In the Garden - Tomatoes & Peppers

"This was going to be the year we cut back on how many peppers and tomatoes we grow due to the glut of fruits they provided for us last season," He says chuckling to himself. Well those plans went out the window with this year's seemingly never ending cold and rain. What do you do when the weather does not cooperate? Well we changed all of our gardening plans at the last minute, focusing on quantity of plants over quality. I am growing twice as many peppers and tomatoes this year under the assumption that we will no doubt have a much lighter crop come fall. So each plant only needs to produce half as many fruits in order to provide us with a similar harvest as last season. That's the idea anyway.

We also scrapped all of the many plans that were formulated this past winter for numerous varieties of both bush and pole beans focusing instead on the cold hearty fava and my old reliable runner beans, both to be used as dry beans. We have a few other varieties of beans planted but nothing like I had originally planned on growing.

We need all the sun we can get this summer so most sunflowers and any tall fences of climbing plants besides those on the outskirts of the garden are pretty much out of the picture. I even had to sacrifice my wife's beautiful elderberry bush as it was shading part of our tomato patch, no worries though as a good pruning will make it thrive even more next spring.

While the vast majority of our tomato and pepper plants are planted in the ground every extra spot of space is filled with potted peppers and tomatoes...lots and lots of them. I figured that the peppers in black pots would outperform the ones in the ground this year and I am right so far. Potting a bunch of our plants will also allow me to usher them into the greenhouse if September's weather does not pan out. This is what I enjoy the most about gardening, the challenge of making it happen no matter what. A few of the smaller dwarf tomato varieties are even starting to bear fruit.

Husky Dwarf tomatoes

Totem

Red Alert

A tasty Tumbling Tom

A ridiculous amount of caged indeterminate tomatoes

Cali Orange tomatoes in pots

A gifted Coastal Pride Orange all staked up ~ A friend grew and babied a number of these plants from seed out of a tomato we gave her last fall. Thanks Paige!

Potted Bloody Butcher tomatoes starting to form

Margherita

Patio and Husky Dwarf tomatoes planted in the greenhouse

There are even tomatoes in the Orchard

Black Pearl Pepper ~ (looking good Randi)

Our first cayenne pepper...and that's my clean hand you should see the other one.:)

Jalapeno and cubanero peppers in pots

and pots

and pots
And more pots - Now all that's left to do is sit back and cross my fingers that time will be on our side and hope for a very warm August and September because come October it will all be over for any of these fair weather plants that are not lugged into the greenhouse.