I didn’t grow any pumpkins in my backyard garden this year. I didn’t have a good crop two years ago because of worms – I only got one usable pumpkin – and I didn’t feel up to it last year.

Susan makes pumpkin pies and pumpkin bread from scratch, so we have to buy pumpkins. But I have discovered that the price of pumpkins plummets two days after Halloween.

So I buy a few pie pumpkins for a couple of bucks each. In October, they would sell for at least $1 a pound. She splits the pumpkins in half, removes the seeds and bakes them in the oven (with about a half-inch of water). Then she uses an ice cream scoop to take out the pulp. She puts that in a food processor and freezes most of it.

Then she makes delicious pumpkin pies for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Once you have eaten a pumpkin pie made from scratch, it’s hard to get excited about a pie from a can.

She puts raisins in her pumpkin bread and that makes it special. We give loaves of pumpkin bread away at Christmas because it is such a treat.

Susan grew green beans this summer and for a long time, it looked like we wouldn’t have much of a crop. But then in October, they starting coming in like crazy. Green beans are really healthy and good for you. It’s great to eat them from your own backyard. The green beans stopped producing a few of weeks ago when we had a big freeze.

Likewise, her tomato crop seemed to be a big disappointment (like almost everything else in 2020). But in October, the tomatoes came pouring in. 

During the early summer, she had some success with broccoli. Broccoli isn’t hard to grow but it’s hard to grow high quality broccoli in your backyard.  We had several mint plants in our garden again this year. For some reason, we have never done much with mint. But this year, I was determined to harvest some mint leaves.  We had a bunch of them.

Four times I harvested the mint. I washed the leaves, dried them off, and then put them in a paper bag for two weeks to let them dry. There are other drying methods but that is the one I prefer.

Then after two weeks, I stripped the leaves off the stems and crushed them. Then I placed them in glass jars and sealed them.

I am hoping to make some mint tea this winter. I have four jars of mint. It smells wonderful. It’s just amazing how easy it is to grow mint. And apparently, mint is good for keeping some insects away from your vegetable garden.

We also grow basil, rosemary and some other herbs. It’s a treat to use herbs that you have grown yourself. Susan has a dryer that she uses to preserve some of the herbs.

My parents and grandparents all had backyard gardens. They grew cucumbers, beans, peas, lettuce, spinach and a whole lot of other foods. They usually had a chicken coop, too.

They knew how to can produce and how to preserve food. It was a very useful skill set.

I grew up without knowing how to grow much. That’s one of the reasons why 10 years ago, we dug a garden in the back yard and planted some seeds.  Sometimes we get a nice crop.

Sometimes the bugs get a nice dinner. We try to learn from our mistakes.

None of our kids are interested in a vegetable garden and that’s a shame. There could come a time – like what happened in World War II – when everyone needs to grow some food.

And homegrown food is so much better for you than processed food. It is healthy and delicious. You don’t have to worry about what chemicals were used to grow that food or wash it after it was harvested.

In 2021, I’m thinking I will get back in the pie pumpkin business.