Peppers are Just About Done

I started organizing this blog in September but never posted it. Now I’m glad I didn’t because there is another chapter to it!

Chapter 1 – September 14th

It’s late in the growing season and it’s about time to turn our spring and summer vegetable garden into our fall pinwheel garden. We didn’t have a great garden this year but did have a good crop of peppers. But now even the peppers are just about done.

Lia checks them every day and is ready to pick the peppers as soon as they are ready. Sometimes the squirrels decide they like them and get to them before Lia does. So they other day Lia picked what was probably the last few peppers of the season. They were small but rather than let the critters get them, she picked 5 peppers early.

The way prices are going up in the grocery store, I like to save as much as I can and even with a few peppers I can cut them in slices and freeze them for cooking. They are great for stew, soups, pot roast with potatoes and vegetables or even stuffed pepper casserole. I also like cooking fried peppers and onions so when I get a craving I just have to pull out fresh/frozen garden peppers from my freezer!

First I washed the peppers then cut the top and bottom off and cut the pepper in half. I cut out the seeds and then sliced them in narrow pieces. Put in a freezer bag with the date and they are ready to cook up with my favorite meal. It I need smaller pieces for omelettes, I cut the frozen slices in smaller pieces.

The five small peppers yielded about two cups of sliced up peppers. There’s nothing better than fresh peppers any time of the year!

Chapter 2 – October 14th

Just last month we thought the peppers were done, but here we are still picking peppers!

It’s exactly one month from when we thought the garden was done and over. After Lia picked her peppers in September we had a few pepper blossoms so I decided to see what they would do. Lia went out to her garden yesterday and said she was going on a pepper hunt. She came back with three more small peppers!

Like the last batch, we cut the peppers in slices to freeze them for omelettes or pepper steak. The three little peppers got over a cup of sliced peppers. I don’t like anything to go to waste and these will be delicious when fried.

This time as I was cutting the seeds out, Lia decided she wanted to save them so we are going to dry them and plant them next spring. It will be great if we can get more peppers from our pepper seeds!

So I think this is the end of the pepper story for this year, hopefully we can post about our pepper plants growing from seeds in the spring!