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.