Hot Sauce Time Again

5 oz peppers, 1 cup vinegar, 1/2 tsp salt. Blend, boil, skim, pour in hot jar. Cover with thin cloth tied with a rubber band. Now to wait three days and see what develops. I sampled tiny chunks of each of the peppers 20 min ago and my lips are still burning.

Hot pepper sauce

RIP Tomato Hornworm

Finally, a helpful animal in the garden! Thanks wasps for disabling this tomato hornworm. 

Tomato hornworm hosting wasp eggs

Got a weird range of new peppers. Except for the one dark green, thin serrano, there were all supposed to be jalapenos. I took the seeds out of jalapenos we grew in the garden last year. Some pretty weird stuff. Must have crossed with the hungarian wax.

Jalapeno non-purebred offspring

Pumpkins getting large. There are several of them, should be a nice harvest.

Pumpkin

Pumpkins?!?

One of our pumpkin experiments is doing quite well. We got a large green and white striped pumpkin (Cushaw suggests google images...) at a local farm for pie last Halloween and it was very good. We saved some seeds and now we have some monster plants growing out back. Here's one photo from a few days ago vs today. This one is now the size of a baseball, and the biggest one we have found is the size of a softball.

Cushaw (??) Pumpkins

Tasted the first Black Krim tomato (1/2 a pound), it was very tasty but it's no Cherokee Purple, so it's out next year. Only room for one black tomato in the garden.

Black Krim

The peppers are all over the place, some may be crossbreeds. A few look like jalapenos though. I'll have to put together a gallery of what we have so far soon. One Bell pepper plant has 5 Bell peppers on it each currently the size of a hackey sack. If last year's crop is any indication, they may not get much bigger.

EDIT - Tomato looked darker in real life. Terrible cracks on the top.

Back the the homestead

Out of town for a few days, a kind neighbor watered the garden for us. We came back to:

• 8 oz pattypan squash
• 7 oz eggplant
• 21 oz zucchini
• 1 oz jalapeno
• 3 oz corn - this was way early for the corn, but the Mrs. wanted to see if we could save one before the squirrels ate it.
• 4 lb 12 oz cucumber (time to pickle some)
• 2 lb 1 oz tomatoes
• 3 oz green beans

So about 9 and a half pounds of produce. Not bad, but I feel like we should be getting more.

The best haul was 26 ripe Sun Gold off a potted plant on the front deck - maybe about a three gallon pot. The nicest looking pick was a 13 oz pickling cuke that was enormous for the type, but looked beautiful.

Northern Pickling Cucumber

EDIT - The corn was not ready. Also, made 7 quarts of dill pickles, yum.

Big tomatoes

Big tomatoes coming in! Picked a little early. Kelloggs Breakfast and Brandywine.

Kelloggs Breakfast tomato and Brandywine

[Editor's Note - The Brandywine was delicious as expected. The Kellogg's was tasty, but not as flavorful as the Brandywine. But extremely meaty, might be good for sauce.]

I need to water more

We're going to be going away for a few days and I've been a little worried about my plants and how well they'll do in the scorching heat without watering (90 - 100 degrees some days). A few of the peppers in pots out front have been wilting in the heat pretty badly, though I'd water them and they'd come back. So I figured there's no way the wilty ones will survive in their pots, and I decided to plant them in an open spot in the garden.

Normally I water them a little bit every day. I don't want to underwater, but I'm maybe a little too afraid of overwatering. So I give them each a little water. I think I'm underwatering by a long shot. Today the heat wave broke and we got a torrential rain storm. I figured the plants were all soaked and happy. So I went to transplant one of the wilty peppers and this is what I saw.

Jalapeno that's not watered enough

That was a wake up call. I'm just not watering enough. I hit each wilty plant with a nice deep watering, until water flowed out the bottom of the pot. I'm thinking they won't be wilty tomorrow. Guess we'll see.

Transplanted about 10 basil seedlings out into the garden. Also 3 pepper plants. We'll see if they perk up.