Benji & The 24 Pound Banana Squash Book Review and Giveaway

I received this book free to facilitate this review. Affiliate links may be in this posting. Thanks for supporting my blog.

Benji & The 24 Pound Banana Squash is a hardcover children's book that is by bestselling author Alan C. Fox with illustrations by Eefje Kuijl. This adorable book is the story of a child named Benji's experience of growing a banana squash from start to finish. Benji & the 24 Pound Banana Squash is based on a real-life event that happened when Alan Fox was eight. It teaches kids about patience, love, dedication, and perseverance and how much fun it is to grow their own foods.

My kids enjoying our harvests.

Our Thoughts:
Benji & The 24 Pound Banana Squash is a wonderful story of garden-to-table. I love how Benji is so patient even though he sees nothing come from the seed he plants at first. After a while he reaps the reward of his determination and nurturing.

We loved this cute book and its lovely illustrations. The book starts from the beginning where Benji picks the perfect spot in the ground and plants the seed to his family sitting around the table eating the cooked squash with butter and brown sugar. The pictures are fun to look at too. One picture shows Benji trying to dig the hole himself with the shovel and he fell over on his back flinging dirt and earth worms into the air. Another shows his dog bouncing a ball on a small trampoline as Benji carries the large squash inside the house. My kids will treasure this book.

Teela and Zari enjoying the Benji & the 24 Pound Banana Squash book.

I recommend this sweet and endearing story to anyone. It is perfect for those who want to teach their children about where their food comes from or even help them grasp the concepts of being more patient...because it will certainly pay off in the end. It is wonderful for those city folk that want to give a piece of country life to their kids.

BUY IT
Purchase The Benji & the 24 Pound Banana Squash book for $17.95 on Amazon.




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Prize: Win a copy of Benji & The 24 Pound Banana Squash Book {US ONLY}

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DISCLOSURE/DISCLAIMER: I received this book for free to facilitate this review. My thoughts are mine and my family's own opinion and have not been altered by anyone else. I did not receive any other compensation for doing this review. Affiliate links can be found in this post. Thank you for your support of this blog!

Wordless Wednesday Garlic and Potato Harvest

Elephant Garlic harvest this year was awesome!

This was my first time growing and harvesting potatoes.

The Harvest - September and October 2012

During the month of September and October we were very busy picking, harvesting, foraging, gathering and wildcrafting. We picked apples and pears off our trees and grapes off our vines. We picked plums from the neighbors trees that they wanted us to help ourselves to and I gathered up fallen walnuts from both our many Black Walnut and English Walnut trees. I have also been trying to educate myself about the flora and fauna in and around Portland and Rainier Oregon, where I live. I am learning a lot about canning and dehydrating too.

We made Golden Plum fruit leather in my dehydrator and it turned out a to have a gorgeous stain glass look to it. All I did was wash them, peal the skins off, pit them and mush up the plum fruit in a bowl or if they were really ripe I just mushed them with my fingers and spread the mush out on the fruit leather tray somewhat. It is fine if it has juice in the tray with it because that will get dried also. So yummy and without any additives or extras.

We canned pear sauce and dehydrated pears too. I don't have a proper water bath canner or a good canning rack, but we used what we had and got the job done. The dried pears turned out really chewy, but still really good.

I have a handy dandy Pampered Chef apple peeler that gets the job done quickly if I want apples peeled and cored. My Nesco American Harvest Food Dehydrator is perfect for making yummy apple chips! The kids helped load them onto the trays and then they were dried. We like to bag them up and freeze them. They stay crispier this way.

We have different varieties of grapes that grow on our grape arbor. The grapes are really good straight off the vine too. We made both white and red grape juice. After we plucked a bucketful of each variety off of our grape vines we washed, sorted and de-stemmed them. I used my Vitamix to blend it a little in batches then we placed it all in a big pot on the stove to boil while stirring. Then we strained it all through our strainer (we don't yet have a food mill) and bottled it.

We gathered and foraged loads of walnuts from our trees that had fallen to the ground too. I don't have pictures of the walnuts yet, but I will get some.

We also love to visit local orchards, farms and "u-pick your own" places to get things we haven't yet grown at our place. Since I am still learning I love to take photographs of plants and identify them to see if they are edible or medicinal or useful in another way. This is a fun hobby of mine that I want to soon get really good at.

What have you picked, harvested, foraged, gathered and/or wildcrafted this year? Have you made anything special out of the things you got? How have you preserved your harvest?