Harvest

What you see is a sample of the ongoing harvest from our garden. It's taken a lot of work, but is now (literally) bearing fruit. Geek that I am, I've been keeping stats on our yield. To date we've gotten about two dozen tomatoes, about twice as many tomatillos, and exactly two small red peppers.

The tomatillos have ranged from a few plum-sized ones at the start to much more numerous golf ball-sized ones now. It's been rainy the last day or two, otherwise I'd have another handful. These we've used almost exclusively to make salsa verde, which generally we use in a nice black bean enchilada recipe we've been making for years.

We planted four different varieties of tomato, but managed to get them a bit mixed up between the seedlings and the transplanting, so I don't know exactly what the red ones are. The orange ones, however, are Moonglow, an absolutely wonderful variety that is all tomato flavor and sweetness with very low acidity. We also have some brandywines that are very, very slowly making their way to full ripeness. If the frost holds off another few weeks, we should be able to get another dozen or two. Even though the weather has turned cooler of late, we still love to have fresh tomato and pretend it's still July.

I simply cannot explain the peppers: they have great soil, they've have abundant sunshine and hot weather, but also plenty of watering. And yet, the two peppers you see above may well be the only fully red ones we'll get this year out of eight plants. The plants themselves are stunted and stressed, not at all like our last experience with peppers, which by comparison was downright bountiful. Perhaps they got overshadowed by the voluminous tomatillos, perhaps they needed better staking and support, perhaps we should have started our seeds in March, rather than late May. Ah well. We use peppers in a lot of our cooking, so we will redouble our efforts come next spring.