Yet another Friday is here, and it is also the last Friday for Lunch in the Garden this summer. We’re featuring peppers, and we’ve definitely got a good crop of peppers in the garden!

These gorgeous bell peppers are from the ‘Big Bertha’ plants. The bell peppers seem to go in flushes, but this week was obviously a heavy harvest.

Look! The tomato plant laid a golden egg! Okay…this year, that might almost be true. The yellow “egg” is a Golden Rave Roma tomato and the red pepper behind it is actually a purple ‘Merlot’ pepper. Yes, really. We left it on the plant long enough, it turned red! Pretty neat!

Something decided that this melon was ready to eat, even if we didn’t! I think it is getting close, but I’m waiting for those dark green sutures (the stripes) to fade to something a little more creamy. It’s probably edible right now (well, obviously), but wouldn’t be very tasty. The melon are taking a lot longer to ripen than I expected them to – maybe a combination of how heavily they are set and the lovely weather.

We picked this ‘Black Krim’ tomato on Tuesday when it just had a tinge of pink. Good thing, because the rain the other night might have caused it to crack.

Here’s that same tomato this morning. It’s almost ready to eat. My past experience with the Black Krim is that it should be a more purple/brown color when ripe, but either the heat is causing the colors to be bleached out or the seeds we got were a little more genetically varied toward pink instead of purple. These tomatoes remind me a lot of the ‘Rose’ heirloom tomatoes we grew last year, at least in color. (Haven’t eaten one yet, so not sure about flavor.)

One of my coworkers brought this cool tomato in last week. Aren’t those designs artistic and cool? Anyway, this is an extremely characteristic example of Tomato Spotted Wilt Virus. The tomatoes are still fine to eat, they just look bizarre. Usually the plants are infected while still in the greenhouse, and the only thing to do is to pull the plants out when you see a problem.

Have a great weekend! Posting will be light for the next couple of weeks, but don’t forget to check back occasionally!