A Summer of Backyard Vegetables (Part 2)

Here is the continuation from yesterday's blog post, A Summer of Backyard Vegetables.  In this blog post, you can see how everything grew and turned out, despite making some mistakes earlier in the summer like planting tomatoes in a slightly shady location.  Figuring out where to grow your veggies in a new house is a bit of a trial and error process, and the best solution for us was to plant our tomatoes and peppers in a bright and sunny location in containers.

From July 25, 2011:

Sweet Pepper Carmagnola Yellow

Here is an update so you can see just how much our veggies have grown!  Pictured above are the Sweet Pepper Carmagnola Yellow, just beginning to turn yellow.  These peppers are absolutely ginormous! There are two of the biggest peppers growing on one plant, plus three other plants that are growing a few peppers on each of them.

Chinese Five Colour Hot Pepper

Here is the Chinese Five Colours Hot Pepper.  Some of the peppers are beginning to change from their first colour of purple to a creamy shade of pale yellow.  After that, they will turn pink, red and orange.  It will be fun to see them change colors as they ripen!  This plant seems to keep growing new peppers, so hopefully we will get a lot of them out of just one plant!
 

Variegated Fish Hot Pepper

This is the Variegated Fish Hot Pepper with its striped peppers.  They start off green with faint white stripes, and they are changing to be green and orange/yellow.  I believe that they will end up being orange and yellow when they ripen and are ready to be eaten.  It will be interesting to see how these ones turn out!  I have two of these plants and they have many peppers on them.

Cayenne Pepper

Here is the Cayenne Pepper plant.  Just one of the peppers is turning red but it won't take long for the others to turn from green to red.  This is the only Cayenne plant that I have as the other one unfortunately died.  Should still get lots of tasty hot peppers though!

Hungarian Hot Banana Peppers

Lots of Hungarian Hot Banana Peppers, ready to be picked and devoured!

Then, we have lots of tomatoes!  Thankfully, none of the tomato plants died when I had to transplant them - very lucky!  I am so glad that I moved them out of their previous shady location.  Even though we may not get as many tomatoes as we could have gotten had they been in the full sun the entire time, these tomato plants have really grown and have lots of tomatoes growing on them!  It may take a little longer for them to mature, but some of the tomatoes are starting to turn red!  And that is good, because I cannot wait to make my famous salsa and bruschetta bread!

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From the beginning of August, 2011:

Fresh from my garden, here is my Chinese Five Colour Hot Pepper plant growing with peppers in all five colors.  They start out purple, then change to a creamy off-white, then yellow, orange, and red.  The red one must be just about ready to be picked and the orange one isn't too far off.  I haven't tasted these peppers yet but I hear that they are hot!

My plant is leaning a bit to the side so I should probably stake it.  Also, next year, I will be sure to plant my peppers in big pots like the tomatoes as I keep seeing that these pepper plants can grow quite a bit larger and bushier.  I am really happy that these peppers all seem to be growing really well, and I will have a great variety of hot peppers to eat throughout the rest of the summer!  This plant is quite beautiful with all of the bright colours.

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And finally, from August 11, 2011:

The veggies are ripening and new ones are fresh to pick on a daily basis!  We had a couple of days with a good amount of rain coupled with some sunshine so lots of tomatoes and peppers are ready to be enjoyed.

Here are all of the peppers that we are growing and at least one of each of them were ready!  The one on the left is the Little Bells Sweet Pepper.  I had no idea that these grew to be so big!  We used it tonight in our dinner and it was delicious!  Since the pepper is so big, we ended up only using half of it, so the other half will be used in a salad tomorrow.  The other peppers in order from left to right:  Hungarian Wax Hot Pepper, Red Cayenne Pepper, Variegated Fish Hot Pepper, and Chinese Five Colours Hot Pepper.

Here are some of the tomatoes that I picked - Matt's Wild Cherry Tomato (the smaller ones) and Baxter's Bush Cherry Tomato (the bigger ones).

I ended up using a lot of the tomatoes and hot peppers to make my delicious garden fresh salsa!

I hope that you enjoyed this whirlwind tour of my vegetable garden, from start to finish over the summer!  We aren't nearly finished yet though, as I am still picking a whole bowl full of fresh tomatoes every single day from the garden even now that it is September. There are still some hot peppers left to pick, as well as a whole bowl of them sitting in the fridge waiting to be devoured.

Thank goodness for summer and growing your own veggies!