Fruit and vegetable gardens 2023

[Deleted member 60]

Garden pic dump...

Sugar Rush Peach- We have 6 plants this loaded. Never grown these previously. They are pretty hot.

Habanero- I bought 2 of these plants at a local greenhouse. They are fuckin nuts with blooms/peppers. "Pray for Ice Cream"!
Tiburon Poblano- This is the second round of peppers on this plant. Just given up the love bigly...

Greek Pepperocini

Siberian Red tomatoes-Very good producer on medium size fruit. I didn't get pics of the Cherokee Purples but they are dropping huge fruit.
Ciambiante' strawberries. Market/huge sized berries. We havd a flush early but we lost a bunch of plants last winter due to scant snow cover so we let the runners root...then cut the cords (LOL) 3 weeks ago. Now they are blooming profusely.

We're now looking at 2 weeks of 85 and sunny...only a slight chance of rain. 50's for lows. No frost/cold in the extended forecast. We may actually see everything in the garden finish this season without dragging fucking plants in the greenhouse due to freeze/snow/etc. We started cutting off tomato buds/other buds that would make fruit that would never finish on Aug 15th. so all the energy is flowing into the remaining produce. The ganja is also goin the fuck off as well. I need to trim all the girls down low cus I just can't deal with this much weed LOL. Gonna be a massive harvest all around.

 

[Fiddler's Green]

The garden is moving along and learning is occurring.

Pumpkin on the bottom is 82" in circumference


76" circumference (estimate)


Unknown due to location


Volunteer tomatoes from food scraps


All the big sunflowers were volunteers dropped by the Blue Jay's, I just transplanted them in rows.

 

[Fiddler's Green]

Mutha fuckas


Not to brag but.....

 

[H.A.F.]

I'll get pics of the jungle tomorrow. I was going to start fall crops, but where I was expecting death and empty spaces for stuff the tomato re-veg thing has just started making some tomatoes. My hot peppers are ripening their first real flush. The darker jalapenos on the left seem to be a pest favorite. The lighter ones will ripen to orange but they lose heat. Crazy since the regular greens ones get hotter when they turn red. These get sweeter.The center two are "sugar rush" peach and red. They are in between japs and habs for heat with sweetness and a good back-end kick. Great raw but I am going to try a relish all of these for a change of pace. I needed to snip these beause the next flush of peppers is coming on and these are all on knee-high skinny-ass plants except for the annaheim. The righthand are annaheims, nice heat for eating or replacing bells for daily cooking with heat.

The little red ones are on a tree that I started in the tent last winter. I get that many per day and just slice them in half and they go on a dehydrator tray. The little purple ones are like a medium heat cayenne, pretty but no flavor so they get dried and won't get grown next year. Not a producer. The habanero looking orange and green are rain forest chili's. They counter-dry to deep red and I have been drying them as well. Decent flavor but they are like a hard shell and thin skinned. I'm drying the rest whole, but I have a coffee grinder just for hot peppers. That group is a tasty pepper-flake mix.

I have a few different bells and a pablano tree (about 6' tall) that I just got one tiny fruit from so far - but all the trees seem to be late bloomers. I may garden around a few of them over the fall and winter and just see if any re-veg next year.

 

[treefarmercharlie]

My garden is finally slowing down. Last week I pulled out the cucumber plants. Today I’m going to cut the tomato plants back and will pull all the tomatoes off what I cut to use for chutney. I lost the zucchini plants about a month ago from vine borers but have new ones growing in their place. Still getting a shitload of tomatoes and green beans, though, and I have a nice sized cabbage plant that grew off of one of the stumps from one I harvested in July. I’ve canned over 45 pounds of tomatoes so far and even more weight in cucumbers.

 

[H.A.F.]

I took some regular pics of the backyard garden but it was too bright and the pics were all shit. The roof shot came out fine though and I added some reference points since I can't show plants up close.

The arrows are the beans that have taken over. The red arrow upper left is red ripper cowpeas, purple arrow by the boulder is Thai long soldier beans and the blue lower right is the Chinese red noodle beans. The red noodle are a novelty and have the same nubmer of beans per pod as the smaller beans, but a lot more pod biomass. They are 24" long, the Thai are about 12", the cowpeas are about 8" long, and all three varieties have about a dozen beans in them, and of similar size.

The ground all around the soldier beans is lilac sweet potato. The runners are rooting and I think I may end up with a pretty cool invasive species . The red circle is my hot peppers, and the blue circles are my sweet or mild hot (annaheim/pablano) peppers. They are all trees, and I should be covered in peppers in a month. The yellow circle is two tomatillo plants and I get a dozen or so per day. All the clothes racks are still tomatoes, but they are either new ones planted a month or so ago, or the re-veg growth from old stalks that I cut back.

My next years garden is making some good bio-mass for chop-n-drop worm food and soil building.

The spoon/birdhouse gourd has 4 decent size gourds so far - 1 lower left above, and 3 in this pic. one on the ground and two hanging. It is still blooming and putting out more vine.

the other two masses are the red ripper cowpeas - again. I planted lots of stuff to see what did well, they do. What is wild is that on all the beans there are ants, wasps, or yellow jackets that hang out at every flower site - no flowers required. There are mostly black ants in this pic but they are at every bean-node. Never any damage to the fruit, and the wasps and yellow jackets are so intent on whatever is there they don't give a damn about you.

This guy and lots of his buddies like having the bugs isolated on the little stems

 

[Fiddler's Green]

Number nine


This thing is legit

 

[H.A.F.]

Royal Sweetness 132 watermelon - it's great throwing size, got a good weight to it, it would leave a mark. The yellow and green tomatillo are a daily harvest and what I am getting the most of now. Another handfull of drying peppers, and the story of three beans. The Chenese Red Noodle bean is the red one - duh, then the Thai Long Soldier bean and the Red Ripper copwpeas. If you want biomass go witth the noodles. Way more plant than bean. The Thai are just coming in but are way more prolific. and the cowpeas I have started waiting for them to just yellow to get the best shelling beans. But a few days too long and they are seeds/dried beans

But no matter how long the beans are they have about the same food inside.

 

[treefarmercharlie]

I’ve been cutting the grape tomatoes back and stripping all the green and ripe tomatoes off the vines I removed. Got about 12 pounds total and used all the green ones (5.5 pounds) to make this chutney today.

Here’s the raw ingredients

And this is how it turned out about 2 hours later.

 

[H.A.F.]

I have a tomato plant top uarantined and am watching close. The worm is practically a zombie. I lost several random top libs to a few other hornworms, but this one has eaten a total of half a leaf. I am trying to wrap my head around the process. Where was the worm prior to appearing on that leaf, nothing else is eaten so it had to be a cocoon there or something right? How big was the worm when it got caught, and how long ago was it? I found this last night but as of this afternoon nothing has moved and nothing else had been eaten.

 

[Bobby Legit]

Tom

I have a tomato plant top uarantined and am watching close. The worm is practically a zombie. I lost several random top libs to a few other hornworms, but this one has eaten a total of half a leaf. I am trying to wrap my head around the process. Where was the worm prior to appearing on that leaf, nothing else is eaten so it had to be a cocoon there or something right? How big was the worm when it got caught, and how long ago was it? I found this last night but as of this afternoon nothing has moved and nothing else had been eaten.
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Tomato horn worm is a kill on site for me

 

[Bobby Legit]

Stoned...don't know who tom is...lol. but I never feel bad about smashing those things.

 

[Bobby Legit]

Never seen one with eggs on it. Could be beneficial predatory wasp eggs I've read about.

 

[H.A.F.]

Never seen one with eggs on it. Could be beneficial predatory wasp eggs I've read about.

Yes, the braconid wasp is a tiny one that looks like a mini bee. The use the worm as an incubator.

 

[Slowdrawl]

I have a tomato plant top uarantined and am watching close. The worm is practically a zombie. I lost several random top libs to a few other hornworms, but this one has eaten a total of half a leaf. I am trying to wrap my head around the process. Where was the worm prior to appearing on that leaf, nothing else is eaten so it had to be a cocoon there or something right? How big was the worm when it got caught, and how long ago was it? I found this last night but as of this afternoon nothing has moved and nothing else had been eaten.
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Those things give me the willies....

 

[H.A.F.]

When they get all big and juicy - eeeewwwwwww LOL

 

[treefarmercharlie]

We have a ton of grape vines on our property. I’m not sure if they are wild grapes, or wine grapes from people who have lived on this property for the last 200+ years, but the smell of the ones that were starting to shrivel up and go bad reminded me of a merlot. They take over the trees in our field so I decided out of the blue today to send my wife up in the bucket of our tractor to pull a bunch off the vines. Figured I’d make a jam from them and see how it comes out but I’m honestly a little nervous about eating it, but I’ll see how it turns out. We did dip a spoon in it to taste before jarring it up and it did taste like grape jelly. I didn’t want chunky jam, so I put the skins in a blender to purée them before adding them to the de seeded pulp and sugar.

 

[Zaphod420]

We have a ton of grape vines on our property. I’m not sure if they are wild grapes, or wine grapes from people who have lived on this property for the last 200+ years, but the smell of the ones that were starting to shrivel up and go bad reminded me of a merlot. They take over the trees in our field so I decided out of the blue today to send my wife up in the bucket of our tractor to pull a bunch off the vines. Figured I’d make a jam from them and see how it comes out but I’m honestly a little nervous about eating it, but I’ll see how it turns out. We did dip a spoon in it to taste before jarring it up and it did taste like grape jelly. I didn’t want chunky jam, so I put the skins in a blender to purée them before adding them to the de seeded pulp and sugar.
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Those grapes look like they would make some absolutely killer raisins there TFC.(I love making Mead with raisins, Honey,& orange peels) And man that jam looks smack yo momma Good!

 

[treefarmercharlie]

Those grapes look like they would make some absolutely killer raisins there TFC.(I love making Mead with raisins, Honey,& orange peels) And man that jam looks smack yo momma Good!

As I was making this I was wondering how people make raisins with seeded grapes? Do you just leave them in and eat them carefully or is there a trick to removing the seeds when you make raisins? The seeds in these grapes were pretty big and it was a pain in the ass to separate them even with a food mill.

 

[Zaphod420]

As I was making this I was wondering how people make raisins with seeded grapes? Do you just leave them in and eat them carefully or is there a trick to removing the seeds when you make raisins? The seeds in these grapes were pretty big and it was a pain in the ass to separate them even with a food mill.
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Hmmm seeded grapes would most likely make horrible eating raisins. When I use them in my meads it's only to add a bit of tannins to balance out all the sweetness from the homey. They end up being removed after the primary fermentation.