Season Cooling off With Very Little Summer Crops to Harvest

The weather here has been getting cooler over the past couple of weeks and those hot humid days are probably over for this year.  I don’t expect to get much more summer crops this year except for some beans, cherry tomatoes, steakhouse tomatoes, peppers, and maybe decent sized eggplants.  What I have in melons is it for this year and now is the time to start picking them off the vines.

At the moment I have picked one crimson sweet watermelon and two honeydew melons from their vines this past week.  None of the other melons were ripe yet and have not fallen off the vine which is an indication that they are ripe enough to be eaten.

Although weather is cooler I am still seeing flowers on my eggplants and one of them actually is producing a few vegetables on the plant.  I am not certain how big they will get with the lack of sunlight and warm weather, but I am happy that I could get a few more from this season.  As long as a frost doesn’t occur for some time I could get a couple of decent sized eggplants.

Peppers and cucumbers are also still producing flowers, but I think that they are pretty much done for the year.  I think the last cucumbers are on the vines right now and are probably ripe enough to be harvested.  Peppers are done producing flowers and a couple of them have fruit on them that I will have to pick either today or sometime this week.

 I will soon have to cover my strawberries for the winter, but I am going to wait a little bit and put straw on top of them most likely in October.  I will also have to cover my rhubarb this season since it is the first winter for these plants.  I probably could pick some of the stems, but I want to wait until next season in order to prevent from picking too many stems this year and possibly harming the plant.  Plus rhubarb needs at least one cold winter to produce tasty stems for cooking

More Tomatoes are the Subject for Today

It seems that all I have been talking about is my tomatoes.  Fortunately I have been getting plenty of them this season especially when it comes to cherry tomatoes.  300 cherry tomatoes were picked last week while today I beat that by getting 490 ripe cherry tomatoes.  It looks like more salsa will have to be made with these types of tomatoes.

On the other hand I picked plenty of Roma and steakhouse tomatoes this past week as well.  I had over forty pounds of Roma tomatoes that needed to be used otherwise they would become rotten and not good for anything.  Luckily I made plenty of sauce with them and was able to fill up plenty of glass jars with this sauce.  I will be using most of it over the winter as well as the salsa from the cherry tomatoes.

I also had picked many steakhouse tomatoes which are basically good for sandwiches.  I love BLT and have been slicing large pieces of tomato for my lunch.  Having a large slice of fresh tomato on your sandwiches is one of the best things of the summertime.  It is one of the many things I look forward to each year.

Now that I have discussed my tomatoes it is time to talk about other vegetables in my garden.  First of all I picked some more pole beans today and will probably be freezing some of them for use in a couple of months.  I only picked a small batch, but there is still plenty of time with plenty of more beans to be picked real soon.

My melons are doing well and I don’t know exactly when, but some of them are going to be harvested sometime this month hopefully.  My watermelon will most likely be the first since it was planted first and the first to generate a melon.  I have a couple of cantaloupes and a couple of honeydew melons that are still on the vine not ready for picking.