Food Gardening 2025

Still drowning in cucumbers over here. Tomato plants look good with lots of green fruit, except for my two paste tomato plants which look awful. They do have fruit, though.

Shishito peppers already producing harvestable peps, and the bell pepper plant has some youngsters on it. I planted two poblano plants and one is very weak-looking, but I don’t know what to do about it.

That’s all the food I’m growing - more in a flower phase at the moment.

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Despite the heat and daily thunderstorms, some produce has been providing good yields.
Goldie ground cherries

Chupon de Malinalco

And some of the tomatoes. Left is Manon’s Majesty, which has less juice and is more disease-resistant. Center is Eva Purple Ball, very uniform and tasty. On the right are Black Krim, one of my favorites for flavor, but as you can see, some fruits got “catfaced”, deformed from the rank humidity.

Most of the tomatoes get cut coarsely and cooked briefly, which destroys an enzyme that causes the juice to separate.

Because I didn’t plant 50+ vines, I’m using the smaller Squeezo tomato mill to separate out skins and seeds, producing tomato juice/puree.

I pressure-canned half-gallon mason jars with the juice, plus one quart set aside for dinner.

Teriyaki London Broil and a Bloody Mary. There needs to be some reward for all the work!

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Not really gardening, but the berry foraging is excellent this year. Yay.

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Those look amazing! Do you know what kind of berries those are?

Raspberries and and the less good blackberries. The more good blackberries are not ripe yet. We also have black raspberries, but very few, and they didn’t make it to the bowl. :smile:

There probably more specific names for them.

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Maybe, if one wears PJs…

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I don’t know berries well and many look similar to me.

I tend to see what I think are blackberries, with wicked thorns, in random places, like a long the edge of yards and bike paths.

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That is what I have as well, yes. The “good” blackberries are more oblong, with smaller drupelets (I just looked that word up, it’s not like I had it in my back pocket).

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Blackberries and Dewberries have very similar-looking fruits. Both are variable in flavor. Dewberries tend to have thinner, trailing stems while blackberries are more upright.

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It’s finally happening!

The Cherokee Purple on the right is my largest specimen this far at 13.5 oz. That’s a $6 tomato at my local grocery store!

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Yayyy! :partying_face:

Those are beautiful and will be very tasty! I would love to grow Cherokee Purple. How big is the plant?

I have a big Dwarf Fred’s Tie Dye still completely green on the plant that I am praying will start to blush before nature intervenes


It won’t be as big as your’s @biondanonima !

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Wow! Impressive! Upcounty we are still watching and waiting. Our sugar snaps have stolen some of the sun from our tomatoes (not really complaining because I loveeeee sugar snaps!!) but hopefully soon we’ll have some ripe ones!

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Mine are around 4’ tall at the moment. They do like to sprawl a bit, so I have been pretty vigilant about pruning suckers (once I had 4 established leaders per plant, that is). With pruning and staking, I’ve been able to keep them to around 2’ wide.

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You’ll get there soon!

I hear great things about Black Krim! Most of my varieties are either cat faced or lately cracked, the latter I figure from our dry heat.

They are in planters with reservoirs that get filled every six hours, and most of the plants get afternoon shade.

Italian frying peppers…and poblanos

One reasonably sized, and very tasty pluot. The rest are small