How Many Peppers?

If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, how many peppers did he pick? Well, let me tell you: a  lot. We spent the morning picking vegetables in the garden. Our plan was to dig the onions and potatoes. We came to the house with a whole load of goodies.

It's not a very aesthetic garden; it's become pretty wild and weedy here at the end of the season, but it has produced quite nicely and isn't finished yet.

The cantaloupe may or may not have enough summer left to mature; although this one may be about ready. They are small, but boy are they sweet. The vine produced dozens of blossoms, but few fruit. You can see how dry the garden is by the color of the drying leaves on the cantaloupe vines.

We have far too many tomatoes. The vines have grown so large and heavy that they have bent the tomato cages to the ground. I keep telling the head gardener that he needs to do 3 things: not plant so many tomatoes (we had 35 at one time), prune them so that they don't grow so wild, and build some strong supports for them.

We have a ton of peppers: red bells, yellow bells, green bell, anaheims, and jalapenos. They are prolifically producing with some very nice sized peppers.

In addition to a wild and weedy and gnarly garden, it has holes too. Worm holes. Cabbage butterflies make themselves quite at home, and that's okay.

We had a wonderful onion harvest, both yellow and red onions. We are storing them in sweet corn sacks in the barn, hoping that they don't rot. I will give a lot of them away too. They are really good, strong onions. Goggles anyone?

Here are the potatoes. We didn't get around to planting potatoes this spring, but we must have had left a few in the ground last year for they sprouted, grew, and produced. Not many. But we have a few fresh potatoes.

See the little dust cloud around hubby's feet. He irrigates the rows with a garden hose, the paths between the rows are dusty and dry. The hens when he lets them out love the dust baths that the dry dirt provides. One boon of drought: hen dust baths.

And I pulled the rhubarb and got it cooked. I love it on toast in the morning. Hubby doesn't eat it.

 And would you look at that asparagus. It is really coming on. I bought two 1 gallon containers at the end of the season and they have really taken a liking to their new home. I worried that we couldn't keep them wet enough to get them started. They even have real spears. I won't pick them, though. And I hope to add more next spring. I'd like about six plants. When we planted them, we mulched them with horse manure and grass clippings. The plants have done well.

Yep. A peck of peppers and a few egg plants in the bucket.

We use everything in the garden except for the eggplant--aren't they pretty? Someone doesn't really like eggplant, so I give them away to the faculty at work. They just look so pretty in the garden.

From top counter clockwise: Spaghetti squash, potatoes, egg plant, peppers, some sort of winter squash,   tomatoes, and rhubarb.

And Mother Earth washing it all. (She has changed her moniker from Mother Nature, now allowing her little sis to go by Mother Nature. She is learning about continents and oceans and other earthy stuff  her first week of kindergarten and decided that she likes being Mother Earth.)

So for supper tonight we had squash and potatoes from the garden and I had a little dish of rhubarb. How satisfying it is to grown food. I sent food home with Jenn; she made fajitas with peppers and onions. We are still trying to figure out the garden and how best to do it. Once the frost kills it, hubby will add more horse manure to the entire garden to add humus to the glumpy, gummy clay soil and probably some chicken stuff too. We think that the chicken that he tilled in last fall along with a lot water helped production and size. It's a good life living with dirt under your fingernails. Hope you have a bit of dirt under your nails this week end.

Hope you all have a grand week. The weather man promises that the temperatures will begin to fall, bringing much needed relief to heat that we have endured all summer. And now, may we ask for some rain? Fall is certainly in the air and as we harvest a bit of own crop, the farmers around us will soon begin bringing in their crops: corn, onions, pinto beans, sugar beets, cabbages, carrots. Here's to a bountiful harvest from your garden, too.