Scorching the Garden 2019 Part 10
Every year we grow the peppers and garlic and onions and herbs to make our sauces. Every year we try something new that we hope is better. We ditch something that doesn’t work out. And we repeat and refine those things that promote the completion of our goals. Follow along and steal all our ideas as we Scorch the Garden in 2019.
October is here and with is, the beginning of the end for the gardens. The nights are getting cooler and cooler every week and the shadows remain long on the ground throughout the day. We have a small harvest every few days where we are picking peppers, herbs, and even some tomatoes. Its a race against time for the remaining peppers to ripen.
With the rapid growth of the plants during their final fruiting stage, the low temperature nights, and a couple of hard rains, some of the plants could not support the weight of the branches. Some plants were completely destroyed. A few only lost a couple of branches. Unfortunately, the super hots tend to have weak joints if not supported with tomato cages, which we foolishly did not use this year. The reason being, last year, some of the bushes were so massive, they had to be CUT out of the cages, mangling them to the point that many could not be salvaged. Next year, tomato cages for sure.
Another casualty of the storm was one of our rain catchers. We were able so salvage most of the materials, but we only have a few weeks to go so its pointless to rebuild it.
Next year we will have more rain catchers and twice as much capture surface for each catcher. If anything, our limiting factor was water.
We also need to remove the fencing before everything freezes. It will get wrecked during the winter. Getting those intertwined weeds out of the holes will not be fun.
The few peppers we have are ripening. We are growing a few test varieties of peppers among our staple Gang of 9. A fun one is the Peter Pepper (that’s the mauve looking dangly ting with the brown/green tip). Its comical how quickly people (mostly guys) are to pick it up and pretend to put it in their mouths. Makes you wonder…
Another neat pepper we are toying with is a purple cayenne. We can’t give away any secrets, but there are some really wild things going on in our test kitchen.
When we started to carpet the garden in the spring with overlapping sheets of cardboard, we threw peanuts underneath, just to see what would happen. We had never grown peanuts before, but we knew they grew underground and they restore nitrogen back into the soil.
By mid-July there were these patches of a viney looking bush that was subverting the cardboard. The leaves weren’t something we were familiar with, so we let them grow to see what they would become. One day, we grabbed clump and pulled out-PEANUTS! It freaking worked! We are definitely doing this again.
