Unfortunately only about half of them were ready to pick today and the other half were still a bit green. The ready ones are a very pretty mottled pink bean. The green ones are....well green. We will make a pot of soup with them sooner rather than later. The pink ones are drying on a cookie sheet and can go into a mason jar and we can eat them thru the winter. I guess next year we will plant them a bit earlier so they are drying in the pods when it comes time to harvest them.
We also picked all the remaining peppers that were on the plants and then pulled up the plants. This is a huge bowl of them. They are all sizes so Patrick cut up all the small ones tonight and we have 4 dryer trays in the dehydrator as I type. We made a pile to take to work and share and the remainder we are leaving on the counter to turn red. Some of them are already turning a bit red as you can see in the picture. If we were not expecting the frost we would have left them on the plants until they turned red.
I pulled 2 carrots to test size. The really big one in front is one of the red carrots. They are so pretty in salads as the outside is red. The next layer is orange like a traditional carrot and then they have a yellow center. When we grate them we end up having tri-colored strips. Freezing carrots in the ground make them sweeter so we are only harvesting carrots as we need them. The orange carrot is a "danver" carrot which grows well in heavy soil. The grow short and fat as this one definitely is.
And finally...........the row covers which prevent frost damage and lengthen growing seasons. One bed is entirely lettuce. The other contains the danver carrots, celery, kale, swiss chard, spinach starts which should overwinter and give us a jumpstart in the spring, and the remaining radishes which we will eat in the next few weeks.
We let the chicken roam around in here today so they could stir up the empty beds. They had a great time digging around and hiding under the pepper plants before they all got pulled up. They then started trying to jump the fence to head for their favorite tree spot so I helped them get over. They have not been out for a week now since Patrick has been trying to establish the grass so I think they enjoyed the freedom.
Overall it was a beautiful autumn day to play in the yard. Hung a few loads of laundry on the line, had all the windows open, and ate on the porch.
No comments:
Post a Comment