Harvesting

The sweet potatoes are finally flowering. They produce beautiful purple flowers that fall off when the potatoes are ready. They open in the morning and close at night. 

Medium cantaloupe hanging on the trellis about 3.5 feet off the ground. The skin is changing slowly, not like the container melons that changed overnight.

Large cantaloupe hanging about one foot off the ground. Skin changing. 

Eggplants of all different shapes and sizes. 

Our first red bell pepper. It has, obviously, yet to turn red but its very exciting to get even one considering that the tomatoes overthrew that box. 

Ready for harvest chili pepper (transferred to PM bed from container). The transfer has done them well we have at least 4 other peppers turning red. 

My full harvest for today; lemon boys, jalapeños, cucumber, tomato-berries, super sweet 100's, and chili pepper.

Tomato City

Picking and Bags...

Every time we pick tomatoes we put them in brown paper bags to ripen a little more or if they are ripe just for storage. They seem to keep a lot better that way. If we are ripening them a little more we put a banana in with them and if we're not we don't. Something about the peel helps the process. Anyway, at this point we have 3 brown paper bags full of all different types, shapes, and sizes and I have given a small bag to a friend, 2 small bags to my mom and 1 large bag. We have about 100+ more tomatoes on the vines at different stages of growth and ripeness and 25 of those are ready for picking but we rather them ripen as far as naturally possible on the vine than bring them in to rot. It's amazing! Mike's dad has attempted growing tomatoes in containers every single year since we've been here and every single year they either get eaten or don't ripen. I think that's why he wanted so many plants this year and my green thumb prevailed, even the container ha set forth 3 ripe tomatoes and only keeps growing and ripening. Yah, we over did it a bit but its nice to have some veggies to give away. 

Bag of tomatoes I have to my mom today, with plenty leftover for us. 

Some of what was ready for picking today, definitely not all, I found an pick these in 2 minutes so I could give my mom a few extra Lemon Boys. 

Tomato Mania

Intense Heat...

It's been advisory hot outside for the last 4 or 5 days. It's been in the high 90's to the low 100's with a lot of humidity which has been amazing for the tomatoes. Tons of them are ripening on all the plants. I collected at least 10 tomatoes and 2 squash today alone. I took the squash to my moms for her to cook them,like she can only do, for me. Mmmm so good! The heat is miserable but the results are amazing! I hope it stays sunny and fairly hot, maybe just maybe, not advisory hot but tomato hot. 

Today's collection! The yellow is a lemon boy. The small ones are tomato-berries.

Cooked squash with onions.