Finally getting around to posting a 2022 season synopsis
Last year was wacked out. I didn't post much about it and only took a few pictures. I wasn't impressed. No pests except for a rabbit. I couldn't trap it and Cody couldn't catch it even though he went to the garden to chase it every morning before daylight. This little monster destroyed 8 of my pepper plants. No bug pests all year and weeds weren't a problem until the Chamberbitter started the annual party. Disgusting weed. I hit the garden with pre-emergent earliy this year in hopes of eradicating it soon. The plants were weird. I guess arbitrarily slowing them down to deal with Lia's problem took a toll. They were doing very well from the get-go on the usual 18 hours of light but by March they were down to 10 hours since I was trying to keep small but healthy. The weather was crazy, too. Way too hot for a very long time. The last week in April when I was gone on another trip, we finally got some rain. Eight inches in four days. Then the heat really set in hard and no more rain. Then it started raining again. Another eight inches in a week. Rinse and repeat. The plants really didn't like the alternating drought/flood weather cycle and the beastly heat.
From June:
The plants did produce a good yield of large and wrinkly YNBS pods that are always super hot and delicious. They're my favorite pepper.
The fortunate thing about the weather is the season extended to shortly before Christmas . I got the plants through two frost events including one when the temp in the garden went to 26° for a few. The thing that came in for Christmas was guaranteed to be too much so I knocked everything down and saved what I could. We had quite a few nights in the teens and a couple of day/nights when it never got up to freezing. Thanks to the longer season I ended up with a fuzz over 20 kilos of pepper powder so I must have picked around 100 kilos.
The tomatoes got to 6' or so right quick and flowered like crazy but never set a single fruit. Some plants turned into real freaks of nature. This from August.
I found 3 green beans in the Blue Lake bean wall before the plants died off in August. I suppose they didn't care for the weather. Usually they produce until freeze kills them. The Blue Lake bush beans produced fairly well until Cadi the horse decided to be a bad boy and mangled the crop.
We've made a lot of Zucchini but the plants were done early and a second crop didn't work at all. The North Georgia Candy Roaster winter squash made very few fruit but an August planting of Butternut squash did very well.
I'm working on this year and will post about it as we go along. I adopted a modified plan for this year due to upcoming events. It will be a weird season too. Lots going on again and the family takes priority.
The good news is Lia's quarterly followup scans have all showed she's cancer free. Nothing from the adrenal pheo tumor got loose. Her next appointment with Auburn is April 10. The bad news is I found a new tumor in the back of her back leg. I took her to our regular vet the next day who examined and tested and learned only it's not a lipoma or mast cell. The doctors at Auburn will find out what it is and we'll take it from there.
More bad news is we found a fast growing tumor on the outside of Cody's right elbow in January. I took him in the next Monday. The doctor thought it was certainly a lipoma. At nearly 8 years old, we were planning to neuter him this winter anyway so our vet did the neuter and took the tumor the next day. The worst news is the tumor was a soft tissue sarcoma. Very low grade with super low mitotic figures but the pathology showed not so great margins which means tentacles and tendrils and lots of bad cells.
The good news is we'll be in Auburn week after next for evaluation. This is to plan for a treatment on their $4 million radiosurgery machine. State of the art and only one of three available for veterinary usage. This thing is so precise with real-time on-board CT they can literally take out bad cells one at the time. It may be breathtakingly expensive but we don't much care. In most of the world the treatment is hope the tumor doesn't grow back but they generally do and much more aggressively and dangerous. From there it's amputation. Not gonna happen to one of ours. I want it over now. He's young. 8th birthday is May 1. And never mind he's my service dog.
... Beautiful pepper!
I most likely missed it. I will read the entire thread again when I have a bit more time 
