September Review

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First, the good news is that it has been an amazing year for peppers. The plants are bearing heavily, and I am giving a lot away. I made stuffed peppers a day ago, and I will need to start freezing them. The Cubanelle peppers are almost identical to the Shishitos and don’t resemble the ones in the store. I have never seen such a great pepper crop in all of my gardening days. The Gypsy peppers have been amazing. In most cases we’ve been letting them ripen to bright red.

This is the largest yellow pepper I’ve ever grown.
Jalapenos ready for freezing.

The bad news, of course, is that the groundhog destroyed much of the garden. He ate zucchini, cucumbers, peas, beans, okra, kale, celery root and likely many tomatoes. He also did a little trimming on the eggplant and killed a couple of the tomatillo plants.

The tomatoes started out well but stopped ripening after the first bunch. I think the groundhog is eating some and there seem to be a lot of San Marzano tomatoes missing. Now the plants are all dead.

All of the tomato plants are dead. They all look like this. It is possible that I didn’t water enough in August. It might be disease, and the groundhog likely helped. I will need to prune a lot heavier next year.