Sunday, January 23, 2011

Back From The Dead

Well, I never reported final results. Decent crop of chili peppers, but hardly any sweet peppers at all. Green beans were pretty good, eggplants so so. I got 33 pounds of sweet potatoes, a decent amount of delicata squash and sugar pumpkins, not so good with the butternut, carving pumpkins and buttercup squash.

Of the seven tomato varieties, the only ones that we liked and will replant were the Sprite Grape and Riesentreube Cherry. The Yellow Pears were prolific but so-so on taste. The Mortgage Lifters and Marglobes were useless. They were far too susceptible to blight, with the bottoms of the tomatoes themselves rotting before they even started to turn. The Pink Brandywines were good on flavor, but again lost about 3/4 of the crop to blight. The Bloody Butchers grew pretty well, but so so on taste. I did manage to make about four quarts of pickled green tomatoes. I'll try to include the recipe in a future post.

Overall, I definitely need to fertilize more, especially the corn. In the midst of the darkest winter days, with all of the snow already come and more predicted for Wednesday, and tonight's low forecast for -11, I tried to brighten things up by organizing and cleaning up previous years' seeds and I even ordered some new tomato varieties for the spring. Whenever it comes.