by A.J. Coltrane
Previous post here.
September 30, 2014 post here.
The final harvest took place last year on October 7. This year it happened on September 28. Last year we got 226 pounds out of the EarthBoxes. Yesterday’s harvest brings us to 270 pounds of produce for 2014. Improvement!
Here are yesterday’s twenty-three pounds of peppers:
Overall we harvested 31 pounds of peppers in 2014. Next to the cat are ten pounds of King of the North. In the center sheet tray are two pounds of hot Pasilla peppers. Last year’s final pepper harvest is pictured below:
By weight it’s about 50% more peppers, though to be fair we also allocated more space this time. I think that 2014 shows more “red” as well.
We’ve had a busy couple of weeks breaking everything down. Last night we borrowed SeattleAuthor’s dehydrator for the Pasilla and Thai Hot peppers. He’s right — they’re so aggressively toxic that the dehydrator needs to go outside, otherwise stinging fumes fill the air.
Overall it was a pretty successful year. As a group everything that ripens, ripened better, especially the tomatoes. The yield was up somewhat when looking at 1-to-1 comparisons. Even though six of the 12 boxes fell over at some point the plants were still more productive. And we learned more things that we can apply to year three, such as the importance of support for the boxes…
“Recap” posts coming soon.
FlatbreadGarden 
The hot summer really amped up the heat on the peppers. Even my jalapenos were insanely hot. Fortunately the end of the harvest peppers were a little more mild and I was able to make up a batch of hotsauce with them today that was sub-atomic.
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Yeah, the pasillas and Thai peppers were/are totally nuclear. Our jalapenos weren’t dramatically different in heat than usual.
The biggest difference was that a much higher percentage of the tomatoes ripened — virtually all of them.
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