These are the end of year tomatoes that didn’t have a chance to ripen on plant. If OP has a decently long growing season, they probably harvested a few multiples or that. For example, bandywine tomatoes weigh in at 1-2 pounds each and one plant will produce… quite a few tomatoes.

Sauce: I grow tomatos in my garden too

Late to the party, by quite a big margin, but I have some thoughts having gone the commercial and DIY routes on this with two rounds of raised beds.

First, drip irrigation = great. Soaking the soil slowly is way better than flooding it and having a lot of the water simply roll off. It also keeps water of leaves, which is generally good for your plants.

I found homeowner grade commercial systems effective, but also fiddly and expensive. I was happy with the Rain Bird setup in my first garden after I installed an inline pressure regulator. The pressure regulator was necessary because we have very good water pressure out our spigot, even after 50’ of hose. The Rain Bird system didn’t offer much flexibility year over year. For example, if I planted a sprawling zucchini one year and wanted to put tomatoes or peppers there the next I was cutting hoses and swapping fittings as you can fit multiple tomatoes/peppers in in the space of one zucchini. Draining everything for winter was also fiddly and I would inventively lose a few parts to the freeze/thaw cycle. These systems are not easy to break down and reuse.

My original garden beds wound up getting torn out when we pulled out our pool and I went the DIY route with our second garden setup. Instead of running a hose to my beds, as I had before, I dug a trench and laid PVC pipe underground. Each of my beds has its own ball valve to help balance flow/pressure. On the house side, I PVC glued a hose adapter that I use to tie into a hose bib. I usually have a brass Y valve attached to it, so I can either send water to my garden or the hose.

None of the PVC pipes or fittings downstream of the ball valves have any PVC glue on them, so draining them for winter is super easy. Inside the beds I simply laid the PVC on the ground and drilled 1/8" holes into them every few inches. If you ask your favorite search engine, you can find a number of articles/videos showing variations of this technique. I do have a sprinkler in my raspberry bed, as raspberry canes are weeds and row style irrigation doesn’t work well for them.

Despite using drip irrigation, powdery mildew on squashes and gourds seems unavoidable due to my garden’s location. It’s flanked by trees on its eastern side, which means it doesn’t get direct sun until 10-11 in the morning.

… I hope this wall of text is helpful. Feel free to ask for follow ups.

Seconding the cat suggestion. Our cats love to lie under the grow lights - it’s nice and warm.

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Spot on answer.

While I totally agree with you, it really does seem like we’re moving back towards the era of centralized committing, at least for mainstream computing. More and more “desktop” applications are really electron apps with a good chunk of the compute happening server side. That’s before you start to consider the many browser based word processing products, etc.

Maintaining a changelog for very large app development organizations is also a pretty damn hard task, trying to coordinate whatever all teams are releasing in a particular build.

I feel this in my bones. Our biggest device contains hundreds of apps and firmware. We generally update the apps and firmware together. It’s nearly impossible to summarize the changes in a meaningful way. What issues were fixed? Likely a few hundred. What new features were added or improved? Another big list. Management thought AI would magically solve this problem, but it turns out that it has no idea which things are worth mentioning vs which should be glossed over.

It sucks both internally and externally.

I don’t otherwise like Hershey chocolate, but their chocolate syrup on good vanilla ice cream slaps.

We had a shishito pepper plant last year. It yeilded way better than our bell peppers ever have. I really regret not planting any this year and will be sure to plant some next year.

Like you said, they’re really easy to cook and taste great too.

If you’re somewhat handy, there are tons of cheaper DIY options available.

Apple sauce is a favorite of ours. Apple pie is another. Both are made very easy with an apple peeler, corer, and slicer. For the apple sauce, we toss in some cinnamon sticks and don’t add very much sugar.

You could also go for apple juice or cider (fermented or otherwise), although this will mean that you’ll probably want some kind of grinder/mill and a press.

Our peppers tend to not be very prolific either with one exception: the shishito pepper I grew last year was a pretty prolific producer despite not being more than two feet tall. We have 2 bell peppers in the ground this year and have only harvested 7 peppers so far. We will get a few more, but far from a bumper crop.

I’ve grown leaks in SE MI, which was recently reclassified as 6a, as a spring into summer crop from seeds started indoors. I didn’t have any problems with health or yeild. Haven’t tried them as a fall into winter crop.

Like all things produce, “Leak” is a family with different members being more cold tolerant than others. It looks like 20 °F is the floor, but dropping below freezing can do damage.

Great read, with some amusing asides.

Shots fired!

Thanks for sharing! First time growing zucchini? Some of them can get massive if they get away from you. We were gone for 10 weeks in July a few years ago and came back to one that was nearly as long as out toddler was tall.

I am a die hard laptop/desktop person but the majority of my outside of work ‘computer’ time is on my phone these days :(

Not trying to plant-shame in the slightest, but under optimal conditions, your plant would be well over the 6’ mark at this point in the season.

This really depends on where you live. I’m in Zone 6a and a 1’ tall tomato plant is doing pretty well right now. We have some posters who are up in Canada and I don’t think they’re even passed their last frost date.

They look happy, so yay!

I’ve had mine going for three years and they seem to be holding up as well as the cheap poly grow pots, so woo. I keep my starts in a tray to keep the extra water and keep the bottoms moist if I miss a watering.

Solo cup (or generic equivalent) starts! I do the same thing. Way cheaper than buying “gardening pots”, but you do have to put holes in them.

I have a very cobbled together grow light getup for my starts, but have thought about trying to make an enclosure around one of my raised beds to get the temp up earlier and push the season out.

As long as they’re not wilty life is good!