Peppers, Peppers Everywhere!

I guess I did something right this year with my green pepper plants. Fortunately, we do love green peppers, so all is good. I use it in salads and for my no lettuce salads and they are good stir fried or stuffed.

I had the last of our garden tomatoes in this salad mix I made a few days ago. I do have a few more green tomatoes in the window to ripen, but I am not sure if they will ripen up for me.

The pepper plants grew extremely tall this year, we had a good amount last year too, but not near as many as this year. I guess the soil is very fertile.

 There still are plenty of flowers blooming and lots of little peppers too. If the temperatures drop too low, I'll pull up the plants then. I read that if the temps stay below 60 degrees the peppers will stop ripening.

Dirt for the garden

We worked on cleaning up the garden for the Fall. I plan on planting some cold season crops this year, so I wanted to make sure I had enough soil in the garden. I have 13 raised beds in the garden now and even though they all have soil in them, not all of the soil is very good and all the raised beds are not completely full. 

Anyway to make a long story short, we purchased some Gardeners Choice dirt from a landscaping company near us. They will load it into your truck for you. We ordered one cubic yard for around $36 which is a pickup truck load for us.

A view from the inside of the truck as the dirt is being dumped.

It took the two of us quite awhile to unload all the dirt.

The best tools were two shovels and a wheel barrel.

The soil is called Gardener's Choice since it is a screened topsoil with organic compost, manure compost and organic sand blended together with a topsoil shredder. This soil worked the best for us last year and the vegetables planted in the beds with this soil did very well. We also purchased soil from another company last year that hardened like the clay soil her in NC, so the raised beds with that soil did not do as well. We're working to amend those soils with better soil, mulch and cover crops. We learned our lesson to buy the right soil the first time. This new soil definitely has the manure in it, you can smell it.

We'll be getting one more load of soil to complete the garden beds. After this year I am hoping that we'll be able to keep up with our soil needs with our own compost bins of vegetable scraps, mowed grass, shredded leaves and chicken poop. It is for sure a work in process.

Growing Strawberries

I have tried to grow strawberries over the years with a lot of trouble. I bought some strawberry roots one year and nothing ever grew, I sowed some strawberry seeds and nothing grew. Last year I bought one strawberry plant and I had a few strawberries from it, but mostly some animal came and ate them before I got to them. 

So this year I bought a few strawberry plants and set them in one of my raised garden beds. They shared the space with some bush beans. They did well this year. It also helps to read about each vegetable or fruit that you want to grow so you really know what you're doing.

There were quite a few strawberries on the plants and they were really sweet although small.

At first it produced really small strawberries, but they did get a little bigger then this later on.

Even last week I was still seeing more strawberries and flowers and it is October now.

Here is my biggest harvest of strawberries, not much for 3 plants, but the best crop of strawberries I've ever had so far. I guess any progress is a good thing.

I learned that strawberries will come back each year and that you should have a dedicated space in your garden for them. So now they have taken over one of my garden beds. I plan to add more to the other side of the garden bed this year as well. They are a fairly easy fruit to grow. I have also learned that bird netting over the top of the garden bed is necessary unless you want to share your strawberries with all the furry and feathered creatures around your yard. In my case, my chickens love the strawberries and I have to pick them after they are locked in their coop for the night or they will steal them from me.

My strawberries are ready for the winter now. I put some mulch of leaves around them to keep the soil warm for them and it will decompose and give them nutrients over the winter.

So next spring I'll purchase a few more plants to add to my strawberry garden bed and I will also try to use some of the off shoots that the vines produce to add more plants to the garden.