Eggplants Picked and Corn Stalks Removed

Now it is time for my eggplants to begin ripening and I should be picking many more of them in the near future.  I only picked two of them so far, but I still have at least five more growing on six different plants.  Some of them have only flowers while others have either one fruit or multiple eggplants.

The bigger eggplant weighed one and a half pounds and the smaller vegetable one pound.  This is an average size for eggplants and I can still make a good size eggplant Parmesan with these two vegetables.

This is the largest one I picked today and below is the smaller one of the day.  Hopefully I will be picking many more of these that are much bigger as well.

I also picked plenty of peppers today which will probably be the largest harvest of the year for these vegetables.  I collected a total of 11 peppers with some of them red, turning red, or green.

Here are a couple of red and green peppers I picked this afternoon.

Some more cucumbers were ready as well and some were a good size while a few of them were kind of small.  Not a big deal because my cucumber plants are starting to produce less flowers and fruit.

This cucumber is yellow, but it is actually quite alright because it is still hard and has not turned soft at all.  It will still last as long as one that is still green like the one below.

Again I picked another harvest of beans that totaled 9 and a half pounds for today.  I still have plenty more on the vines which I will pick in the coming weeks, but for now I just have to wait until they get a little bit bigger.  Right now I just need to can the beans that I collected today.

A couple of days ago I decided to remove my corn stalks because they were done for the season and no more corn was growing.  Once they start turning brown, then it is usually a good practice to remove them from the ground.  I only left one corn stalk in the ground because this is the one that has an ear on it which will be used for seeds next season.

I keep the ear on the stalk until it dries completely and this usually takes about a month or so.  Once it is dry enough, then I will bring it inside and store it until I need it next year.

Here is the corn stalks removed from the garden with one left standing.

The stalks I will turn into wood ash and the leaves that I removed from them I will turn into a mulch which I could use for my fall crop.  Any remaining ears of corn that happened to be on a few of the stalks were chopped up and I will give them to my earthworms during the winter.