Peppers and Tomatoes are Done

After the heavy frost last night and the beautiful weather this morning, I decided it was a perfect opportunity to harvest all of the remaining peppers and tomatoes.  I started with the peppers, pulling each plant and then cutting the peppers off of it into a bushel with snips.  I found that it worked really well, cleaning out the plants and making sure I didn’t miss anything all at once.  I ended up with 2 bushels of peppers from my 36 plants. Overall from the whole year’s harvest I figure I ended up with 3+ bushels from those plants.

 

In the picture below you can see the chocolate peppers.  A few were ripe but mostly still green.

 

This is the bushed containing the Jimmy Nardello and the chocolate.  They both did very well, and had my best yields of the 6 varieties. Both had ripe peppers the earlier than the others.

 

These are the purple peppers.  I found that they didn’t start to produce until after the others, and when they did the peppers were of a medium size with thin walls.  The plants were fairly brittle so when picking them you had to be careful.

The Alma paprika did well, but also had slightly lower yield and most of them didn’t ripen up. 
 

King of the North produced great peppers, but took until almost September to give me red peppers.  They did have big green peppers, but were later than the other sweet non bell peppers.

Sweet Hungarian was another great producer, there were lots of them on the plants and they ripened up steady throughout the year.  I would have them at 3^rd on my list for productivity, possibly second.

Finally there are the golden Cal wonder.  Last year these didn’t even survive from the seeds.  This year they grew into nice big plants with my largest peppers.  I had 2 plants and both produced 4 large peppers and a couple smaller ones.  It did however take until the very end of September until I had a yellow one. This is a pepper that would defiantly be on the edge to grow again. There are defiantly better bell peppers out there.

For the tomatoes, I just filled a flat with ripe ones and filled another with any that were still green.  The ripe ones are going to be either used up in the next week or preserved in some way, and the green ones kept around until they either ripen up or go bad.  It’s hard to judge how well they did because they were so crowded but over all they did pretty well.