High Tunnel Jungle | Mid-Season Garden Tomato Topping & Pickled Peppers

Hello there everyone, if you are new here my name is Chelsea. Welcome to Little Mountain Ranch and if you've been here before welcome back. Super happy to have you here with me today in the high tunnel which is starting to look a little bit jungle like which is what we're here to fix today. I'm going to be topping my tomato plants so that literally means going along and cutting the tops off my tomato plants. We'll talk about why when we get to that point. We are also going to be building a little bit of a trellis to go along my peppers. As you can see they're starting to get weighed down by all their beautiful fruit and falling into the aisle. We are also going to pick some peppers and pickle some peppers because there is nothing as delicious on a pizza or a good sandwich than some pickled peppers. This is the what I call the maintained YouTube worthy side of my high tunnel. It's not really it's not really that except that this is the area that I usually do work when I'm going to share a video on a specific thing that I do in my high tunnel to maintain it and this side over here the side of my high tunnel that gets a little bit more neglected. Look at that it is an absolute jungle back there. I would like to be able to say that this is an unusual event in my high tunnel but the evidence would speak against that because if you look back on videos from the end of July beginning of August since I put this high tunnel here was it five years ago I think it was around five years ago now you would see that at least once every single summer this is how my high tunnel looks. So obviously we have some work to do over here. Before we get into doing that and dealing with those tomatoes I do want to deal with the peppers because it is quite hot in here which you can probably tell by the sweat beating on my nose and my face turning red and this is something that I need to take care of because if I don't the branches on the pepper plants are quite fragile and they could break under the weight of all of the fruit. So I do want to get this job done first and should we have time and I not get too hot then we will do the pruning over on that side. We will definitely go along and top everything though because that is something that I do need to get done regardless of how hot it gets in here but the actual trellising up of the tomato plants on the other side might wait until tonight. One of my sons made me all of these stakes that I am going to use along these plants. I'm not going to use a stake for every single pepper plant because I think I have 130 or something like that pepper plants in here so that would be a lot of stakes but what I am going to do is hammer these stakes in so that they're nice and sturdy and I got him to make me eight stakes so we're going to put eight and you want a yarn that's fairly strong for this or some kind of twine and I'm going to run I think three lines maybe two we'll see all the way along and that will help hold everything up and my son did such a nice job of making these I think I'll probably just leave them in here instead of taking them out and reuse them again next year because I do plant my peppers here each year. It is recommended of course to rotate your crops as best you can but in a closed environment where you have limited space like in a high tunnel like this it's a little bit difficult to do and I have these permanent trellises that I have set up for my tomatoes here and I've been planting these all in the same spot for the last couple of years and it's been working fine. The biggest thing you have to do if you're not going to rotate is to make sure that you feed the soil whatever nutrients that plant that you're planting in it is going to need because they will become depleted over time. I've shared this before but I have a thing for fences. I just love any type of fence so even this I like the contained feeling of a fence and this makes me really happy. So now we're going to head over to this side where we're going to deal with some of these unruly tomato plants here and top our tomato plants. It takes generally between 20 and 30 days from the point of flowering to until you get a mature sized tomato and then it can take depending on again the kind from between 10 and 30 days for that plant to reach full ripening stage on the vine. So a lot of people especially if you live in a really hot climate where the chance of your tomatoes cracking or ending up with severe blight or anything like that, it's recommended to take the tomatoes off the vine when they just go to the point where they're just starting to get a little bit of a blush on them and then you can ripen them inside. We do the same thing here in the north except at the very end of the season we push the tomatoes on the plant for as long as we possibly can and then we pull all those green tomatoes off and ripen the rest of those in the house. I find that if I take all my tomatoes, let's see by the end of August first to second week of September depending on how warm it is, if I take all my tomatoes off they've all gotten far enough along in the ripening process that they'll ripen the rest of the way inside. But I like to avoid ripening tomatoes inside as best I can because I don't have a lot of counter space or table space or any other type of surface for doing that. So keeping that in mind and whether you want to make the decision to top your tomato plants or not is going to depend how many frost-free days left you have in the season. So we're looking at around let's say if we're really going to push it middle of September if I'm able to keep heaters going in here and keep the nighttime temperatures warm enough and we don't end up getting some random hard frost. We always get light frosts even by the beginning of September sometimes even the end of August but the high tunnel protects the tomatoes from that. But anything harder than that harder than a light frost I need to pull my plants out. So I'm looking at the amount of time we have left between now and then which let's see is going to put us at 30 on the short end 45 on the long end days left which doesn't give us a ton of time to have tomatoes from this stage which is flowering to actually having tomatoes that we can pull in off the vine. So it makes sense at this point to go along and remove any of the flowers that I know are not going to have time to produce fruit. If I have any like this right here where I have some little tiny tomatoes forming they still have the flower end on them those ones are probably going to have enough time especially because this particular variety is a plum size variety so it's going to have enough time. There may potentially be enough time these ones are sun golds for these flowers here that are actually there's little tiny tomato plants let's pull that off here sorry tomatoes not tomato plants let me show you there's a little itty bitty fruit can you see that in there that may have time to mature on this so I'm going to leave the cherries because I hardly got any cherries oh my gosh it's hot I hardly got any cherries at all cherry tomatoes at all this year so I'm going to let this one go because why not so this is kind of the interesting thing about what happened with my tomatoes this year is that I ended up with fruit forming along the very bottom so the all the the situation was perfectly ripe I guess you could say for good flower production and good pollination right along the bottom and then the second rung up on the plants all these ones are for the most part beefsteak style tomatoes along here they were able to also flower and produce fruit at the right time but anywhere above that so probably about this much of the plant itself didn't even flower so something happened during the temperature of the growth of the plant along there that was not ideal for flowering and actually flowering because they didn't even flower they didn't even try to flower and then not get pollinated they actually just didn't flower at all and then I'm having another flush of flowers along the very tops of the plants it's so interesting to observe these kinds of things in the garden because I find that I learn a lot about the ideal conditions for plants by observing when they when they don't do well I can look back of course on this season and see our temperature wild temperature fluctuations the fact that we didn't even start getting any heat until this last week lots of heat now though and so that obviously played a big part in what these tomatoes did so I have to admit to being a little bit sad to go along and lop off the potential of this plant to produce any with these plants to produce any more fruit but truth is they're just not going to form they're not going to have enough time on the very top there so some of these plants like these ones here are well over six feet tall probably seven feet tall at least up there so there's lots of beautiful growth happening but unfortunately we're going to cut it off and you know what it is much cooler on this side of the high tunnel so I am going to start well that's exciting look we have cucumbers yay look at that these are Socrates which is a great northern variety of slicing cucumbers my very favorite way to eat cucumbers well there's two I love a good greek salad but I also love a peanut butter and fresh cucumber sandwich with a little bit of salt if you've not had it please try if you love peanut butter and you love cucumbers the combination is amazing okay so these ones here aren't actually too bad but these ones way too tall and I have some yarn so I'm going to go along and trellis up anything that needs to be tied back like this enthusiastic one here so let's go top I was just looking at these plants and I was thinking about the fact that I have two choices here when it comes to the foliage all the leaves that you can see on there because as you can see there's a lot of them I wasn't as diligent about pruning this year as I have been in years past but I was thinking about removing them removing a bunch more of the leaves but this is the thought that's kind of been running around in my brain as I've been doing this is that these leaves are not going to grow bigger they're just going to basically maintain themselves at this point they're all fully grown on these plants and I will pull off all the suckers so the suckers are the branches that come out in between a leaf and the main stem so I will pull those off because the plant will put energy into growing those but the whole idea behind pruning is that you want the plant to put energy into growing fruit and producing the fruit but also the plants themselves those leaves actually photosynthesize which gives the plant energy so I'm kind of wondering if at this stage of the game if it's not really worth it going to the effort of pruning off all the extra foliage here if there's anybody who is a more expert tomato grower than I am I would love to hear from you if you would with at this point if you would bother with the pruning the other thing about pruning is when you prune early in the season the plant still has a lot of oomph and get up and go and so it can rebound from the shock of removing all those pruned leaves whereas this time of year it has a little bit less energy because a lot of that energy is going into fruit production so I'm not sure I feel like the topping definitely needs to happen but I think as of right now anyway unless somebody tells me differently I am going to follow my intuition on this and actually just leave the leaves on one of the reasons that I do love pruning my plants is because you get to see all the beautiful tomatoes look at that they're just gorgeous on this plant you get to see them better without having all the foliage on here but like I said I'm just going to leave it as is but let's go along and top all these flowers way up at the top of this one you know what I think I'm going to do is just top right above that and leave that little one to go we'll see if we end up with tomatoes on that at the end of the season oh my gosh this one is almost at the top of the high tunnel holy moly so now that that is all done our tomatoes are topped and this side is pretty well pruned I'm gonna have to get to the other side but that's gonna wait till tonight when it's a little bit cooler in here but right now we are going to pick some peppers I have tons of peppers look at those beautiful banana peppers there so we are going to pick some peppers and we are going to make some pickled peppers so these ones are our sweet banana peppers and I like mixing banana peppers with some of the hotter peppers because they're sweet so it balances out that heat a little bit so we're gonna pick a bunch of these theoretically I could do the same thing with the peppers as I did with the tomatoes I could go along and pull off the flowers that are on here because they are not going to have enough time to produce peppers but I usually don't bother doing that I don't know why I don't bother doing that I just don't these ones also have a way to go what are these ones anyway where's my tag I am going to pick some of our Hungarian black peppers here which are very prolific now these ones apparently have a similar heat to the jalapenos some people say they're a little bit hotter and some people say they're not as hot so we're gonna have to check it out ourselves but there are lots of them I don't need to do that many pickled peppers this year because I have tons left from last year because I did so many last year so how many of you have the Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pickled peppers little rhyme in your head every time I say pickled peppers I know I do we have some golden cayenne peppers that are almost ripe so that's exciting oh we got a couple jalapenos here and I can see a bunch more banana peppers over there a whole bunch right there and some more here nice little haul so far these ones are another cayenne I want to make Frank's hot sauce or an imitation Frank's hot sauce so I grew quite a few cayennes oh we got some Hungarian hot wax over here oh look at that beauty that's a gorgeous sweet pepper the peppers this year are kind of like the tomatoes over here in that we just don't have a ton of them the ones that are down here more the hot peppers they're doing pretty well but all of my sweet peppers that are along here have just tiny little fruits on them or no fruits at all which is kind of a bummer there's another one this is just what happens with gardening sometimes you win and sometimes you don't it's a good thing we have these gorgeous sunflowers to keep us feeling cheerful all right I think this little batch of peppers that we have here is the perfect amount for a small batch of pickled peppers so let's head up to the house and make them all right friends back up in the kitchen with our gorgeous peppers look at how beautiful these look so all I'm going to do this is could not be easier we're going to cut these up into rings you can choose to leave the seeds in if you want or you can remove them so rings just like that and I'm going to do a mix here of sweet peppers and of spicy peppers most people do pickled peppers with jalapenos or cowboy candy they call it but I like to do a mix because I don't like it too too hot if you are going to remove your seeds and the membrane because the main the membrane part right here is actually where a lot of the heat is held if you're going to remove that I would recommend using those are spicy I would recommend using gloves I'm not doing that so I'm not worried about that today oh look at these so these are the Hungarian black peppers they're green on the inside beautiful when it comes to preserving fresh is best so when it comes to any type of pickling that you're doing the fresher the vegetables you're using the crispier that your pickle is going to be but in the case of peppers I do find that they can sit in the crisper in the fridge for a day or two as long as you have some moisture in there that part's really important and be okay because we're actually going to be cooking these in the syrup that we're going to make anyway so they're going to be softened by that process most of the recipes online talk about making your syrup with your seasonings and then adding your peppers to that and I actually just throw everything in the pot and heat everything up at once because I'm always looking to save on time and that doesn't affect safety at all so we're going to add for our seasonings into this and you can omit the seasonings if you want we're going to add a little bit of celery seeds so for our let's say eight cups we probably have around eight cups so I'm adding about two teaspoons of celery seed I'm going to add some turmeric and this is mostly for color not for flavor so around a two teaspoons tablespoon somewhere in that range and then I am going to add some apple cider vinegar and some plain vinegar and this is going to there's going to be liquid that's going to come out of these so I'm only going to add just a little bit let's say two cups add around two or so to the amount of peppers that I have here I'm going to add half as much sugar as I did vinegar so I added two cups of vinegar so I'm going to add one cup of sugar and I'm going to get this over on the stove and start cooking it down now that these are ready let me show you what they're going to look like they're going to be shiny like that and a little bit translucent we're going to load up our jars with our peppers now I'm going to crank my heat back up and reduce the syrup okay our syrup is all ready to go nice and thick sticky sticky so washing our rim really well we're going to lid it and then can these for 10 minutes in the steam canner or water bath canner all right friends okay we are done don't those look beautiful I am not going to need any more than that though because I still have probably 40 jars down from last year so that's great but I'm glad I was able to show you I hope enjoyed hanging out with me today and I look forward to seeing you next time bye everyone