Fall is the time of year when most people think of harvesting greens and root crops from the garden. However, one thing that I always have a huge amount of in the fall is peppers. Because I like to harvest sweet peppers when they “color”, as opposed to what we think of as green peppers, it takes a good while for them to ripen. Therefore, I end up bringing in a majority of the harvest from mid-August onwards. And by this point, our fridge is more or less packed with peppers!
Over the years, as with many other crops, I’ve narrowed my focus to growing the pepper varieties I particularly like- Carmen and Antohi Romanian. Carmen are a bull-nosed variety of peppers and their elongated, pointy shape can lead to confusion that they are spicy. In fact, they are as sweet as can be once they turn from green to red and produce a prolific crop as well. Antohi Romanian became a favorite of mine when growing for market because of their beautiful transition from yellow to orange to red as they go through their ripening process. Tasting like green peppers when yellow and ripening to an earthy sweetness in their red stage, I also love the thick wall of these peppers which allows them to hold up well in cooking.
Although having an excess of one specific crop can get annoying, I actually tend to enjoy it at least for a short amount of time because it gives me the opportunity to really focus my cooking on this ingredient. I often find it overwhelming to look for new recipes. There’s just so many variables you can go with and knowing you have an excess of something in your fridge really helps to narrow down your recipe search. Because we’ve already canned quite a few peppers for winter, I’m finding it both more fun and more worthwhile to find ways to cook with them fresh now rather than preserve even more for winter use.
Otherwise, we’re coming to that time of year when you have to start making hard decisions. Although we’re just finishing out an extremely beautiful week with temperatures way above normal, leading us to wish we had left in our AC unit as we roasted in bed a couple nights, next week we are forecast to have lows dipping down to 33 degrees, just above freezing, on Tuesday night. This calls for some tough decisions, as summer crops like tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant, will be damaged if exposed to temperatures below freezing. Before getting the first solid frost, we always get these “scares” when temperatures are forecast to get just near enough 32 degrees to force both the question of whether it will actually get below freezing and the decision of whether to harvest all the summer crops off or hope for the best and leave them on the plant. I’ll update you next week on what decision I make and hopefully it’s the right one!
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