Pepper, Apples, Tomatoes, Pumpkins

I'm not sure how I forgot to update the gardening blog for three weeks but there you have it. Things have been busy! First up, I pulled in the three largest papers. I think we'll get 15 this year. These have since ripened and two are in the oven right now for fajitas!

The watermelons are also doing well. I think we'll get three watermelons and two cantaloupes this year.

 

We harvested the first apple tree and ended up with a goodly number of pretty big apples. Some of these have gone into crisps. 

The rest I canned as pie filling to make room for...

...endless tomatoes. I started pulling off the riper ones to help the plants make some progress on the greener ones.

The result was very crowded window skills.

The smaller stupice tomatoes, I mostly dehydrated for the winter.

The largest tomatoes, including some black Russian ones have been ether eaten fresh or crushed and canned.

I have another 40 tomatoes on the window sills ripening. These I'll run through the tomato mill and likely sauce. Finally, we have four (or maybe five) huge pumpkins (four litres ice cream pail for scale).

There are also about a dozen smaller pumpkins. I managed to process the garlic and most of it is in storage. Ditto the onions. The next big rush (other than the tomatoes) will be the scarlet runner beans But those are likely several weeks away yet.

Cantaloupe, watermelons, garlic and pumpkins

As we head into the last two months of the gardening season, we're seeing some progress in the melon patch. I see three cantaloupes so far, which is pretty good news. Not the number I was hoping for, but still better than zero!  

There are more watermelons (at least five). They are growing at a pretty good pace. The pictures below were snapped five days apart. I sent one to Jess and her co-workers were like "does your dad have giant Shaq hands or are those just tiny watermelons?"

We're also starting to harvest tomatoes. Mostly stupice at this point but the bigger tomatoes are starting to ripen.

I pulled the garlic and cached it in the garage to cure. So now everything in the garage, including the inside of the car, smells like garlic.

Things are going so-so on the trellis. I have a few more squash showing.

And a small number of cucumbers. I think the soil needed some amending so I'll work on that this fall.

The raspberries are basically done for the season. I managed to put 5 litres away in the freezer for jamming. The pumpkins are insane, though. The vine just keep spreading. Of the pumpkins I can easily get to, this is the largest so far (thumb to pinky is 9 inches) so I think we'll have a large number of pretty big pumpkins come fall.

The coronet front is probably a write off (not enough sun). And the potatoes have been a real mixed bag this year. Some good sized spuds but not a whole lot of potatoes per plant.