A success!

Last week I had put in some overtime and wasn't getting home until 8:30 or 9:00 for most of the week. Friday morning I sent a text message to my teenage kids and asked them to do a couple of household chores for me. I also asked my daughter to pick some of the cucumbers for me (I hadn't picked since last weekend). Luckily I didn't have to work on Saturday and was able to start catching up on the household chores. I also had a window of time to work in the garden where I tied and trimmed the tomatoes and picked the third picking from the first green beans. In the past I noticed that the beans drop off dramatically after the third picking so I pulled the plants after the third picking. So now I had an empty row and so I planted Lima Beans. I also picked some more cucumbers. It wasn't until Sunday while I was watering the veggie garden that I noticed a success that warmed my heart. The first planting of green beans were shading the next door row of green peppers and I have peppers coming. This is a first for me for July since I started gardening here when we bought our house in the fall of 2000. I have a semi wooded lot and I have always said that my garden gets only about 3-4 hours of good sunlight a day. I have lost some trees but the trees lost really didn't effect the veggie garden. Every year I since I started my veggie garden I wasn't getting any peppers until September. I know peppers like full sun and that's the only reason I can think of why I wasn''t getting them during the summer. It seemed like the plants finally decided that in September they better start making peppers because they're weren't going to get anymore sun. Last year I tried a different variety that had a shorter maturation time (by two weeks) and to my surprise I did get peppers two weeks earlier than in previous years. This year I found another variety that's time was even two weeks shorter and its those plants that have peppers on them. The variety is New Ace and it looks like its going to be a staple from now on.