Ok... enough with equipment. Time to show off some produce.

Keep in mind this is the end of October, not exactly the most productive time of year for gardeners. But nonetheless my little IBC tote system(s) are still quite productive. I keep waiting for everything to generally finish "doing their thing" so I can clean the bed out and restart with leafy greens, but everything just keeps going, and going, and going.....

Here's a wide shot of the first IBC tote system.

I am totally amazed that even now this late in the season how productive this little patch of plants are. The tall ones are Okra. I am getting around 5 or 6 nice sized okra *per day* from these plants. This comes out to about this much a week:

Here's a close up of one before I picked it this morning:

I also harvested some of my climbing New Zealand spinach and made a wonderful omelette with it. Here's a close up of what it looks like in the plant bed:

Also tucked in between the monster okra are some jalapino plants. What is interesting about these peppers is that the fruits were harvested in the late spring (made some great salsa with them!). I didn't bother to pull out the plants because the plan was to completely clean out the bed as soon as the okra stopped producing. Little did I know that I apparently have an immortal strain of okra. Anyway, these pepper plants are now producing their second batch of fruit!

While harvesting part of my breakfast this morning I had an awesome surprise! I have this huge eggplant that has continued to flower for the past several months but has never produced fruit. I was snipping the spinach and saw a large fruit out of the corner of my eye. I thought to myself "that's a *huge* jalapino, but when I looked closer, lo and behold, it's a softball sized eggplant that has been hiding in the middle of the thicket.

On the opposite side of the bed from the spinach is a monster basil plant. I've made a couple of nice batches of pesto from it and it is still quite happily producing. I plan to pick some more as soon as I finish writing this to make some pesto and cream cheese dip for a Halloween party this evening.

Ok, enough with the original bed, on to the new one. As I mentioned in an earlier entry, I found that my fish tank can support quite a bit more growth than the tiny (but uber productive) original bed. So... I built a 4'x8' "lumber and liner" bed beside it, filled it with gravel, put in a nice bell siphon, ran a hose over to it, and planted some more stuff. Here's a picture of the addition:

And here are a few shots of the new "babies".

 Kohlrabi:

Chard:

Cabbage and Collards:

And here's the little poopers that make it all possible!