It's that time of year when we sadly have to say goodbye to our garden. It's not completely done yet, we still have some plants left, but we're in our last weeks of it.
The beans are gone for this year, but what a bumper crop we had. It was like a magical bean patch. I'd go through and pick every bean of decent size on one side. Go around to the other and pick a bunch more and always catch a glimpse of a few I missed on the first side. Go back for them and see some still hanging on the other side— round and round, back and forth. Always finding a few more beans. All told, we picked about 25 pounds of beans. Not bad for a 4x8 box.
The tomatoes never really worked this year. They were supposed to be bush tomatoes with 1/2 pound fruit. Yeah, they were more like sticks and didn't produce much of anything, let alone half-pounders. I planned on canning green tomato relish this year, which I did, with tomatoes from the farm market. We got about eight pints, not bad. Let me just say, a pint of relish goes a long way.
We also grew Cherokee Purple tomatoes. They were supposed to be 12- to 16-ounce purple tomatoes. Well, they're purple, but not much bigger than a golf ball. I think they cross-bred with the black cherries. We got quite a few of those, but nothing like the prolific crop of orange cherries we got. They've been a big hit with our resident chipmunks.
We kept finding remnants of cherries in the garden area— just the skin left of a gutted one or the shriveled up skin pieces of a few laying on the stump. I started leaving the split ones on the stump for the chippies. Next day, they'd be gone, just scraps left.
I happened to be looking out the utility room window and spotted a chippie running through the garden and straight up the stalk of a cherry tomato plant. He plucked himself a bright orange one and down he scampered. No way! Did I just see that?
The hot peppers have been jamming this year also. We've given away as many as we could and then cleaned them up for the freezer. I toss them in everything from fried potatoes to sloppy joes. I'm not into canning them, we still have jars that we canned a few years ago.
We only plant the jalapenos for the juice we make to spray on the plants to keep the bugs off the leaves. Again, we had an overabundance and gave lots away to friends, who were eager to have them after the jalapeno/salmonella outbreak earlier this summer.
The cucumbers are also done for this year. Certainly not the same as last year, but we did put up about eight quarts of sweet pickles.
We have been very blessed this year with our bell pepper crop. We've probably picked about 30 beauties and the plants are just living their best life right now. Gorgeous dark green and fluffy leaves, loaded with peppers, about a week or so from harvest. Same with the bananas and jalapenos— dark leaves, new growth, loaded with flowers and baby peppers.
We had a dip in the overnight temperatures last week to the low-40s. We weren't taking any chances. I thought we were well prepared with tablecloths we had picked up at yard and rummage sales. Yeah, either the threat of frost came way too early in the season when we still have too many plants to protect or we're not as prepared as we thought we were.
Anyway, I spent the better part of an hour wrestling uncooperative bed sheets and tablecloths over equally uncooperative pepper and tomato plants, only to look back at my handiwork and see two cherry tomato plants sticking up a foot above the sheets. Pillow cases handled that.
We all survived the frost scare and hopefully, we'll be picking peppers well into the fall season like past years. Plus, we haven't even seen what we've got in the sweet potato buckets— it's our rookie season.