It’s always hard for me to keep posting this around this time of year. There’s so much stuff coming in that it feels like bragging to say much about it. But I also feel guilty about not posting for such a long time, so eventually I wind up doing a post like this one.

Everything is doing well, with the exception of the corn. But let’s be honest, none of us really expected to get any corn this year, especially since we didn’t plant it until so late. But the tomatoes have gone insane. We’re picking more than a hundred roma tomatoes each week and somewhere between 500 and a thousand cherry tomatoes. I don’t waste time counting them anymore. We pick about two pounds of beans every other day, and an Armenian cucumber and a zucchini every day.

Last week we culled what seemed like a million peppers and had a big party with peppers in everything. Stuffed Poblanos, Jalapeno poppers, stuff bell peppers, salsa, guacamole, etc., etc. It was great. As luck would have it, we’re doing the same thing again this week. There’s really no other way to even pretend to come close to keeping up with the rate we’re picking them. It’s awesome.

There are a few things we still haven’t started picking yet:
– Brandywine Tomatoes
– Cherokee Purple Tomatoes
– Squash
– Grapes

Picked this week:
8 pounds of Beans
15 pounds of Blue Potatoes
10 pounds of Yukon Gold Potatoes
10 pounds of Red Potatoes
800 Cherry Tomatoes
150 Roma Tomatoes
50 Pear Tomatoes
120 Tomatillos
80 Jalapeno Peppers
80 Banana Peppers
40 Poblano Peppers
30 Peperoncini Peppers
20 Anaheim/Big Jim Peppers
20 Green Peppers
5 Hungarian Wax Peppers
2 Orange Sun Peppers
1 Habanero Pepper
10 Jack-Be-Little Pumpkins
10 Onions
15 Eggplants
50 Blackberries

It’s pretty insane.

Despite all the craziness with the storm, this was a big week of harvesting things from the garden. We made a lot of salsa, had a lot of shish-kabobs on the grill, and enjoyed a lot of beans and potatoes. I haven’t been as meticulous about counting and recording what we pick this year, but it’s a lot. And the size of the peppers this year has been great. Our bell peppers have rivaled the size of the ones we buy at Costco.

Picked this week:
250+ Cherry Tomatoes
15 Roma Tomatoes
8 Eggplants
8 Zucchini
30 Tomatillos
25 Anaheim/Big-Jim Peppers
8 Poblano Peppers
15 Bell Peppers
50 Peperoncini Peppers
2 Habanero Peppers
30 Banana Peppers
12 Cascabella Peppers
5 Hungarian Hot Wax Peppers
30 Jalapeno Peppers
2 Onions
5 pounds of Yukon Gold Potatoes
3 pounds of Purple Potatoes
5 Red Potatoes
8 pounds Beans

The garden is out of control. Some lack of control is good, such as the beans growing up over the fence into the neighbor’s yard. We can’t eat them as fast as we have to pick them. The same is true for the zucchini. But there are bad aspects to having no control. We had a huge storm over the weekend that snapped one of our biggest pepper plants. I put a bamboo pole next to it, but never got around to tying it up. The squash bugs are everywhere. I find and kill at least 10 adults every day, and now the babies are hatching. I had to kill several hundred this week already, and it only getting worse. We even have a million aphids on the Brussels sprouts. I think I may end up going nuclear on some of them.

But we did harvest a whole bunch of stuff this week.
6 bell peppers
20 banana peppers
10 anaheim peppers
10 peperoncini peppers
2 poblano peppers
100 cherry tomatoes
20 roma tomatoes
20 yukon gold potatoes
12 cups of purple beans