[ 2024-2026 ]What are you growing and cooking?

[DeniseM]

I was out of town for a week and my garden went crazy! Yay, Spinach! OMG, Celery!

 

[DeniseM]

Today, I harvested lettuce for dinner: this is a salad blend from Baker Creek - a great place to buy seed. It's so handy to wash it in my salad spinner. Until it goes to seed, we just trim our lettuce and spinach back, rather than pull it out by the roots, and it will come back with more leaves to be harvested in a surprisingly short time. We have a hard time with Cabbage Loopers in our area, and they love greens, so I keep this bed under netting all the time. Cabbage Loopers are also called "Inch Worms."

 

[DeniseM]

I have new little vegetables/fruits on my plants now. The squash has a female blossom, but no male blossoms to pollinate it, yet.

 

[DeniseM]

Update on the Strawberries growing leaves: It was a nutritional deficiency. I fertilized them with some berry fertilizer and it stopped.

 

[Chrispee]

Well once again you’re all ahead of me with your growing seasons. Things are starting to take shape though, and it looks like our new little fig tree will have fruit this year.

 

[DeniseM]

I've been on vacation for 2.5 weeks, and my garden grew a lot, but I also have aphids a number of places, and worms in my tomatoes! Tomorrow they DIE!

Because I over-wintered my peppers, I picked the first peppers today!

Today's salad harvest, purple cherry tomatoes, strawberries, sweet peppers, green tomatoes & cucumber vines:

 

[Shiba]

What fertilizer do you use for your tomatoes?

 

[DeniseM]

Organic tomato food, blood meal, & powdered egg shells.

 

[slip]

Our Squash are coming in nicely and we already have some blossoms. Peppers are coming in well to. We have to start more tomatoes.

 

[Brett]

big banana peppers

 

[DeniseM]

Strawberry crumble made with our own homegrown strawberries:

 

[DeniseM]

Tomatoes! Here in Northern California, we picked our first tomatoes today. The 2 little ones on top are black cherry tomatoes, plus 2 yellow tomatoes and a red tomato. The strawberries are still going strong, too.

 

[easyrider]

Another batch of pickles for 2025. This year it was a huge batch. I think 96 quarts split by three.

Bill

 

[Chrispee]

Apples, Figs, and Tomatoes on the way.

 

[DeniseM]

Beautifuuuul!

I'm growing cherry tomatoes that look like that as well - they turn purple, before they turn red! The variety tag says: Indigo Blue Berries. It's the biggest tomato plant I have - it got to be about 7 or 8 foot tall, then the whole top laid over and now it's growing down, but it's still blooming and producing!

 

[Chrispee]

We managed to forget to keep record of what tomato varieties we planted this year

If I’d posted pics before searching you could have saved me 15 mins of my life… blueberry tomatoes was indeed the consensus we came to.

 

[DeniseM]

Strawberry Poke Cake made from home grown strawberries: Update: This turned out great - tastes a lot like strawberry shortcake.

 

[slip]

All of sudden, the banana peppers are exploding on this one plant.there must be 50 on this plant. They don't all show in the pictures but they have gone crazy. I have had this plant for over a year too.

 

[DeniseM]

We are still getting beautiful peppers & tomatoes from our garden in Northern California, where fall is just a more pleasant version of summer. It is supposed to be 78º this weekend! These all came from the same Anaheim (sweet) pepper plant, even though they look different. Last year we got our final harvest on Dec. 13th.

 

[DeniseM]

Today's garden harvest:

 

[Tia]

Everything here has frozen as it's late fall nearly winter

 

[DeniseM]

Today, I processed the last of my 2025 tomatoes & pepper, and made green enchilada sauce for the freezer. We had such a warm fall that the plants were still growing & producing in December. The tomatoes have all been pulled up, and tomorrow we will prune & wrap our pepper plants to over-winter them:



[Added later] I had some leftovers from Christmas eve, so I improvised a casserole with Mexican meat balls, cheese, enchilada sauce & a corn bread mix:

Preheat oven to 400º degrees
Spray a baking dish with veg spray
Spread Mexican meatballs evenly in the bottom of the dish (you could use any cooked meat for this)
Cover with enchilada sauce.
Add a layer of grated cheese.
Put the baking pan with the meat & sauce in the oven & bake until very hot & bubbly.
Top with unbaked corn bread batter.
Bake 20-25 min. or until golden brown.
*** It is very important to have the meat & sauce very hot before you add the corn bread batter, or the corn bread will be raw on the bottom.

This is not a glamour shot, but it turned out delicious:

 

[DeniseM]

Here in Northern CA, we wrap and over-winter our pepper plants, and today I was shocked and pleased to see that we already have 5 peppers on May 15th! This Anaheim Pepper plant is 3 or 4 years old:

 

[DeniseM]

We came back from 3 weeks vacation with a wide variety of garden results (they are on an automatic drip system.)

- Peppers: A+ (We over-wintered the plants)
- Volunteer tomatoes: A+ (look great!)
- Lettuce: A (Lettuce looking surprisingly good, since it's hot here)
- Tomatoes: C+ (need fertilizer)
- Strawberries: C (poor production)
- Cucumbers: F - I planted them twice, and the seeds did not come up! (gonna buy starts)

This is an Anaheim Pepper: We wrapped the pepper plants and over-winter them, so we get fruit much earlier than usual.


These are 3 volunteer tomatoes that came up in the flower bed in front of the tomato pots. These are "Indigo Blue Berry" cherry tomatoes that I planted in this area last year, and there are 2 more volunteers in the same area. I didn't plant this variety this year, so I'm going to let them go and see what they can do.


This is a "Mortgage Lifter" Tomato - they can grow to 2 lbs. each. The plant looks like it needs fertilizer - tomorrow.


This is my first lettuce harvest - it's supposed to be 103º by the end of the week, so I don't expect the plants to make it much longer. This is a seed mix with different kinds of lettuce.

 

[amycurl]

I had squirrels plant other people’s tomato seeds in a space between our wood pile and the house. They were tiny grape tomatoes and were delicious! I haven’t tried to grow tomatoes in my porch pots for years, because the squirrels always ate them before I could harvest. Joke was on them last year, lol!


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