Fall Garden

It's been awhile since I last posted about our family garden. We are still getting quite a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables, even with the dog days of summer that we experienced in August. Thankfully, the cooler weather of September has allowed us to plant a fall garden to give us more fresh produce for the winter.

Here's what we've got growing in our fall garden:

The big large "bush" in the two above pictures is actually our big boy tomatoes, a sweet pepper, and two bell pepper plants. There are a ton of green tomatoes growing and peppers of all shapes & sizes. Won't be long now! The "bush" next to the window is our green beans that we planted in the Spring. It has only given us one meal's worth of green beans. That is, until now. It's chock-full of green beans--yummy! We also had a few squash & zucchini plants that had been planted here, but they burned off due to summer's heat, so we pulled up the remains. Hubs put up chicken wire and some pipes for support and we planted sweet peas, green beans & cucumbers. Hopefully, we'll have a bumper crop before winter's frost arrives!

We also bought 3 grape vines, and here they are. No sooner did we plant them, they started sprouting leaves. Looks as though they like the soil. :)
Above: 3 types of onions--red, vidalia, and green onion. Below: carrots. We're going to try them again. After a little research, we learned that carrots actually thrive in cooler weather, so maybe they'll do better in a Fall garden than a Spring/Summer one.

We also planted some corn, we have one squash plant that survived the summer, and there are several more bell peppers, another big boy tomato plant, a white eggplant, a black beauty eggplant, jalapeno plants, plus our strawberries are still going strong producing berries here & there, and our raspberry bush is doing well, too. We also have a blueberry and a blackberry bush, although they are not actually producing fruit. I think the season for them is long over, so we'll see if they survive the winter and what we can get out of them next year.

Here are some of our recent harvests:
Several bell peppers. By the time I went to chopping & freezing them, one had turned completely red and one had turned completely yellow (finally! peppers that look like the tag when we bought the transplants!). Also, a sweet pepper, which I chopped along with a tomato we picked; froze these for later use. One white eggplant, which we ate this week. My black beauty has a small eggplant. It'll be several more weeks before it's ready for harvesting. Also got a cucumber--yippee! All of our cucumber plants had burned off a month or so ago; that is, all but one. We had a cucumber plant that hid beneath a squash plant in our main garden. This cucumber plant finally shot off and has started reproducing cukes. There are several more on the plant that, keeping our fingers crossed, we'll be able to harvest in a week or two.
Our watermelon plant, which had started taking over the better part of our main garden, finally did make some watermelons. We have 5 large melons, and 1 little baby one. We ate some watermelon for dessert one night this week. The kids loved it, and I loved it since it was a healthy treat for everyone.

And finally, hubs was tickled pink at al the jalapenos he picked the other day. He made Pepper Poppers and ate 'em up while watching a football game.