The Garden that Keeps on Giving

I can't even believe it. We're expected to get snow tonight, and even though I picked everything I thought possible before the last frost almost a month ago, yesterday I still got an entire bowl full of veggies from the garden!

I picked this assortment of bell peppers to the left (green now, but hopefully will turn orange like they are supposed to after a little stay in a paper bag) and Italian green frying peppers on the right:
Then these habaneros. The ones towards the bottom, not in the tupperware- were picked just yesterday off of the plants left untouched outside in the garden. The really orange ones in the tupperware at the top of the pic were taken off of a plant we pulled out of the ground before the first frost mentioned a couple posts ago, and placed in a bucket full of water in the basement. At first they were green, but sure enough turned orange after about 2 weeks, and still look pretty decent as you can see. We need to make them into hot sauce or freeze them or something as soon as possible though. There were actually more of them that my crazy hot-loving husband has been eating all along as garnish on pretty much every meal (seriously- be puts them on his hash browns in the morning, and again on his pasta at night) . I still have yet to even touch them (and have no intention to do so!)

Finally, even more green grape tomatoes!!! This plant was like the little engine grape tomato that could. This whole bowlful was just picked yesterday on November 16th, and on top you can even see two red ones! Amazing to think that we've been harvesting red grape tomatoes from this same plant since early summer. Just Wow.

Scary Belated Halloween Post

Boo! Its an army of ugly angry tomatoes coming to get us a little after Halloween! Scaaaary. Actually, these were some of the last red tomatoes I picked back on October 4th. But I'm posting them now because I just learned something new about ugly tomatoes- something called "catfacing" and "growth cracks". I think the tomatoes above are afflicted by growth cracks, though I had a couple with catfaces too. I just want to post the links I found here so I don't forget next summer.

http://www.organicgardening.com/featureprint/1,7759,s-2-28-1121,00.html
http://wihort.uwex.edu/fruitveggies/TomatoDisorders.htm

Here's something positive for this post: I still picked 6 italian frying peppers like the ones above from my garden tonight, Nov. 9th! Amazing. They were delicious in this soyrizo polenta bake with some garden fresh oregano and a garden cayenne: http://vegweb.com/index.php?topic=13183.0

Still so much more to write!

So, I did great in October for Veganmofo but the fun is over. Don't worry though, I am not going to forget this blog. I still only covered less than half of what I grew in my garden this year! I didn't even mention (red) tomatoes, radishes, beets, peppers, scarlet runner beans, herbs and calendula yet!! There is a lot more to come, but right now I'm busy with a couple projects. I'll probably get the details of this summer recorded by about January, haha. Then it will be time to plan what is going to go in the yard next year, and start seedlings!