24 October 2008

Late Harvest

Last spring, I planted a few things in the garden in the hopes of growing some of my own veggies. I am notorious for killing whatever I plant, and I was ecstatic when my pepper and tomato plants did not die. However, as the summer went on and others were harvesting juicy tomatoes and spicy peppers, I was getting no fruit at all on my tomato plants and dwarfed, thin peppers that were good for nothing other than throwing over the brick wall behind our alley. (I got quite good at this!) The plants themselves continued to grow and especially the tomato plants have gotten huge, still without fruit. Then the strangest thing happened. Suddenly, the tomatoes flowered. I kept watering and now I have many growing green tomatoes on my plants!! My peppers took off too. I got a bunch of yellow mild peppers and my bell peppers are large and green right now. I am going to let them sit for a bit longer in hopes of getting them to be red before I harvest them. I just hope that now that the nights are getting cooler, my tomatoes ripen before our first frost. It got down to 44 last night, so there may not be too much time. Anyway, check out the yellow peppers I picked last week.

I mixed them with some chicken and these other yummy veggies for a great stir fry that my whole family loved!
(For some reason blogger keeps turning this picture to a portrait orientation, even though it is supposed to be landscape...sorry it looks a bit odd.)

Anyway, I guess it is true what they say, "Better late than never!"

3 comments:

Tina said...

That is funny, because the same thing happened with my tomatoes! I am also notorious for killing whatever plants I come in contact with, but bought some tomato plants from a sale the kids' school had. They were little cherry tomatoes and didn't finally ripen until mid-late Sept, and we had already had some quite frosty mornings. I ended up having quite a bit after all. Funny, no one here likes tomatoes so I didn't know what to do with them. Luckily Jack (the baby) ended up loving them and he had tomatoes every day for over a week! (I know, why grow tomatoes if no one likes them, right? only because I heard they were easy and they were one of the cheaper plants to purchase- ha!)

M said...

lol.... my in laws grow a huge garden that I drool over every year and can only aspire to having one day.... but one of their main crops is tomatoes too! They not only grow cherry tomatoes which grow so tall that they fall over and start growing back down the stakes, but so abundantly that they are trying to pawn them off on the neighbors! In the end though they always can them and turn them into spaghetti sauce. I hear if you dip them in boiling water the skins literally peal themselves, making tomato sauce making even easier!

Kainoa said...

Everything looks so delicious! I am jealous as someday I want a garden too!