Honkin' peppers take top honors

What is the biggest success of this year's garden? Well, we successfully grew pumpkins and even though we only got five or six that was a first for us, we grew some watermellons (though they were quite seedy) and cantaloupe (all ripened at once), but the biggest success in this year's summer garden is our bell peppers.

No they didn't win any blue ribbons at the state fair, but here we are more than midway through October and our pepper plants are still loaded down with ripening fruits. This is kind of a cruddy picture, but you can see how thick and bushy the plants are in the background. I've had to stake several of them to keep them from toppling over under their own weight.


Here's another photo of a few peppers I picked last week. Yes, we're still getting eggs too.



I'm not totally sure how to account for the pepper's success other than the garden soil maturing naturally through our few years of adding lots of organic matter. What's been really cool is how thick some of the stems are and how thick the walls of the fruit are. These photos don't tell the whole story - we've had some really honkin' peppers. My only wish is that more of them would successfully ripen to the point of turning completely red. We've had a few big ones go the distance - and they were delicious, tender, and sweet - but for some reason many of them start to show signs of rot or insect damage before they can turn completely red. Bummer. Maybe next year things will improve even more and we'll get more honkin' red peppers.

Ready for winter - should it come

Loyal reader Paula has been kindly nagging me to update the blog to help alleviate her boredom. Naturally I am putting all other responsibilities aside to deal with this emergency. I have actually had things I wanted to blog about but actually doing those homesteading activities takes some time - time that might otherwise be spent blogging.

Using wood as a supplementary heating fuel was a goal when thinking about and designing our new house. We don't have terribly bad winters in central NC, but we do get our fair share of ice. In 2001 (I think it was) we had a really bad one and were without power for four or five days. Being without power we were without heat because our thermostat required electricity to turn on our gas heat. We spent several nights and days in our sleeping bags. I think it got down in the mid 40's - inside the house. Spending the night in the sleeping bag is kind of fun since you can pretend you're camping, but spending the day in a sleeping bag just to keep warm is rather charmless.

So an efficient, wood burning appliance was a must have in our new house. I got some great advice on how to select a stove and where to put it from this site: woodheat . The information on chimneys is extremely useful. As the site notes - the chimney is the engine that drives a wood heat system. If you're interested in all that stuff you can check out the info on the site, so I won't send Paula into further depths of boredom with that detail here, but I will say that our woodstove is in a central location and the chimney runs straight up from the stove and exits the roof as close to its peak as possible - these are good things. I tried to find a good picture of our stove, but it seems to only appear in Christmas pictures, which again, are quite boring. We have a Jotul F400 Castine and couldn't be happier with it. Our's has double doors, which I guess they don't do any more on this model.

So here's what this post is really about - our wood pile! What could be less boring!?!


The story of our wood pile is actually quite interesting. Notice that there's no bark on this wood? That's because it comes from a pallet making factory. Everything here is left over scraps and cut off pieces from that operation. The guy who delivers it for us told me that something like 3 of every 5 hardwood trees cut in the world are used for pallet making. I guess that makes you realize that oil is not the only natural resource being depleted by the global economy's appetite for consumption. In any event I'm glad that the company producing these scraps is able to get rid of them without putting them in a landfill, and the guy who delivers them to me makes a little money off them, and we save a little money on natural gas by heating with them. Now if I could just find a way to make the wood stack by itself maybe I'd have more time for blogging.