Vegetable Garden update

It's the 3rd week of June and the garden is looking good.

Just planted some bush beans for drying - black, calypso, kidney, cranberry varieties

 Some corn sprouts coming up in the two pots

 Butternut squash is starting well

 

 Watermelon vines

 The hops have topped out the trellises and are starting to flower and form cones

The two paprika pepper plants didn't make it early so we replaced with jalapenos from the garden center. 

Some baby peppers 

 We started the onions a little late, not sure how big they'll be when we harvest them. 

 The bed of garlic that was planted last fall looks fantastic.  

 They all have scapes or have bloomed, so they'll start dying and be ready for harvesting in a few weeks.

The tomatillos and ground cherries that we started from seed really took off once they were in the ground. 

 Tomatoes are nice and bushy, and all have fruit

We did potatoes in the pots again, hopefully they do better than last year

 Sweet potato vines in half of the pots

Hot Sauce Completed

So after letting the pepper mash ferment for about two months, I decided to bottle it up.  Back when it started fermenting, some small spots of white mold started to form on the surface of the pepper mash that was above the brine.  So I topped off the jug with more water so that it was completely filled with pepper mash and brine.  The first 2 weeks of fermentation was fairly aggressive, as it forced all the pepper mash to the top of the jug, and pushed some up through the airlock, which made a mess.

You can see the pepper mash changed from a greenish color to more brownish, and even after the fermentation slowed down, all the mash was still forced up against the top of the jug:

It definitely had a sourish strong aroma, a little funky.  Upon tasting the mash, two things were clear.  One, that I used way too much salt (6 oz).  Two, that either the Tabasco peppers or Fish peppers were VERY hot.  I hoped that most of the salt was in the brine, so I strained the liquid from the mash.

That definitely helped.  But the pepper mash was much too hot (and too thick) to use as straight hot sauce for "everyday" uses like on eggs or tacos.  So I thawed a container of tomato puree that we had frozen from the garden.  Since the tomato puree was just blended whole tomatoes that were cooked down, it was very thin and could thin out the pepper mash and cut some of the heat. I made three variations, X, XX, and XXX, increasing in heat.  Most of the sauce was made as the milder X recipe which has a nice balance of flavor and slow burn heat, with just few bottles of the others.  The variations:

X - 1 part pepper mash to 4 parts tomato puree, with rice vinegar and brown sugar to taste

XX- Equal parts pepper mash and tomato puree, again with rice vinegar and brown sugar

XXX- Pepper mash, with some rice vinegar and water to thin it out a bit. 

For reference, the mix of varieties of peppers was:

1/2 lb Red Zavory

1/2 lb Fish 

1/2 lb Tabasco

1/2 lb Jalapeno

2 lb Salsa

2 lb Poblano

1.5 lb Sweet Bell

Hot Pepper Jelly and Fermented Hot Sauce

We canned a batch of hot pepper jelly from some of the Red Zavory and Jalepeno peppers.  

Then for the last batch of radom peppers, I decided to try to make some fermented hot sauce. 

 The peppers were stemmed, then pureed, then salt added, and some whey off the top of some yogurt, to give it some "good" bacteria to ferment.

 Similar to the method for traditional pickles or sauerkraut. The salt brine is enough to kill off bad bacteria so that Lactobacillus can ferment the sugars and create lactic acid, which is a natural preservative, as it lowers the pH. It's supposed to give the peppers a better flavor.

Garden Late Summer

Our two best vegetables by far were the tomatoes and peppers, which all went crazy. The tomato plants eventually grew out the top of the bird netting

 We had to stake up the pepper plants because they grew so many branches that all had heavy peppers

 Sweet potato vines expanded all over.  Unfortunately the zucchini and squash plants in the back were decimated by squash bugs and rotted.

 We put up two different grape vines on the arbor we built over the entrance to the garden.

 We finally got the fence painted too

Vegetable Garden - 1st week of July

We've planted two rows of gourds, we'll be building an arbor for them.  

Birdhouse gourds and snake gourds.

 The watermelon vines are starting to take off.

 Sweet potatoes are doing fine, they needed more room.  The squash and zucchini plants have bloomed and are developing. 

 The sugar snap peas have completely climbed the tepee, and are now starting to yellow with the heat.  Carrots next to them are good, we think we should have thinned them out a bit though.  We'll see how big the carrots end up.

 The Italian rose beans are full of beans, the 3 cucumber plants in this bed appear to have been infected with Bacterial Wilt.  But we've only seen one cucumber beetle, which supposedly causes it.  The plant didn't seem slimy when cut either, which is supposed to be a sign.  Either way, this is the 2nd year in a row they did not do well. 

 Closeup of the Italian Rose beans.  We are going to let them dry on the plant.

 These 4 cucumber plants are doing much better, but now some of the vines are starting to wilt too. 

 Our soy beans plants are huge, and are flowering.  The green bean plants behind them have already flowered, and have small beans on them. 

 As you can see, for whatever reason, the one half of the tomato plants are doing much better than the other half.  We can't figure out why. 

 The "Fourth of July" and "Fresh Salsa" varieties are starting to be ripe.

 The peppers plants all have peppers.   The Scarlet Runner beans have flowered, but don't seem to be forming beans.  We think maybe the birds are eating the flowers/baby beans?  

Closeup of some of the peppers

Closeup of Peppers and Tomatoes

 We planted 5 pumpkin vines, 2 "Amish Pie" and 3 "World Color". 

We harvested our onions (yellow and red), and the rest of the garlic. We discovered that you do not want to let the onions bloom.  The 3 that had flowered, had the smallest onions.  The garlic is hanging up to dry on the porch, as it's supposed to be out of direct sun, and breezy.