We just returned from two weeks at our favorite place in North Carolina (if not the entire world), Ocracoke island, part of the NC Outer Banks. I typically use this break to assess the garden season, plan the following season and think about the various gardening projects that are underway. Last year I started my book; this year the weather was so spectacular early on that I didn't sit down and do my typical pondering until well into the second week. I did manage to fully assess status of the Islander hybrid pepper dehybridization project (subject of a future blog post) and get my slides ready for tomorrow night's Southern Season cooking school on Chile peppers. More on that below...
On Sunday I was delighted, as always, to be invited to spend 30 minutes speaking with Niki Jabbour on her radio show, the Weekend Gardener. Here is a link to the podcast. We covered the 2013 season in review, my take on tomato grafting and a few seed saving pointers.
At 6 PM tomorrow evening, I will be collaborating once again with Alex Hitt of Peregrine Farms for a Southern Season cooking school - this time on something completely new for me, a class focused on Chile peppers. Here is the class info. This should be a really fun event - if you have the time, click on the link, register, and join us!
I actually still have all of my pepper and eggplant plants growing in my driveway, despite weeks of neglect. I have a bit of seed saving left to do, and whatever the deer left me (they love pepper plants, if not the fruit) will be harvested and frozen. Once those are gone, the 2013 season will be a wrap. Thank goodness...it is a long season here in NC!
There is a great deal of work for me to do between now and next spring; assessing the Dwarf project, determining what to plant next year for seedling sales as well as my own garden, ensuring I've assessed that which went well and not so well and incorporating changes into my plans for next season, and - probably quite soon - addressing requests for book edits coming from Storey. All of this will keep me quite busy, and I will be blogging - perhaps not quite as often as during the growing season - about all of these.
I will also do a blog post with a few of the best pictures taken while on our Ocracoke escape.
See you again soon.....I do have to admit that the Red Sox and, now, Patriots are keeping me busy and happily (if not nervously) entertained as well!