Cookies and my Pepper Harvest

Westfield's theme last weekend was Cookies.  Apparently many other historical villages bake cookies as demo items, because they are pretty easy and appealing.  However it turns out that most of the  Westfield historic cooks cook other things far more often.   This opened up having a village wide theme  of cookies.  It was planned that we'd all make different cookies.   I made hard gingerbread.  Shrewsbury cakes, jumbles, rock cookies and thumbprints were being made throughout the village.   It was a tasty day for sure.  I handed out so many little gingerbread men to visitors that there were only a few left for the staff!

Back at home, I've been working on the garden.  The weather has been perfect, warm enough to not need a jacket, but cool enough to make for easy working.   I've cleaned out the raised bed that had been dedicated to green beans this year.   Then I harvested peppers.  It was a very good year for peppers this year!   I planted sweet banana peppers, jalapeno peppers and some kind of chilli pepper, that I'm pretty sure was mislabeled.   All the plants were very productive and had huge crops of fruit.   The jalapeños were small in size though, and all the hazy skies and clouds reduced the actual sunshine hours which for parts of my garden area, was an issue for actual ripening of the fruit.

I spent the morning threading each of those little hot peppers onto sewing thread to hang them to dry.  I'm not sure why I didn't anticipate how long that would actually take, but I actually turned on the tv and watched 1.5 episodes of Vera while I dutifully threaded the peppers individually onto the thread.  They're hanging in the kitchen now.   I'm packaging some peppers for my kids when we get together on the weekend.  It seems appropriate to share my garden bounty on our Thanksgiving.  

Tomorrow I'm going to harvest the last of the herbs.   I have some chives, parsley and a huge amount of leaf celery or soup celery.  I priced out dehydrators today but right now they are out of my price range, so I'll have to air dry the herbs.    

My son brought in the lemon tree yesterday.  It's so weird that we've still had lovely weather this late into the autumn.   While there hasn't been any frost warnings yet, the low temperatures for the next 3 days are supposed to hover just barely above freezing, which means at the very least patchy frost.  Getting the rest of the garden harvested before then just means less work of covering all the plants at night to protect them.