We substantially increased the size of our garden this year and have eaten zucchini for nearly six solid months. We have frozen numerous batches of tomato sauce, spaghetti sauce, tomato paste and have freeze dried some also. We had a bumper crop of okra growing it for the first time. We have so many winter squash, acorn, Japanese, butter nut, pumpkins, pie pumpkins, etc. that we over ran our storage area. Watermelons. Cucumbers, cantaloupe, peas, green beans, greens, onions, potatoes, lettuce, arugula, etc., etc. etc.
The reason I started this list was to emphasize that we had a great year in the garden but the pepper crop was a bit of a disappointment. We got some peppers, but not a huge harvest. Then September rolled around. OMG, Cathy started making Fajitas once or twice a week to make a dent in the pepper harvest. We overran our refrigerators, I had a large cooler full of bags of peppers, which I had to daily swap out frozen water bottles to keep them cold. We canned pepper's, we froze peppers. We even freeze đried some.
The wife did not want to lose her pepper plants so we went searching for a greenhouse. A few years ago, I could have built one in a couple weeks, but sadly those days are but a memory. I can still do those kind of things but what used to take days, now takes weeks or months. We bought a 12 x 16 Greenhouse which took about 4 weeks to get here. Had we relied on the Greenhouse to save the pepper plants they would have all succumbed to the first freeze several weeks ago.
Instead we converted part of our garage into a hothouse with plant lights. We purchased several Patio Pickers which are plastic self watering containers on wheelsthat are roughly 20 x 24 x 10 inches on wheels. We transplanted 4 to 5 peeps into each planter. We ended up with over 50 pepper plants in the garage. Some continued to produce under the lights, while some were unhappy at least initially from the transplanting shock.
We have spent the last 3 weeks, insulating, modifying, sealing, etc. the Greenhouse. This year we will need supplemental heat for the peppes to survive and thrive, but when I finish with modifications and expansion next spring the Greenhouse should require little or no electricity to run.
When we first took delivery the greenhouse temps were daily swinging from 40 degrees to 110. Now it is more in thee range of 50 to 80 most days. The peppers are migrating from the garage. At the moment we only have about 20 peppers still under lights in the garage. Most of the insulating is done but I am still sealing it up and caulking. It will provide plenty of work for the next several weeks.
It has not been an inexpensive project, but we are shooting to be producing a large percentage of our food organically by next year.
The moral of the story is that with hard work and not an insignificant amount of cash, we were able to save our late season pepper champions. We expect great things from the "team" next year and multi month production of peppers. We hope to be eating a lot of fajitas next summer.
