The Official End of the Summer Season

The forecast for a freeze tomorrow night has abruptly cured my winter-denial-procrastination state (and it was so nice having peppers and broccoli coexisting in the same garden…….)

So today I got busy and harvested a few jalapeno and poblanos, and was much less discriminating than normal about their size since anything on the plants will be toast in 36 hours.

The poblanos surprised me; I hadn’t harvested many by the time the unusual heat of mid summer had set in and temporarily shut down pollination. The same occurred in August after a modest break but my single plant kept growing throughout thanks to the drip irrigation system. This nice specimen of a plant had quite a bit reserve production capacity by the time September’s cooler weather arrived.

Capacity? Production?

I harvested all of these off of my one poblano plant today:

The same was true with the four small jalapeno plants scattered around the garden this year. The plants were smaller than last year but absolutely covered with clusters of beautiful peppers:

The 5 gallon bucket sharing this picture with the poblano harvest offers “proof of jalapeno bounty”:

I realized I still had beans to harvest and turned my attention to finding all of the “christmas” lima beans hidden within the two bean towers, even employing a ladder to reach the tops (sample below):

After a few minutes combing through the thick leaf cover it dawned on me that there was no need to avoid damaging the plants (duh) so I just cut them at the base, toppled the towers, and then cut and combed through the vines for the last harvest.

Afterwards, we had the yellow bucket filled with mostly mature limas for my best lima sheller to work on, plus the view past the shed to the back has been re-opened:

Darkness beat me to the finish so tomorrow I will pluck the last okra of the year from these scraggly, towering plants:

Hello winter…….