How does fall sneak up on me so fast?  All of a sudden we’re in coats and long pants, and the leaves are turning.

Fortunately I did get my summer garden cleaned out, with the exception of the pepper plants.  They are the most prolific ones I’ve ever grown.  I’m crediting the weather this year, along with the new irrigation system that James’s dear cousin Jaime installed for us in the raised beds in July.  (Just a few weeks after he got it finished, he passed away unexpectedly at the age of 44.  Every time the irrigation comes on, I think of him and thank him for helping improve my garden and harvests.  I’m so sad he’s not here to enjoy all the habanero, serrano, tabasco, and poblano peppers that are still coming in.)

Here are some of the yellow and Cubanelle peppers — we’re still harvesting them, enjoying them raw, in salads and stir-fried.  So sweet:

The yellow peppers are now being joined by red peppers — they took the longest to mature out of all our pepper plants, and they aren’t really worth the wait.  The yellows are by far my favorite.

The darker green peppers on the left are poblanos.  Some of them grew to be quite large, almost as big as the yellows but not as thick-walled. They had a slight kick to them so we sauteed or stir-fried them.

I’m the only one in the family who likes eggplant.  I love to roast it and make baba ganoush.  These small globe eggplants were perfect.  From just 3 plants, I got enough eggplants to make several batches of baba ganoush and freeze it.  I harvested the last two of them in mid-September.

And my winner crop this summer?

Greasy beans from Sow True Seed.   I grew them up trellises on the sides of the raised beds.  They were delicious — I steamed them, boiled them when they got too big, and finally canned 24 pints of them, turning them into spicy crunchy dilly beans.  I combined a couple of recipes (as I didn’t have any fresh dill weed on hand when I got everything going in the kitchen) and they turned out great.

I spent alot of time on the porch stringing those greasy beans.  But that’s one of those gardening activities that goes perfectly with hot late summer afternoons.  I was also able to enlist help from relatives over Labor Day weekend so we could all share some, cooked down with sliced onions and a nice helping of butter.

Now we’re in an in-between stage, waiting on the broccoli, collards, cauliflower, brussels sprouts and kale.  In the meantime, I’ve been thinning radishes, arugula, asian greens and a couple variety of lettuce seedlings, and using those on top of salads as sprouts: