Just sent you an email. Kris

Timf7, Thanks for your ideas. Our weather warmed back up almost immediately after I wrote my earlier post, but that night I had gone out and picked many of the still-green peppers, all the small zucchini, and every tomato that showed any pink at all. I brought them all inside and put the tomatoes and peppers on the kitchen table together, for lack of a better idea. A few days later I noticed that all the peppers had turned bright red! I had no idea bell peppers would do this off the vine, like tomatoes will. I wasn't surprised to see the tomatoes turning red, but the peppers were a very pleasant surprise. Aren't tomatoes and peppers related to each other? I wonder if the chemicals the tomatoes exuded helped the peppers turn red? I just might get in the habit of picking my peppers green and letting them turn red inside, now, because it takes so much longer for them to turn red outside. And often they start to rot or are bothered by pests in that awkward period between green and red. I think I will try cutting down the entire tomato plants and hanging them upside down in my basement, once cold weather really sets in here. I have heard of people doing that with geraniums down here, to overwinter them. Of course I don't expect that will overwinter the tomatoes, but maybe it will let the plant's "juices" flow right on down into the fruit. And I suppose it's as good a place as any to wait for the tomatoes to turn red. Sometimes they rot on my kitchen counter while they are turning color. Last weekend I saw bou-coups of bees, both honey bees and bumblebees, all over my lima bean plants, so I guess I was wrong about the insects being gone, too. My beans just keep right on producing, in fact they seem to like this cold weather better than anything they've seen so far this year. I don't think I'll be coming up to Chicago anytime soon, but if you're in Atlanta you're certainly welcome to come and get some tomatoes, green or otherwise.

You might check with the 'market' forum, they were just talking about this.

Susan, The nice thing is that she can be whatever she wants to be as long as she's willing to work for it. When my now 24-year-old niece was 3-years-old, Tim asked her "What do you want to be when you grow up?" and she replied "Barbie!" Well, she didn't grow up to be a Barbie doll after all, but she is a mom herself now and that was her real dream all along. Chipotle heat varies depending on which kind of jalapenos you use to make them. Chipotles are just roasted jalapenos and you can roast them in the oven or on the grill. I freeze them but they also can be canned in adobo sauce. It sounds like you had an amazingly successful butterfly year. After having very low butterfly numbers in 2008, everything seemed to return to normal this year, and I still have tons of butterflies here in the first week of November. There are all kinds, but especially the sulphurs. In August and September, it was mostly swallowtails. If I pay attention to what is going on around me, I'll see butterflies here almost every month of the year....although not too many in January and early February. I am not sure about the grasshopppers for 2010. We saw their population make a strong resurgence all over Oklahoma this year but we won't know for 2-4 more months if their numbers will climb higher and peak in 2010 (likely) or if 2009 was a peak. A very cold and very wet winter works against them, so let's hope for 'cold', since the El Nino pattern more or less guarantees 'wet'. For us here in southern OK, there are years we start seeing grasshoppers hatching out at the very end of January or in earliest February. In a year when that happens, I make a mental note to buy one of the natural baits with nosema locuste (Grasshopper Attack or Semaspore or Nolo Bait) in it and scatter some once the hoppers are 1/4 to 1/2" long. It kills them quickly when they are in the younger instars. I only put out a little if I am seeing early hatchings, but I put out more every couple of weeks through about early May. If you can catch them early, they are easy to deal with. If I don't see a lot of grasshoppers hatching out until March or early April, that's a good sign and likely we'll have lower populations. So, by mid-Spring, we'll know for sure. And, of course, it goes without saying that there's not much we can do about the other grasshoppers that migrate into our yards during the summer since they grew up elsewhere, but I do think it helps if you've been able to keep the native population very low before the migrating ones arrive. Because grasshoppers were bad, blister beetles were bad too, although they were bad late. The blister beetles eat a lot of things, and I believe grasshopper eggs are one of their food sources. So, if we are seeing lots of hoppers, we'll have to brace ourselves for lots of blister beetles. We had prolonged heat in part of July and part of August which did make those water bills pretty high, but the rest of the year the water bill was just a dream. The important thing was that the rain came along every so often and kept the garden in heavy production a lot longer than normal. I can justify the high water bill if I'm harvesting oodles of produce, which I was. For once, I didn't have to just give up on watering and walk away and let the drought take the garden from me, so it was very nice. The amazing thing about our rain, Susan.....here in Love County we had 23" in 2008 and, so far, about 48" in 2009. I guess you can see where our average annual rainfall (36-38") comes from. I have to say that I prefer the 48" years to the 23" years. Grandkids are fun. We just should have had them first! Dawn