Potato Time

After carefully planting, hilling, and weeding potatoes all summer, finally it's time to reap the rewards. Here are a few of the Red Pontiac and Kennebecs I dug today. They do not get washed; I just spread them out on cardboard box tops and store them in the pantry. It's cool and dark enough there for the skins to toughen up a little, and then they can be used for baking, mashing, whatever.

The pile here comes from about five plants total; I planted a dozen of each variety. The rest of the potatoes will stay in the ground a little longer, though I need to remember to dig the rest before it gets too cold!

Lonely Pumpkins

Only four big pumpkins in my pumpkin patch, but they are beauties! Here is the one I've got my eye on for a jack-o-lantern.

You can see black landscape fabric and brick pavers on the ground; that's what I used to keep down the weeds in my pumpkin and melon section. It's a nice, relatively easy solution, but it also means the vines aren't able to re-root in the surrounding soil as they grow. Next year I'll try it without the landscape material and see how it goes.

Picking Peppers

I have 30 plants full of Aji Cristal peppers. Holy pepper overload! So I've been picking them and wondering what to do with them... a lot will be frozen and turned into jam this fall once things slow down.

To give you an idea of just how many peppers I am talking about... I picked every single pepper off just two plants, and filled my trug to overflowing!

Five Tomatoes to Grow

Five varieties of tomatoes were planted in my garden this year. Clockwise from the biggest one, they are: Pink Brandywine (indeterminate), Mountain Fresh (determinate), Amish paste (indeterminate), Tommy Toe (indeterminate), and Bellstar (determinate).

Without compare, the Amish paste tomatoes were my favorite. They are incredibly bountiful and had almost no disease or pest problems, aside from a few cases of blossom-end rot. Being a meaty tomato, they made great tomato sauce, but they are heavenly in bruschetta and salsa, sliced up on sandwiches, or salted and eaten by themselves.

Tommy Toes were an easy second: large and flavorful cherry tomatoes. I only had two of these planted and they were plentiful. I'm sure there would have been even more, had I gotten them in the ground earlier and staked them higher.

Pink Brandywines were tasty, but they seemed to be the vine of choice for the hornworms and other pests. They all looked great when green (and made great fried green tomatoes) but most had some kind of decay or bug problem by the time they were ripe. I only harvested about a dozen of these tomatoes in total. The vines haven't been killed off by frost or anything yet, but I don't expect much in the later season.

Mountain Fresh and Bellstar both grew fine and had lots of fruit, but I think I got them planted in the ground too late. I was able to use some of the Bellstars in sauce and salads. The Mountain Fresh ones are nice, firm, round tomatoes, exactly what you expect a typical tomato to be, and they were tasty. But determinate tomatoes is that all their fruit ripens within the span of a couple weeks. Indeterminate varieties keep bearing fruit as long as they keep growing - even now some of the Pink Brandywine plants are blossoming. They require a bit more attention since they grow much taller and, ideally, should be pruned as they go, but the benefit of having fresh tomatoes for a prolonged period of time makes them the better choice for me.

Bountiful Harvest

September arrived with an overflowing garden! I spend as much time harvesting as I did on some earlier days of tending the young plants. And it is worth it... behold:

Patty pan squash, yellow and purple string beans, cucumbers, zucchini, bell peppers, tomatoes, tomatillos, and hot peppers.