I had another sleepless night last night (courtesy of the cats!), so my daughters took care of most of the morning stuff. That let me get at least a couple of hours of sleep before I headed out to the garden, just before noon.
We got a smattering of rain yesterday evening, so I used one of the side walls from the broken market tent to cover the onions that were curing outside. Once things were warmer, I uncovered them again, so they could get some sun and air flow.
Speaking of air flow…
We’ve got some warm, sunny days coming up, and mild overnight temperatures, so I lifted the bottom half of the vinyl sheets wrapped around the box frame over the eggplant and hot pepper bed.
As you can see in the foreground of the photo above, Syndol is checking out the eggplant and hot peppers I harvested out of there this morning!
This is the rest of today’s harvest. We have a first today!
Finally! Some yellow peppers!
Yes, a couple still have some green on them, but I wanted to get some of the weight off the plants. It was much the same with the few tomatoes I collected today.
Also, yes, that is a mutant Little Finger eggplant on the left! I actually remembered to bring pruning shears to cut the stems – they are surprisingly spiky! – and it was rather a surprised to cut one stem and get two eggplants! There are two Classic eggplant in there, too. I’m harvesting a bit smaller, as the large ones we’ve harvested before were getting pretty seedy inside. Mind you, we could leave some longer just to collect the seeds, but it’s probably too late in the season for any of the ones still on the plants to have viable seeds to collect.
The long, straight hot peppers were easy to harvest, but the curled one was so twisted around the stalk and another pepper, I ended up breaking off the top of the pepper itself, rather than the stem.
We also have one melon today, and one purple Dragonfly pepper. The colour is very much the same as the eggplants!
Pretty darn good for near the end of September in our area!
The German Butterball potato plants have all died off, so we should be harvesting those, soon. A few of the winter squash are starting to look ready to harvest and get set aside to cure, too. The one Jebousek lettuce that seeded itself should have seeds ready to collect, too. The kohlrabi look like a total loss, though. The flea beetles just decimated them. 😢 We finally got some to actually grow, and this happens. *sigh*
As we build up our raised beds, making it so they can be covered with insect netting is going to be important! I would really like to grow kohlrabi and cabbage and brassicas in general, but it looks like that’s just not going to happen until we have a way to protect them from those flippin’ flea beetles!!
All in good time.
Little by little, it’ll get done!
For now, I’m just happy with what we have!
The Re-Farmer
The Re-Farmer 