This is my favorite time of year- and for the first time, I have a bumper crop of heirloom hot peppers! But first, a few other pictures.

This is my little tomato plant that could.  It had been completely snapped off by rabbits- and I mean completely.  The stem was snapped at the soil line- and had completely vanished.  I wrote it off, but a few days later saw a tiny bit of new growth and decided to see what it could do.  This thing has about a dozen tomatoes growing on it now, and also plenty of blossoms.

These are my scarlet runner beans.  It took a little bit of a cool snap for them to really take off, but now they’re growing like crazy and looking beautiful.   (That’s the neighbors corn patch behind the fence.)

This amused me.  It’s a little late for a melon to actually grow and become ripe before it frosts, but it’s the first one to do so.  These melon plants have really taken over the bed…note to self: give melons their own bed if you really want to grow them.

And now for some peppers.  So far, I am beyond pleased with the peppers I got  from Seed Savers Exchange.  Their flavors have been good, and they definitely have a bit of heat to them.  This first picture is of the Bulgarian Carrot pepper.  I haven’t tried this one yet, as they’ve just begun the process of turning orange this week.

This next one is the Maule’s Red Hot.  These definitely have some heat, and made some spectacular first batches of salsa.  SSE recommends them for drying or for making hot pepper sauce.  I’m thinking about that- I certainly have enough peppers to do so with this year.

We haven’t tried this one yet either.  This is Joe’s Round, and these peppers are surprisingly tiny!  They are literally less than an inch round.  SSE says these are very hot, so I’m not sure what I’ll do with them.  There’s enough here I could probably pickle a jar, but we’ll see.

Next is the Hinkelhatz.  This one resembles an habanero in shape, but not heat.  SSE lists it as simply hot- we haven’t tried this one yet either.

I didn’t take pictures of my Aji Crystal as I picked the biggest ones for salsa making already.  I picked them at their yellow stage- and they were AMAZING.  They had great flavor, quite a bit of heat, and the salsa made with them is really fruity and wonderful.

The Georgia Flames are just beginning to turn red, and the Cascabellas really want to be used or pickled too.   My jalapeno is doing well, as are the serranos.  The plant we’ve been affectionately calling “Mutant Pepper” I think I’ve determined to be an Anaheim pepper.  My peppers started blushing orange in the middles, and looked more like Anaheims than Banana Peppers.  The only heat in my peppers were in the seeds and membranes- once removed they were like sweet peppers, and made a nice mild salsa for the kids.