Back to The Farm, strictly harvest edition

Went to The Farm a couple days ago, just to do some harvesting. No weeding, no nothing else. Just harvesting. Got bell peppers, which have done well. The hot peppers, not so much:

Got some more of the last-crop beans, which continue to produce well:

Paltry hot-pepper crop. Too much rain in July, too cool in August:

This is practically our entire tomato crop this year. Partly weather, but mostly no weeding. They just got choked out:

As it has all year, the Swiss chard continues to produce in spades:

The okra also continues to produce at rates that pretty much exceed anyone's ability to consume okra:

Fall crops are in, so we'll see how they do. The fall corn is coming along OK, and we have lots of other stuff in as well. We'll see how it goes.

I successfully ground a bumper crop of peppers

By successfully, of course, I mean without suffering any "ill effects." More on that below. Having already turned a bunch of this year's ridiculous crop of hot peppers into hot sauce, I finally turned this past weekend to deal with the absurd amount of peppers I dried over the course of the harvest. It was a lot of peppers:

 

That's two grocery bags full of dried peppers. It's a lot. So, I went over to Farmer Tom's to take advantage of Mrs. Farmer Tom's excellent food processor and outdoor deck (can't do this stuff indoors) and commenced to grinding. First, of course, you destem them:

Put the properly destemmed peppers in the food processor and have at it:

You will wear surgical gloves during this process, and you will not touch any other part of your body until your are finished or have removed your gloves. "Pepper dick" is real, and very painful. Search the blog for that phrase -- it hurts too much for me to even provide the link to that post.

Anyway, having taken the appropriate precautions, grind away:

I actually had an inadequate supply of shaker bottles on hand, so I filled the six I had with the ground pepper:

Put the labels on, and the shakers were ready to be Christmas presents. And, of course, that quart jar full of ground pepper will fill a pretty good number of additional shaker bottles:

Not a bad afternoon's work. Of course, that "afternoon" started in March, but it was a fine and rewarding culmination of a long growing and harvesting season. Now, finally, we are done until, oh, March, I'd say.