As the growing season starts to wind down, there is less care we need to provide to these fruits and vegetables. We have had enough rain every few weeks to keep them happy. We already harvested a few cantaloupes of the mini variety. But hoping we may still get full sized ones before the end of the year. We have had many pounds of tomatoes and soon more peppers will be ripe as well.
The minis do not have as much meat as we would have hoped, so next year we are probably going to skip growing the mini cantaloupes.
This one popped right off the vine, smells strongly of cantaloupe.
It has been a hard year for these vines, melon aphids have tried to take over numerous times. But we always fight back with soap and salts and works well for a few weeks. Sometimes we need to repeat treatment sooner, we can tell when we see lots of ants walking around.
Placing them up on rocks we hope to keep them safe and not get any rot on the bottoms.
The broccoli plants have woken up and are producing crowns.
I need to go treat them for caterpillars though, seems like they are attacked a lot by insects.
Luckily I saw predator insects walking around on the broccoli too hopefully it feeds on the caterpillars.
The tomatoes are doing great now we are watering them less. Next year we will be more careful about over watering once they start fruiting.
We have an entire counter of tomatoes, lol.. next year we are gonna grow half the amount we have now.
The cherry tomatoes are coming back too.. hopefully next year they will do better.
One of the last things we harvest before the frosts show up is the sweet potato plants.
Some of the beds are doing great with the sweet potatoes..
The peppers are coming along nicely. Serranos can be seen turning from green to red.
We can pick the peppers whenever we want, so even if some do not turn red in time we can still harvest them and eat them.
The mini bell peppers are cute, but we will probably grow full sized ones next year.
The vine has completely covered one side of the trellis.
It is making its way over the other side, but I think winter will be here before it can finish arching over. It is full of flowers right now and bean pods are growing.
The Trinidad scorpion peppers are starting to ripen. So cool to see them form like that.. one ugly pepper.
I bet they are going to be intense. When ripe they can be over one million units.
Wonder what the green ones are like, and how bad the spice intensity is.
Some cayenne peppers growing, its cool to see them curl like that.
A few of the tomatoes that did not get cages, one of the reasons we should grow less next year. We really want to save some of the big tomato cages for the tomatillos as well.
Soon I should have some garlic to plant into the beds, but first I am going to do a little conditioning and deal with the settling occurring in the raised beds. And a few months probably around the first of the year, I will start seeds indoors in preparation for next growing season.