Beautiful fall weather with lows in the 40’s or high 30’s to wake up to and highs in the upper 60’s to end the day.  The sun is out this week so it is nice to just walk around and enjoy the country.  We are cooking three more butternut squash and will have those for the next three or four days for dinners and have just two more left in the cellar.  So today we picked all the peppers and dug the sweet potatoes.  This is the last harvest —except for the parsnips and a couple Swiss Chard plants.  Oh, and a few green tomatoes that are yet to ripen.  So the harvesting is almost done. 

These are the things we harvested today.  On the right is the light green banana peppers that didn’t fit into the basket in the middle and four small green bell peppers and half a basket of jalapeño peppers.  Both the banana and jalapeño  are the mild kind as much as jalapeños can be mild, I still can not touch them when I cut them so Norman has to deseed them with gloves on.  The little box on the left is what we got from the two boxes of sweet potato plants.  I guess the soil was too rich so next year I’ll try using more sand  so the soil does not pack down so hard.  They do look good and know they will taste great but they are small and that is what the old farmers say, “If your soil is too rich you get all vine and no taters.”   This is the last of the peppers and I will freeze most of these.  I tried it earlier in the fall with three gallons of peppers and yesterday I took out four large  frozen peppers, deseeded them quartered them, sprinkled with olive oil, put tomatoes on top and sweet potato cubes around and baked them and they came out great so I will not hesitate to just put most of these into gallon bags and toss them in the freezer.  Maybe the jalapeño peppers will be easier to deseed when they are frozen also.  Shirley gave me a good recipe for jalapeño poppers that I want to try when we go to Florida so will try it with these frozen peppers.   Still don’t see our house listed on Zillow so maybe Hugh (our real-estate dealer) has another plan for listing it.  He is good so we will just trust he knows what he is doing.   We will put a couple ads in the newspapers in Florida when we get there also as I remember when I taught at the High School there many of the teachers retired to the mountains and others were planning it also.  So maybe we will find someone there that would like a mini- farm in TN to retire on.    We will try the parsnips after we have had a frost, if we get a frost before Thanksgiving.  Otherwise we will let them winter over in the ground and get sweet over the winter.  Must get to my cooking – have a great day.