Final Pepper Harvest and Autumn Scenes

We had a late killing frost at night on October 18, a welcome month later than some years. As it was getting cold that afternoon I harvested the sweet and hot peppers, the only frost sensitive crops not yet put away. The sweet peppers filled four bushel baskets together weighing around 125 pounds. I ran out of time to pick individual fruit, so, with light from a headlamp, I cut whole hot pepper plants and placed more than 100 of them in four piles in the insulated back building and shut the door. We had only two plants worth of shishito peppers so they just went into my pocket. It took many hours over the next days to separate the 150 pounds of hot varieties from their stalks and leaves. Around half of both the sweet and hot peppers were fully ripe, with the rest green to partially colored.

A Box of Sweet Peppers Heading to a Friend

From Top: Serrano, Alice's Favorite, Jalapeño, and Poblano Hot Peppers Left After Delivering 140 Pounds to a Food Pantry and Friends

 Frost also did in the dahlias and gladiolus and a week later we dug up the tubers/corms and put them in a dry place to prepare them for a long winters nap.

Light Colored Dahlias with Amaranth Leaning from the Left 

A Dahlia Arrangement

Solid Red Dahlias with Cosmos in the Foreground

Glad Corms in the Wheelbarrow, Dahlia Tubers in the Box

Frost also hastened color change of maple trees and it took only a few days of wind and rain to send most of the leaves to the ground.

Maple Leaves Just Starting to Fall

Four Days Later: Maple Leaves Falling Faster

A Week Later: Few Maple Leaves Left on Tree

Bean and Pepper Harvest

We grow pole or runner beans because they climb up on fences, poles or other structures created to keep them up in the air. We like the colorful flowers of Scarlet Runner Beans but their seeds are pretty tough and take many hours of simmering to soften. So we also plant a white-colored bean that cooks more quickly.

Scarlet Runner Beans with Flowers, Immature Beans and Tan Dry Pods

Woodchucks and rabbits seem to ignore the tough stems near the ground and the tender tendrils, flowers and developing beans are out of their reach. Some birds like cutting off tender pods or teasing out mature seeds - but not enough to diminish harvests too much.
The pods of bush beans often lie directly on the soil and deteriorate it they remain wet for very long. Because we mulch quite heavily, the soil is usually moist that leads to the pods and the seeds inside molding before they dry. Slugs and snails also attack fruit near the ground much more than those high up in the air. 

Second Harvest of Dry Scarlet Runners: 4.5 Pounds of Shelled Beans.

We eat quite a few meals of the tender green beans but most we let mature and dry. When their pods become brown, we periodically pick and shell them, letting the fancy beans dry completely in shallow baskets store against the ceiling above the wood stove. We like to harvest the dry beans every two weeks, or so, to prevent a flock of birds from stealing them. When a single bird figures out that there are nutritious beans inside the innocuous pods, it takes only hour or days for them to shred them all. We're lucky that most years they don't figure it out.

Third Harvest of Scarlet Runners: Six Pounds of Dry Beans

Sweet peppers mature much faster than hot peppers. Of the five types of sweet peppers, we like the large orange and red types the most because they are meaty and sweet. The purple ones are thin and even when mature, taste very much like mild immature green peppers. Small bright yellow ones son't have much taste and this year they are spongy. Other years these small yellow peppers were our favorite because they mature very early and continue producing into October when other varieties crashed. And critters seem to leave them alone. Many of our larger peppers are nibbled by rabbits, mice and voles, often making holes to access the seeds inside the fruit. Daily harvesting catches damaged fruit so to minimize waste we simply trim away nibble marks and eat them in the next salad or stir fry.

Variety of Peppers, Tomatoes, Squash and Eggplant Waiting to Be Eaten. When the Stove Is Not Being Used for Heat, It Makes a Great Table!

Peppers!

We're having the best harvest ever of both hot and sweet peppers. Five varieties of both sweet and hots are planted in beds separated by a few hundred feet so bees don't transfer hot genes to seeds developed by sweet varieties. Though we usually grow out specific varieties completely isolated from other peppers and have thousands of seeds stored in our freezer that were harvested this way, we'll save some of this year's seeds taken from the most healthy fruit for good measure. Some variety crossover may yield some that grow even better in our neighborhood!

Mix of Ripe Sweet Peppers

We planted more than twelve dozen each of the not too hots and the sweets for variety and to insure that we get at least some hot and sweet for eating. So far, every variety is producing well with very little insect damage: Tangerine, Orange, Mexican Red, Purple Beauty and Yellow Round that are mild and sweet, and Serrano, Jalapeño, Alice's Favorite, Poblano and Shishito that are mildly hot peppers. We used to grow a few colors of Habanero peppers but they were too hot for most people. One batch of salsa even caused one challenger in a hot salsa eating contest to drop unconscious!

Sweet Peppers Sorted by Color

Alice's Favorite Hot Peppers

Serrano Hot Peppers