily with the tip of a knife. Once cool enough to handle, I scrape out the flesh and mash to use in a number of different recipes. The pumpkins aren't cooking pumpkins - they're the jack-o-lantern type - so once cooked, are more watery than the Hopi or banana squash. So I glop the mashed pumpkin into a colander set into a bowl and put that in the refrigerator to drain. Harry Potter and the Hogwarts kids are right - pumpkin juice really is quite tasty! It also adds a nice layer of flavor to beef stew.

Pie, custard, muffins, pasta, soup - there are lots of winter dishes I cook with mashed squash, and if I have to I can always freeze it too. But since I just wrote about dehydrating fruits and vegetables for my turn posting at the Simple Green Frugal Co-op I thought I'd share one of my favorite treats to make now, easy to store for later (pumpkin pie leather in the big jar, peach unrolled on the left, plum on the right).

Pumpkin Pie Leather (makes 4 9"x13" leathers)

2 eggs
4 cups cooked, mashed squash or pumpkin (or 1 one-pound can)
⅓ cup honey
1 teaspoon cinnamon
½ teaspoon ground ginger
¼ teaspoon ground cloves
1 can evaporated milk (or 1 c dry milk + 1½ c water)

Put into blender in order given, blend well. Spray rimmed cookie sheets with a thin film of non-stick spray, or line dehydrator trays with plastic wrap or parchment paper (edit added later: or even better, a silicone non-stick mat cut to fit -nice because it's reusuable) held down with a bit of tape on the corners. Spread mixture uniformly ⅛ to ¼ inch thick on prepared trays. Dry 8-10 hours at 115º, or until leather will pull away from the tray. Roll up and store in a cool, dark, dry place. Will keep indefinitely.