I have already said good-bye to everything. There are some peppers still hanging on the plants that I may try to harvest seeds from. I really liked the Tangerine peppers you sent me seeds for. I plan on growing them again next year also. I do have some small onions that I started from seed that I am a little concerned about. They are only about 2 or 3 inches tall and maybe too tender to withstand the cold.

Is it silly of me to try to save or overwinter pepper or tomato plants on an enclosed patio? I just brought in tonight the ones that were in containers. I also cut back and dug out the stems of two of my favorite outside tomato plants. I know the rest that are still in the ground will be gone by tomorrow, forecast is 28F here.

I had some red bell pepper this evening in a salad. I must say it is one of my absolute favorite vegetables.

Then, I began to wonder what home-grown tastes like compared to store-bought. It's hard for me to imagine an improvement on a favorite taste, but I bet it's heaven on the taste buds.

Bon, they taste wonderful, but I think I like the yellow ones a little better than the red ones. I usually start a lot of pepper seed in the Spring, but this year just as I got mine started we had 2 deaths in our family and I wasn't here to care for mine when I needed to be. I just dumped the entire tray and never started any more. A little later, I happened to be going through Stillwell, and stopped at a nursery and bought some transplants. The names weren't on the plants, and the man just said, "These are red, and these are yellow." At that point I didn't care, so I just bought a few. Both were good, but the yellow ones were fantastic and produced a lot more peppers than the red ones did. Now, I would love to know the names.

I freeze enough peppers each year to use in cooking all year, but I am always anxious for that first nice crisp pepper that I can pull off the plant. In my garden peppers are one of the easiest crops to grow. I love peppers and usually plant too many.

Bon, I agree with Carol that fresh sweet peppers taste wonderful. To me, they have a freshness and crispness that is lacking in grocery store peppers. They're also healthier because once produce is picked, its nutritional value declines daily so that the longer grocery store food has been in the distribution chain since being picked, the less nutritious it is.

I picked tons of peppers right before our hard freeze and have been processing them like mad. On the days I've had poblano peppers in the dehydrator, the house has smelled yummy, yummy, yummy.

Carol, I like the orange ones the best, but will gladly eat red, yellow or orange sweet bells. I don't have much use for green bells, but at the end of the season will pick them green before the last frost and slice and chop them before freezing them for use in cooking throughout the winter and spring. I have a freezer full of tomato products, peppers and corn along with lots of canned stuff and piles of winter squash, so it is going to be a yummy winter.

It's always sad when the growing season ends, but I do still have about 40 plants (mostly ornamentals, but some tomato plants and a couple of pepper plants) in containers in the greenhouse. Since I don't heat the greenhouse, I am not sure how long they will last, but it is nice to walk into the greenhouse on a cool day and be all toasty warm and surrounded by green plants. The peppers in the greenhouse have blooms, but likely won't produce anything this winter because it looks like it is going to be a cold, cloudy one.

Dawn

I've read about the growth. They all start out green but change colors, right?

And, then, I'm assuming some varieties are bred or grown for their distinct color(s) and flavors? It's confusing because reading about the growth and subsequent colors contradicts specific "color" bell pepper plants.

Now that I have plans for the staples out of the way I'm starting to dream about all the beautiful colors that might grow next year. Awesome.

I have grown purple bells that turn purple when they are very tiny, but most bell peppers are green first, and after fully grown, they change to orange, red, or yellow. This year I let almost all of mine stay on the vine until they colored up except for the two times I thought the weather was going to be cold and I did't want to lose what was on the plants.

Peppers are fun to grow and are very pretty plants. I never have a pest problem unless the fruit touches the ground.

Bon, I have to cage my peppers are they will fall over when loaded with fruit. I have some of those cheap tomato cages from the big box stores that are way to small for a tomato. They were a couple of dollars the last time I bought them and I don't buy them now, but I use the ones I have for pepper plants. Well, I use them for lots of things because they are worthless for tomatoes, so I re-purpose them. LOL If the bottom ring falls out, I make a shorter cage to use in a container, and I cut the long legs off and bend the end over to make a long straight piece with a hook on one end. I push (or drive) the straight part into the ground and put the hook over the bottom wire of my 'real' concrete wire cages to help secure them and I grow lots of things on those CRW cages. When the bigger rings break on the cheap cages, I use them with my seed starting trays when I start to harden off transplants. I cover them with pieces of row cover and the hooped wire from the cage holds the cover above the tender plants. Although I bought the larger cages, they are still kind of a waste, but I try to make use of them.

My husband made CRW cages for me and got a few of them larger than I like for tomatoes, but they work great for pole beans. I don't have a really large garden, but with cattle panels and cages I grow a lot of things vertical so I can fit a lot into a small space.

I don't know if you noticed, but in the Pinetree catalog there are lots of mixed packages and I think those are great for gardens that are mostly planted for fresh eating. Cabbage, for instance. I don't need 20 heads of cabbage at one time, so a package of seeds with different size heads, different colors, different maturity dates, etc. works better for me. I like the mixes of lettuce also, but only like the mild ones, not the bitter ones. If I am planting things for freezing or canning, then I want them all alike so I have plenty of produce ready at the same time. On some of the cool weather crops we will be limited by our growing season because it will get too hot too quickly, but not every year.

Pickles are kind of an exception since I started using Mrs Wages mixes. I found that it really wasn't a problem to do frequent small batches and if I had too much liquid mixed, I could hold it in the refrigerator until the next day and still use it. I don't buy many mixes of any kind, but my family loved all of the pickles, and pickles just doesn't get any easier than with the mix.

I am anxious to see the list of seeds you have planned for 2014.

And BTW, small pepper plants are very tender so don't put them outdoors until ALL danger of frost is passed.

Bon,

Most bell peppers start out green, like tomatoes do, and then mature to whatever their mature color might be: yellow, orange, red, purple, chocolate (an oddity I'll address in a second), etc. There are some bells and non-bells that start out either ivory/pale yellow or lilac/purple, but they're not real common except in the gardens of pepper afficianados who want to grow them in every possible color. Oh, and the chocolate bells that I've grown do eventually turn red, but they stay at that milk chocolate brown color, which is a blend of their unripe green and ripe red color, for a really long time, and their flavor is decent while brown, but not as good as it is if you eat them after they've turned red. There are a few sweet pepper types that go through a multitude of color changes as they mature, and one of those types that I've grown is called "Blushing Beauty". It starts out very light colored, almost an ivory or cream color sometimes with a slight tinge of light green that then turns to yellow and then yellowish-orange and then to red. Often, there are peppers at all the stages of color on the plants at the same time, making each plant a beautiful sight.

As with tomatoes (except the green-when-ripe types), when in the green stage, the bell pepper flavor is not mature and full and rich and sweet. The reason that grocery stores sell us green, immature peppers (and we have been conditioned to think we like them) is that ripe, fully-colored-up peppers only have a shelf life of a few days and the stores lose money if the fully-colored peppers go bad before they sell. It is better for the grocery industry, as a whole, to convince us we want to eat bitter, unripened green bell peppers because those peppers have a long shelf life since they aren't ripe. yet. If this sounds similar to the tomatoes-shipped-while-green-and-artificially-turned-fake-orangeish-red to make us think they are ripe situation that drives me up the wall, well yes...same sort of deal, but they don't bother gassing the peppers to make them turn their mature color while in transit. Thus, the green bell peppers we buy at the grocery store are harvested green and unripe, shipped, and sold to us consumers as if that is the proper way to harvest and eat a bell pepper---green. It isn't! However, if you grow up in a non-gardening family, you might not even know that because for decades all you really saw in stores was green bells. When bell peppers are allowed to stay on the plant another couple of weeks and mature to their final ripe color, the flavor improves tremendously.

So, when I think about the flavor of grocery store green peppers versus the flavor of peppers allowed to grow until they reach their full mature color, the choice is clear to me---I don't want to buy and eat green peppers. Luckily, the consumers have made their voices heard in the last 10-20 years and most grocery stores now carry bell peppers in their mature colors of red, yellow and orange too, but often charge a premium price for them. I cannot comment on the flavor of the colored peppers from the store because normally I don't buy peppers at the grocery store, but the few times that I've bought colored peppers from the store, their flavor was good and sometimes their texture was good. Still, they weren't as good as fresh ones out of the garden.

I don't necessarily think the flavor and texture of mature, fully-colored bell peppers from the store is as bad as the flavor and texture of grocery store tomatoes, but I still prefer the sweet peppers fresh and home-grown. They're just so much better when you've grown them yourself, harvested them, and taken them inside to use that day. Even if you are lucky enough to have a neighborhood grocery store or farmer's market that features locally-grown produce, peppers from a source like that still are going to have been picked at least the day before you see them on the store shelves, whereas I can walk out to my garden, pick a couple of peppers, take them inside, wash them, and prepare them for the next meal. I appreciate having produce that fresh. I really don't like green, unripe peppers any more than I like green, unripe tomatoes, so I tend to slice up whatever green peppers are left right before the last freeze and freeze them for cooking where their flavor is only a part of whatever dish they're in, but not the main flavor. Once you get used to having sweet, crisp, fully ripe, colored bells, the green ones taste like what they are--unripened, immature fruit.

And, for the record, many of the hot peppers we eat also mature to colors other than green, and I prefer for my hot peppers to be allowed to mature to their ripe color too. I don't mind eating jalapenos green, but like them even more when they've been left on the plants until they turn red. It is just a bonus when I leave them on the plants while they red and don't harvest them until they start corking.

This year I let everything stay on the pepper plants until November and when I harvested there were all kinds of red, yellow and orange peppers, hot and sweet, and some immature green ones as well. By everything, I only mean the late crop that came from August or September flowers. I had harvested tons of peppers earlier in the summer before the drought set in and it got too hot and dry for me to spend much time in the garden.

Carol, I try to cage my peppers, but inevitably I run out of shorter cages before I get all of them done. This year I had about a dozen plants, mostly jalapenos, that weren't caged, but they produced great. They fell over once they reached a certain size and laid all over the ground, but it was so dry that I didn't lose many peppers to rot. I just had to be really careful because I kept seeing timber rattlers in and around those plants, which is one reason I stopped picking them in late July and didn't venture back into that bed until September. Then I had two more timber rattler encounters in and near the peppers in September, and stayed away from that bed until a day or two before the killing freeze in November. By then, the nights were cold enough that I felt like I wouldn't encounter a snake in the garden, and I didn't.

I did cage all the poblano peppers this year, partly because they got so big last year, but also because I had a little voice in my head telling me to do it (and you have to listen to the voices in your head if you're a gardener because they are the voice of experience), so I used the last few pepper cages for them and let a bunch of jalepeno peppers and peter peppers sprawl on the ground. Actually, the sprawlers started out staked, but eventually got big enough to fall over and pull the stakes over with them. The three caged poblano pepper plants each got about 4-5' tall and 3-4' wide, and crowded out nearby jalapeno pepper plants lying on the ground around them and beneath them, but barely produced anything all summer. Then, undoubtedly influenced by cooler temperatures and the return of rain in the fall, the poblanos went crazy. At the time I harvested them, each plant had produced several dozen poblanos that were full-sized and red, and many more that were small and immature. It was the best poblano harvest ever, so I dried lots of them to make ancho peppers, ancho pepper flakes and ancho pepper powder. I've been processing peppers for a couple of weeks now and am almost done.

I have been too distracted by all the remodeling and redecorating projects I have going on to even think about next year's grow lists yet, but the seed catalogs are piling up on the coffee table and one day soon I'll flip through them to see if there is anything I need or want. I have such a big stash of horded seeds that I might not need to buy many (or any) for 2014. I need to use up some of the older seeds before they get too old for good germination. I love the multi-packs of seeds that contain numerous varieties because you can get, for example, three colors of sweet bells in a pack of seeds instead of buying three separate packs. I don't necessarily like tomato seeds bought that way, though, unless I am buying them from Renee's, which dyes the seeds with non-toxic food dye, so I can be sure how many plants of each tomato variety I put in the ground. I especially like that some sellers now sell basil seed blends because I like to have lots of kinds of basil and would rather buy packets containing a blend of different types than have to buy a bunch of individual packets.

Dawn

Wow. Two highly "clippable" posts for me to review over and over again.

I would love to have some of those cutie Tabasco plants. Just adorable. Bill isn't a spice-eater limiting growing peppers for practical reasons. I have a grill, a stove and a particular pan outside. I plan to be grilling and sauteing like crazy with the veggies and bell pepper varieties. Hopefully.

The part about tomato cages is helpful. They are not high on my list for consumption. I've decided to use the " T " posts and horizontal trellising for tomatoes. The variety is limited to what I have on hand. Like Dawn, I have a lot of heirloom seed that need to be planted.

But the previous owner left about eight of those goofy wire cages and you just gave me ideas to re-purpose.

Bill lost his job, so the focus will be on what I have on hand and the essentials for establishing sustainability within my limitations. Spring will be for seed, mostly, and conditioning the new soil plots. I already have 1/3rd of my garden pulled and covered. yay!

Golden Bantham Corn 200

Garbanzo Beans 60, minimum (various plots)

Molokeyhia (Saluyot or Corchorus olitorius) Just a few. A permaculture favorite

Various cereal grasses. Some wild for sustainability, some customary edible cereal for grain, some for green manure (or fodder).

Flax (trial plot)
Quinoa (trial plot) Lucky if I can get this to grow to maturity
Barley (trial plot)
Vetch (thanks to George) over-winter rabbit food and cover crop
Oat (trial plot, manure)
Red Winter Wheat (trial plot now)
Spring Wheat
Sesame (maybe)
Okra. Heavy Hitter and Zeebest Yay!
Amaranth (trial wild plot) for grain
Sicilian Sumac (Rhus coriaria) Tricky. For the spice and 4 different dyes, anti bacterial/microbial/anti fungal and medicinal. I actually crave this stuff.
Wild Sorghum (ground cover)
Dandelion
Nettle, plantain and dock

Beans. We're still discovering what tastes good to us. Any kind/variety with focus on snap beans as edibles (Kentucky Wonder) and a plethora of varieties for soil amendments and storage).

Giant White Radishes (or similar for breaking up clay)

Garlic. I need MORE!
Onions (whatever I can get)
Potatoes (ditto)

_________________________________

Lesser Importance and playing around with saving seed:

Carrots (Whatever I have)
zukes for stuffing (and worm fodder lol)
Cukes for stuffing my face with tabouli salads
Pumpkins (cuz Little Miss insists)
Gourds
Cantelope
Lettuces (Jericho)
Spinach
Cabbage (for stuffing)
Cauliflower
Brussel Sprouts
Asparagus (start)
Watermelon (whatever I have)
Cumin (hopefully)
Black Pepper (hopefully)
Parsley (Extra curly, of course!)
Leeks
Eggplant (would love to try the turkish orange for stuffing)
Low-acid tomatoes. I still need to look that up and try it on my husband and daughter.
Beefsteak, cherry and whatever tomato seed I have left.
fennel
Cardamom
Basil
Oregano
Mint

for Jordanian Za'atar:

Wooly Thyme
(Sumac)
(Sesame)
Marjoram
(fennel pollen)

Cows. Still looking for seeds cows. Appreciate any suggestions for growing cows. Would save me a bundle. Thanks!

I have a variety of basic peppers with my seeds in storage. I'll plant them all, if I have enough good soil. Probably do.

This is the ideal, only.

It's good to finally know what WE need in the garden. Over time I hope to plant scores of medicinal and beneficial herbs depending on the plant needs and what the environment can sustain.

At this time I do not foresee having any irrigation system. Not looking forward to that part.

bon

Dawn, you set my mind off in colorful imaginative displays and disgusted me with my current taste of green bell peppers. LOL

I'll need to fix that. ha!

bon

Bon, There is nothing wrong with green peppers. Eat 'em if you've got 'em. It is just that fully ripe yellow, orange and red bells taste so much better.

What frustrates me is that the commercial food/grocery industry has convinced us to settle for green peppers (which are not ripe) and to think it is normal to eat them. Would we settle for green peaches or oranges or tomatoes? Well, we do kinda settle for green tomatoes when we buy the average grocery store tomato because they are picked and shipped green, and artificially forced to turn red via the use of chemicals....which is why they don't taste good or have good texture....cause they aren't really ripe! Red does not mean ripe if it is an artificially induced red.

Growing my own food has totally ruined me when it comes to buying groceries. I won't hardly buy anything at the store that I can raise myself. I'd rather have something that was home-grown and then frozen, canned or dehydrated, than to buy commercially-grown food out-of-season that has poor flavor. Once you get used to having fresh food in season, the average grocery-store produce just can't compare. Unfortunately, we can't harvest whatever we want and like year-round here, so a person either has to preserve a lot of what they grow, or only eat what is in season. Since I didn't plant a fall garden due to the drought, there's nothing in my garden to pick now, except for a few herbs, but I did preserve a lot of the harvest for the winter.

I freeze so many peppers for winter that we usually don't even run out of them until the next season's crop is already producing a harvest, but using frozen peppers in cooking is not the same thing as having them fresh, so I'm pretty excited when the first fresh peppers are ready to pick. How excited? I usually pick the first few green. There's a reason for that, though. If I leave the early peppers on the plants long enough for them to turn red, then by the time I harvest them, the temperatures are so warm that the next set of blooms likely will drop off the plant without setting new peppers due to the heat. By harvesting the first round of bell peppers green, I usually get another big burst of blooms that all set fruit (just barely) before it gets hot enough for blossom drop. Those are the red, yellow and orange bells I'll be harvesting in July and August. The big sweet bell pepper harvest, though, always comes in the autumn. By autumn, the plants are big and healthy and produce like crazy once we have autumn's cooler temperatures and steady rainfall. The bells I pick green in June usually go into salsa anyway, though I will save a couple to eat fresh.

Dawn

Bon, I believe black pepper is from a tropical tree. I doubt it will grow in Oklahoma. Years ago, I saw it growing in the sierra North of Puebla, in Mexico.

We had a WONDERFUL crop of hot peppers this year. Unfortunately, my Chile Rayados (a type of Jalepeño, were eaten by grasshoppers. But I had Chiltepins and Ají (a habanero relative) which did great. I've been nibbling on the Ají for days now. I LOVE the flavor even if they are pretty hot. I brought one Ají plant into our sun porch to see if I can coax it through the winter and get an early crop in 2014.

George
Tahlequah, OK

George, those are beautiful yellow peppers with the yellow peeking out from behind the green. I guess I'll settle for stored peppercorns and focus on mild Cayenne. Bill doesn't like heat, but he does like flavor now that he knows the difference. He and little Miss are mildly allergic to acidity in tomatoes and such. Most of my best cooking involves tomato-based sauces (sigh). And, boy, do red bell peppers go well into some of those!! Sometimes our dinner table looks as if we're feeding five missing people. I'm inclined to make two different meals for different tastes and enough left overs for a few days. lol

When Bill had steamed store-bought Brussel sprouts smothered them in butter he was over the top with compliments. His mom (and everyone else) over cooks. I cannot imagine home-grown!

the next 2 years will be an awesome taste journey. That is, if I can raise most of it to maturity. At least I've gotten beyond soil building and into soil maintenance. I hope to grow some very interesting herbals in the future.

Amongst my wish list is Licorice. Now, who has tried that in Oklahoma? LOL

No licorice help from me. I grew a large leaf basil one year that had a licorice smell and taste, and I pulled the plant because I hated the smell when I brushed by it.

I'm not to fond of the smell, either. Anise is used commercially in place of licorice flavoring in cheap food products.

Licorice root is a marked beneficial. I'm interested in its anti inflammatory (steroidal) properties for arthritis pain. I haven't yet researched its growing needs. Probably doesn't work here and I'll need buy it from a store.

I read that tobacco companies use licorice in their cigarettes (bassturds). I'm sure it's a good flavoring additive, but licorice root contains respiratory beneficial. It does something to the airways that helps breathing making it great for asthmatics and those with COPD. The licorice in cigarettes make smoking more pleasurable. It probably masks immediate hazardous effects of smoking by making them easier on the lungs and promoting tobacco abuse or excessive use beyond standard addiction. By opening up the airways I wonder if the Licorce helps advance lung cancer, too.

Licorice root is very powerful and, even more than turmeric, comes with warnings of ingestion. I think some cough drops claim to have licorice, but I'd be weary of anise being using as flavoring instead of the pricey licorice root that actually helps.

You just wanted to know that, didn't cha? ROFL