Dehydration

My folks got me a sweet dehydrator for my birthday back in September.  It has been very useful in preserving my massive quantities of hot peppers.  This weekend I cut and loaded another batch, and they were dry today. I dry them crisp and hard, since my plan is to grind them into flakes this winter.  Kung Pao pepper flakes.  Scotch Bonnet flakes.  Jalepeno flakes.

I've also dried tomatoes in it.  Next up is rosemary and chives from the herb garden.  Well, once I'm done with the backlog of peppers.  The dehydrator is set up in the Batcave.  The hot pepper scent while the drying is in progress is pretty strong, and the constant hum gets a little annoying inside the house.

Seed

Over the weekend I ripped tomato stakes, cucumber cages, string pea trellis, and row ID stakes out of the garden.  Basically, all the hardware is up and stored for next year.  All that's left that's actually alive are kohl rabi, green onions, some dill, and weeds...lots of weeds.

It's rainy and cold outside, so I'm planning next year's garden.  It's time to do a seed inventory.  I have seeds from 3 basic sources...Seeds leftover from packets I purchased in 2011, but didn't need all the seeds in those packets or never used the packet at all...seeds that I or a relative saved from plants I grew or ate...and finally, a handful of seeds I bought recently from online heirloom seed seller Tomato Bob.  He had packets on sale for 50 cents.  I couldn't resist.  So here's the list...
Leftover 2011 seed:
Sweet Basil
Cayenne Pepper
Cherokee Purple Tomato
Big Beef Tomato
Dill
Cilantro
Salad Bowl Lettuce
Kohl Rabi
Lemon Cucumber
Early Scarlet Globe Radish
Sparkler White Tip Radish
Catskill Brussel Sprouts
Purple Top Turnips
Mammoth Sunflower
Long Imperator Carrot
Lettuce - Park Seed Summer Blend
Yellow Straightneck Summer Squash
Genovese Basil
Jalepeno Pepper
Romano Bush Beans
Danish Ballhead Cabbage
Black Beauty Zucchini Squash
Seed saved from plants/fruits:
Altris Pepper
Yellow Meat Watermelon
Green Meat Cantaloupe
Zuchini Squash
Jalepeno Pepper
Small Thai Pepper
Large Thai Pepper
Kung Pao Pepper
Scotch Bonnet Pepper
a bag of Melon seeds of unknown provenance
a bag labelled "Best Cantaloupe Ever 2011"  I think it came from Aunt Sharon.
4 bean seeds that look like black lima beans.
Butternut Squash
Yellow Tomato
Beefsteak Tomato, yellow with orange stripes
Cilantro
Dill
Red Watermelon
Burgundy Sunflower
Impatients
Wildflowers
Seeds I bought on sale:
Ruby Red Lettuce
Southern Giant Curled Mustard
Long Island Brussel Sprouts
Early Wonder Beets
Grand Rapids Lettuce
Kentucky Blue Bush Beans
Straight 8 Cucumbers

That's a lot of seed.  Next step is to consult with my people to determine what we're actually going to eat, and procure seeds that we need to fill in the holes.  I know I need to get broccoli and more snap bean seeds.  We eat a lot of those.  Our friend Nikita wants us to grow those yard-long Asian green beans.  Angel loves spinach.  With my existing crop of sweet potatoes, I should be able to produce slips without too much difficulty.  I'll need green onion seeds, and maybe onion sets for a regular variety.  More carrot seed.  Hmm, I'm going to need a bigger garden.

November Garden Ridiculousness

Yeah, another big handful of strawberries.  They taste good, but we must eat then within 24 hours or they get soft.  I'm so amazed by these berries.  I mean, it's cold here.

I picked produce a couple times this past weekend.  Here's the Friday harvest...I cooked up a huge pot of turnip greens on Sunday.

This is the Sunday harvest. I picked heavy on the hot peppers because I'm worried about losing them to frost.  Normally I just pick the ripe red ones, but I went ahead and picked them green too.  If they freeze and then thaw out, they rot very quickly.  Somehow there are were still some cherry tomatoes out there, too.  Also radishes, cilantro, green sweet peppers, more turnips, and green onions.

These green onions were planted in March.  They are huge and healthy...check out their root structure.  I love omelets with onions in them, and these guys are fantastic with my egg concoctions.  I also chopped and cooked some with the turnip greens.

Sweet Taters

So, we harvested the sweet potatoes.

I initially bought a pack of 9 plants at Lowe's for about $3.  I had no real idea what sort of conditions they needed to grow, but I put them in the ground between a row of yellow cucumbers and a row of tomatoes.  They spread some, but around mid-summer they took off, vining all over the garden.  When the cucumbers died, they took that space over, and vined up into the tomatoes and the peppers.

As summer turned into fall, the ground where the slips were initially planted started to mound up like hills.  I knew the roots were big, but I didn't really expect the size and quantity that we got.

The end result was 2 five-gallon buckets full of sweet 'taters.  At least 30 pounds of them.  Some were huge and beautiful.  Some were thin and scraggly.  A small number of them looked like they had cracked and healed at some point.  The only problem is that we now have to wait to eat them.

Apparently, you have to cure your yams for 6 to 8 weeks to make them taste right.  If you try to bake them right away, they don't come out sweet or soft.  At least that's what the interwebz say.  You're supposed to put them in a warm place with high humidity for 5 days, and them store them at 60 degrees at regular humidity for the rest of the 6 to 8 weeks.  So, we won't have sweet potato casserole for Turkey Day, but we should for Festivus.  Yum.

First Frost

Well, the almanac said that our area would have its first frost on October 30, and it was dead on.  The morning of October 30, I wandered out to the garden and discovered wilted crookneck pumpkin leaves and wilted sweet potato leaves.  A light frost had hit overnight.

I did a little picking that day.  Only the vining plants were wilted, and I went ahead and picked the last of the ripe crookneck pumpkins.  This week I will harvest the sweet taters.  I also picked a huge handful of strawberries!  Yes, our crazy little strawberry patch is still producing.

They're not really the same as the berries we get when they first start producing, but they taste good.  I'm not complaining at all about a strawberry that I harvest on October 30.  Just getting anything is amazing to me.

The evening of the 30th, the frost was harder.  The next morning, thick frost covered the turnips, radishes, most of the leafy stuff in the garden.  A 5 gallon bucket of water I left outside had a layer of ice on the top.  I thought that maybe that was it for the turnips, but I was wrong.  This morning I checked them, and they were just fine...

These turnips laugh at frost.  They smack frost around a little bit, and demand frost bring them a Coke and make them a sammich.  Nonetheless, I need to pick these things this week.  I was giving them a little longer to let the roots develop more, but I don't want to miss out on turnip greens cooked with onions and bacon.  Time to pull.