Paula,

I know we're enjoying the cooler temps here! Fall still seems a long way off though.

Now to take a stab at answering your questions:

1) With the brown lesions on the pepper stems, it is hard to know what those are without seeing them (and seeing them might not help because so many issues could cause brown lesions), but likely it is bacterial, fungal or viral. I probably wouldn't take any heroic measures to save them but I wouldn't yank 'em either. Just leave them there (unless you want to put something else in their place) and see if they bounce back or not. I'll add a grasshopper comment at the end of this thread.

I save ornamental pepper seeds by leaving the pods on the plants and letting them completely dry before I harvest them. Then I cut them open, remove and dry the seeds well before putting them in storage. Every year I miss some of the dry pods and they fall to the pathway in the garden, and the next year I have a billion tiny ornamental pepper plants in the paths. I usually dig up some and pot them up and then pull up and discard the rest.

You don't have to wait for the pods to dry though. You can harvest the peppers when they are fully ripe and healthy, and remove the peppers from the pods then. To make sure they are dry enough before you store them, try to break a seed in half by bending it between two fingers. If it breaks, it is dry enough. If it bends but doesn't break, it needs to dry some more.

2) I have never tried to transplant southern peas from one spot in the garden to another but would guess they would not necessarily like it. It would be one thing to dig up a plant that sprouted something like 2 or 3 days ago and an entirely different thing to dig up a plant that's already got substantial roots. If you transplant them, they may not survive or they may survive but not produce.

3) I'm betting digging the sweet potatoes now would hurt your harvest, so I'd try to delay. However, I've never tried to harvest early so that's just a guess. If your sweet potato varieties have an 80 to 90 DTM, then you might have harvestable potatoes at this point. If they have a longer DTM, they might not. There's not a 'right' or 'wrong' time to harvest sweet potatoes. You can harvest them whenever they reach a harvestable size. So, I guess the only way to know for sure is to dig around the base of one test plant and see what size sweet taters y'all find. If you're satisfied with the size, go ahead and dig them and cure then. If you are not satisfied with the size, leave them another 2 to 4 to 6 weeks, depending on when your really cool (below 50 degrees) temps are coming. I usually dig sweet potatoes in October and will confess that in some busy years I don't get around to digging them until November. I never get in a big hurry to harvest them....they'll continue to size up on relatively low rainfall in the fall as long as they had adequate rainfall in the summer. It isn't like they're going to go anywhere if y'all don't dig them now.

It sounds like y'all are in a teensy bit of a hurry to end the warm-season gardening year? Remember, though, that we still have approximately 2 to 2.5 months of decent temperatures in an average fall. And, for an average fall, I mean one in which the first frost occurs in the last week of October at the earliest and often not until around Thanksgiving.

Two inches of rain! Y'all really needed that. We got almost a half-inch, which certainly is better than nothing.

Because I didn't do any canning for the 10 days Maddie was here, I am so very far behind and have bowls and bags of tomatoes and peppers stacked up everywhere. I canned 4 batches of stuff today and hope to get 6 batches canned tomorrow. It is awful that I'm stuck inside canning when I could be outside weeding and cleaning up the garden in pleasant weather, but the canning cannot be put off any longer unless I want to freeze everything now and can it later, and I don't want to do that. I already have a bunch of tomatoes and peppers in the freezer awaiting their ultimate fate.

I'm hoping to wrap up the canning backlog tomorrow or the next day, and then I can go back to the garden and pick okra, beans, tomatoes and peppers again. The last few days of heat (we hit 104 and 105 on the last two days that were over 100) really hit the beans hard. They had held on for so long, but look awful now. I think they just got to the point where they'd had enough. I don't know if they'll bounce back in this cooler weather or not.

GRASSHOPPER ALERT: I am seeing teeny-tiny new hoppers, approximately 1/8" to 1/4" long! I cannot believe this. They have reproduced new generations all summer long and I simply cannot believe they are reproducing still. I am sick, sick, sick of all the grasshoppers. Usually by late August we're seeing flocks of doves moving in to eat the sunflower seeds (we also have resident doves around all summer). This year we're just seeing flocks of grasshoppers. (I know 'flock' is not the right word, but don't know what else to call them--maybe 'swarms of grasshopppers' would be more correct.)

Dawn

Personally, I wouldn't dig any sweet potatoes now, unless I was desperate to eat some. The next month, at least, is going to be good growing weather for them and they are bound to put on weight.

Now, some people don't like really large roots. But the truth is, is that they are not any less tender. One can simply cut up a large root to serve to several people.

George
Tahlequah, OK