November Tomatoes

I'm amazed by what I've been able to harvest in the middle of November. Yesterday I picked tomatoes (mostly Paul Robeson, usually the first and last to produce), padron peppers, a sweet ripe red pepper, a Painted Serpent cucumber, a handful of cherry tomatoes (Isis Candy and Black), and fresh lovely basil. I also harvested the first Piracicaba broccoli.

Mid-November Harvest

So last night we had a nice salad of chopped tomato, cucumber, sweet pepper, red onion, and basil. The tomatoes didn't have quite the flavor that they would have at their peak, but they certainly beat those pink rocks that pass as tomatoes at the grocery store.

There are still plenty of green tomatoes left on the vines, a few more cucumbers coming along, and more padron peppers on the way as well. This is not a typical November harvest. On the other hand, all the zucchini plants were encrusted with powdery mildew and had quit producing so they got yanked. I actually kept the zucchinis relatively PM free for quite a while with almost weekly treatments of Neem oil, but I wearied of zucchini so I quit the treatments and they succumbed pretty quickly. Now I can prepare that area for planting fava beans.