September 17, 2018 Homegrown Harvest Part 2

The nightshade family of plants includes tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, and (surprisingly) Potatoes. We put in five varieties of Tomato, four of peppers, tomatillos and ground cherries, as well as the root crops written up previously.

• The tomatoes did well, and are still doing well. We had a hard time controlling the heat in the greenhouse, but eventually got some 50% shade cloth to cover it so things started growing and producing. The plants in the greenhouse produced very well, and still are, but next year we'll plant them quite a bit differently. Tomato cages made us prune them too much, keeping the yields artificially low. The flavors of the four different varieties came through very well. The few we planted outside did very little production, they seem to like it hot. We feed the dumpy ones to the chickens, keeping only the perfect fruit for ourselves. We would have sold them, but we didn't open the fruit stand this year, so most of the good stuff was given to people as gifts. Ann just loves being able to go pick a fresh tomato from the plant and prepare it immediately.
• We put tomatillos and peppers between the tomatoes and so these got over-crowded. The tomatillos never did anything worthy of eating, but instead gave us marble sized fruit. It had a good flavor, but wasn't a real tomatillo. The Ground Cherries (something like a tomatillo) were also disappointing. We'll try again next year. 
• Our peppers did well outside of the greenhouse, they are coming in this month and we have a ton of them. The greenhouse peppers did some, but were probably too hot and so did not meet our expectations. We also put in "cool" jalapenos which have no heat to them, but haven't found a use for these yet. Ann makes wonderful chili rellenos of the Poblano peppers, superior salsa from the jalapenos. The cool jalapenos are for experimenting.

We grew a lot more than I'll speak of here in this post. Strawberries did well, if only for propagating new plants for next year's success. We'll move them in the Winter to another temporary, but much better, home. But we hope to get them into a vertical garden next year at some point.

The Marijuana crop is as simple as falling from a log, if you get the right seeds. We got the right seeds and so Pot is always a good, easy, crop to grow. We'll harvest it in late October on the eve of the first large rain event and give most of it away to friends and family because these plants put out.

But there were other crops worthy of talking about too:

• Cucumbers produced only enough to eat ourselves or serve to the chickens when they inevitably grew larger than they should have. We did two varieties, a pickler, and a slicer. We will put them in heavier once we open the produce stand.
• The cantaloupe melons did nothing and probably needed better sun. 
• We did eat some nice Sugar Baby watermelons and so will put them in heavy next year. 
• We also did quite well with pumpkins too (even though we don't want to do these as a cash crop). We have Jack-o-lanterns galore.
• Pole peas did enough to tell me how many to put in next year, and how to do it. Peas are not a favorite crop and take a lot of work to prepare, but they will work in the produce stand, if only for show.
• Bush beans produced very well too. These will be given a larger grow next year. I found that sorting them into visually  similar classes made preparation better. The big ones would be for canning, but I doubt we'll can them. The slender ones are spectacular for poaching and quick frying them in bacon fat afterwards. Yummy.

All in all the garden experiment gave me local clues as to how to proceed, and reading gave me ideas for improving the crop next year. I can't wait, so we're working on finding a winter crop to put it and planning the gardens for next year while waiting on paperwork to build our farm house.