Autumn Harvesting

Chili ristras drying in the kitchen window. Cayenne on the left and Birds Eye on the right.

This was a month or so ago when the tomatoes were at their best.


The grapes sweetened up nicely after the one which made my throat close over with bitterness. The flavor of these Black Muscat grapes is quite nice but they do have big seeds in them.

Uprooting the Jalapenos made harvesting much quicker.

Nightcrawler Update

This guy has really been putting in the hours to get massively freaked up. The Orb has packed up her web and the Prey Mantis has sodded off somewhere but this guy just gets bigger and creepier every day. The web is quite spectacular and unlike the neat geometric Orb webs, this is a complex 3D mess of intersecting planes which gets bigger and bigger and also unlike the Orb, this one never gets dismantled. Any help identifying this monster would be appreciated. Its about the size of a large egg and shows no sign of easing up!

#Update#
The Mantis sodded off to here

Consolation Tomatoes

Perhaps I was being a little bit over confident when I set my last tomato related post to Also Sprach Zarathustra. Maybe if i'd had some advanced warning that this was going to be the worst year on record for tomato growing I could have set it to the German National Anthem or some kind of death march. Still its becoming a very busy time of year and its increasingly difficult to sleep in till noon so in some ways I'm grateful that I don't have half a ton of tomatoes to bottle. I'd like to think that I've learnt some lessons about growing tomatoes as far as pruning, training and feeding goes which is something certainly. Whats unfortunate is that due to the weather its hard to tell which of the problems encountered were caused by either excess water, lack of sun and heat and of course over and under loving. Blossom end rot has claimed probably half of the fruit that made it and caterpillars ate their of the remains. Still owing to my forward planning of planting several thousand plants there was still a respectable harvest of tasty and attractive fruit which were are saucing our way through at the moment.