Good morning, Everyone. We are supposed to get back into the low 90s for the next week with good chances for thunder storms at any time. I am back to watering early and doing some small jobs in the gardens until it gets uncomfortably warm. It is time for another garden update.

The peppers have been absolutely beautiful this year. These are the red bells. Bought these as seedlings and my put them on my list for next year. If they are heirlooms I may try to save the seeds.

I decided to try these melons, the Tigger. It is an heirloom European variety that only grows to about 1 pound. When ripe it will turn red with white zip-zag stripes. The blurb in the catalog says they are very sweet and fragrant. Started these from seed and the vines have been very vigorous. I found a number of small developing melons so they might produce well.

This is the Brandywine. It is an heirloom variety I started from seeds. This year all my tomatoes and peppers are producing well after last years disappointment with the small and sparse harvest with the slicers. I am trying several new varieties just to see what they will do.

This is the dragon's egg cucumber--a small white heirloom that I started from seed. As I said a few days ago, we took the first one for a salad and were very pleased with it. Sweet, no bitterness at all and thin skinned. Mom doesn't like cucumbers much but she really liked this one. She even suggested they would be good sliced with a bit of salt--and nothing else. I see a lot of flowers and hope they will produce enough for a few jars of pickles.

Some of the first ground cherries are turning yellow and papery which means they should start falling soon. What you see here is the wrapper. The fruit is inside. We are really looking forward to trying these. Started these from seed.

And here is the Vietnamese multicolor pepper. So far I have found only green and purple but I am watching for the other colors. It is a beautiful plant and we will keep one for the show but the fruits are smaller than I thought and a bit hotter (as I described a couple of days ago) than we wanted. The seed company substituted (with my permission) this variety for the one I had ordered because they were out of my first choice and I had no real idea of what it would be like.

This is the Big Beef tomato--one of the odd ones I thought to try out since I still had room in the containers. Normally we would have taken the couple of larger green ones for frying but the heat really killed our appetites.

So far the only plants that haven't even begun producing are the blue lake beans. A lot of foliage but no beans yet.