Autumn Vegetable Garden Update

Almost orderly rows of zinnias, eggplants and tomatoes.

Deep purple (almost black) eggplant enjoying the shade.

I skipped the hot peppers this season and focused on several varieties of sweet peppers.

These slender, curving Asian eggplants are beautiful and delicious on the grill or in stews.

The foliage on the Brussels sprout plants looks like lace. Full of holes!

We’re enjoying a heavy melon crop including cantaloupe, musk melon and watermelon.

We overproduced artichokes last season, but this season’s been disappointing. Still no chokes!

Gangbuster cuke season! They’re getting too big too fast…

It’s been getting considerably cooler at night lately, and feeling fall-like much earlier than the last few years. We’ve already had two nights that broke forty degrees! But still no killing frost.

The vegetable garden is still thick with produce. We’ve been eating cantaloupes and musk melons just as quickly as we can. The same goes for eggplant and tomatoes. We’ve lost the battle with cucumbers which are getting so big they’re almost obscene. I have to apologize before giving them away as a gifts lest I offend someone with tender sensibilities. Fortunately they still taste good. The key is to slice them the long way and scoop out all of the seeds the same way you do with melons.

Several varieties of tomatoes have succumbed to blights. Fortunately the affliction hasn’t really damaged many tomatoes themselves, just the plants. It seems to primarily be an issue with the determinate varieties. 75% of the indeterminate plants are still growing like gangbusters, pumping out large, delicious heirloom tomatoes.

The zucchini seem to have gone dormant, although they’re still producing lots of blossoms. I would love to cook up some squash blossoms before the season ends, but haven’t managed to do it yet.

Lots and lots of sweet peppers too. And a full crop of green beans, spinach, lettuce, Swiss chard, and baby kale coming online soon. I grew a small quantity of beets with the intention of harvesting their “greens” (actually, their deep purple/red). We ate about half of the crop in our salads this summer, but at this point many of them have grown into full grown beets. So we’ll end up harvesting those as well this fall.

What else? The Brussels sprouts are just beginning to set, so I need to snap off most of the foliage to concentrate their energy into sprouts. We pulled up all the corn stocks and composted them. The leaks will be ready to start harvesting in about a month, and only the artichokes have failed to produce. After last summer’s bumper crop, it’s a mystery. Half of the plants succumbed to root rot during the rainy month of June. And the half dozen plants that lived are runty and unproductive. To date none have set even the smallest of chokes. Not giving up yet though…