We have a lot of cayenne peppers! We will probably dry most of them, and maybe pickle a few. Our Purira chiles are starting to turn rainbow colors (I would have posted a picture, but we picked all of the orange/red ones before I took pictures, and I’ve already put them in a spaghetti sauce!). Also, we learned that if the Czechoslovokian Black peppers just stay on the plant, they get red and spicier! I added a few of those to the sauce as well.

The chiles seem to have done fairly well this year, even planted so closely together. With our tendancy to eat spicy things (especially Chris), I think that next year we may need to add a couple more plants. Probably not the Czechs, but definitely the cayennes, puriras, and maybe some other neat varieties.

The tomatoes are starting to die off. We had a couple of cold nights, just under 40º F, which the tomatoes definitely did not like. We pulled off a bunch of yellowing leaves today, and some entire plants may need to go soon. I’m actually excited about making some fried green tomatoes with curry and possibly even a green tomato pie! (I’ve heard that my dad likes green tomato pies, so I better start looking for good recipes!)

Chris planted some kale in the front yard today. We have a lot of new little areas with seedlings – I hope they mature before it gets too cold! Chris said today that he is going to start building cold frames for this winter – maybe he will write about them soon!

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Front Garden Cayenne Peppers

As you can see… we’re going to have some ripe tomatoes very, very soon! There are three fat amana orange tomatoes in the front, and lots of misshapen oxacan pink tomatoes. The romas are starting to ripen, so maybe we’ll be making tomato sauce soon!

The chile peppers are still doing well… the purira peppers are getting fairly large, though they are still yellow. They turn purple, then orange, then red! I think they get spicier the longer they stay on the plant – hopefully in a week or two I will have a rainbow photo to post. The cayenne plants are loaded, though none have turned red yet. Again, a few more weeks to wait.

The pumpkins continue to look very pretty, producing more and more male flowers every day. Unfortunately, there aren’t any fruits on the vines, which is why we planted them. Oh well… at least they add a bit of color to the garden in the back. One yellow crookneck squash finally decided to enter the garden. I still have no idea what that yellow and green squash is… the skin seems like it’s toughening up a bit, so it’s probably a randomly crossed winter squash after all.

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Three flowering black eggplants in pots in the back yard.

It was pretty hot (above 90) yesterday, and the temperatures are predicted to rise for the next two days. I’ve been watering both the front and back garden every day for three days now, and Chris and I are just about to go water it again today. Things are really going to take off I think!

We have a yellow summer squash growing in the zucchini plants – the seeds must have been mixed up when they were packaged! The tomatoes are finally just starting to turn red – there is one Amana Orange that’s just about ripe with Blossom End Rot (boo-hiss), but here’s a rather large tomato that looks like it’s going to avoid the rot:

It’s one of the heirlooms – Amana Orange, Oxacan Pink, or Marvel Striped – but we won’t know which one until it ripens! Next year I plan to keep the tomatoes labeled better, and maybe even plant the varieties together so we can judge the plants for seed-saving purposes (what an idea!).

There’s also a large slicing-cucumber, and a few pickling ones. I hope the pickling cukes take off soon, because we haven’t really had enough to make a batch of pickles yet. Sure, I pull two or three every couple of days but it isn’t enough to fill up a pint jar!

The chile peppers are loaded this year – last year we didn’t have much luck with chiles, getting only one or two peppers from each plant. I’ve been using the czechoslovokian black peppers pretty regularly – each plant has at least 15 chiles on it! The cayennes are loaded with long green peppers – I can’t wait for them to ripen! We should be able to dry a bunch of peppers and also make some chile sauce.

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These went in a curry with lentils, beet leaves, and kale. They have some heat to them, but aren’t as spicy as jalapenos.

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Tomatoes, Chard, Sunflowers, Peppers, Beets, Eggplant, and carrots

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Well, mostly. Everything except about 20 eggplant seedlings, which are either going in containers or replacing the broccoli raab that we’re about to harvest. Containers would be best, because then we could position them to get enough sun… but the problem then becomes finding containers for that many eggplants, and then buying dirt, soil amendments, etc. My guess is that we’ll need to replace a couple of eggplants in the front yard though, so we’re still holding off for a few days.

On Tuesday, we planted 11 tomatoes, 22 chile peppers, 2 okras, and 11 eggplants in the new front garden. The eggplants are quite small, and I’m hoping now that they’re in the ground, they will take off a bit more. We planted basil with the tomatoes, and I still have a packet of dill to plant, which will hopefully be ready around the time that our cucumbers are. Still not sure where to put the dill…

On Wednesday, we had 24 tomato plants left to plant – we managed to fit all but the one I snapped in half when transplanting (oops…) into the garden in the back. That makes 34 tomato plants in all – I’m excited to see how well they produce. I have definited freezing and canning plans for this summer, and we have at least 8 or 10 roma tomato plants, so hopefully we can make some sauces too. We also grew some specialty heirloom tomatoes: Amana Orange, Prize of the Trails Cherry, Oaxacan Pink, and Early Red Chief. One hybrid: Marvel Striped (a yellow/orange tomato). We put the three broccoli in the back yard as well.

The neat thing is that everything in our garden was grown from seed this year. We didn’t buy anything that someone already started for us. Hopefully things will come along nicely over the next few weeks so I’ll have some more exciting pictures to show off online.

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Today we put most of the front garden in. From left to right: Tomatoes/Golden chard in the first bed; Chile Peppers/Beets in the second bed; Eggplant/2 Okras/Radishes/Carrots in the third bed.

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This is exciting: we started ALL of our vegetable plants from seeds this year. This is the lot of the starters: tons of tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, a couple okra, and a few broccoli. There are also some grapefruit trees, papaya trees, and medjool date trees mixed into the lot.

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The peppers are starting to look like real plants, and most have their first set of true leaves.

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Our eggplant seedlings are finally coming through. We replanted them on March 15th, and they finally started to sprout at the very begging of April. We transplanted the seedlings to individual pots on April 7th, and we’ve been watering them on and off with Kelp Tea and PlanTea.

Tip for next year: Eggplants, okra, and peppers need to be started before the tomatoes. The eggplants and okra will need lots of heat to germinate – most of the seed packages say 80-90F! Placing a heating pad under small sprouting trays may just do the trick.

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