I’ve grown the purple ones before, and IIRC, they’re purple the whole time like most/all (peppers, eggplant, carrot, broccoli) the other purple veg. Now I’m curious about the red variety.
Hey, @FloridaManJefe: Stay safe! Looks like Ian is going to give you lots of trouble. 
That’s the equivalent of the end of March for us, so that is a lovely early gift!
right-o! the wind has put my pepper plants sideways! we good though. thanks!
in response to your reply about purple varieties, we will try all sorts of things because they are purple! purple long beans, purple pole beans, purple mustard leaf, purple peppers and, as i mentioned before, purple tomatillos. i guess i’m just wierd that way. Baker Creek Heirloom Seed catalog has a whole bunch of purple varieties of veggies and greens. they are our go-to seed purveyors for really cool cultivars.
I’ve been getting seeds from Baker Creek for more than a decade! They always have interesting new stuff every year. Even better, they implicitly encourage seed saving. Which we do, but our 20’ x 35’ garden can yield odd results. 
The trouble with those is that they go green when cooked. (Well, every purple variety I ever tried did.)
yeah, if i blanch them to freeze, they go light. pickled, they stayed a rosy shade, but stir fried, lightly, they stay crisp and purple! a little garlic/ blackbean sauce and wow! good stuff!
the long beans are my favorite of the lot and are lovely cut into bite sized bits and simply tossed into a green salad.
The handy thing with purple beans is it makes them easier to spot at harvest time 
I was up at my plot today after a day or two off, and suddenly noticed one of my purple sprouting broccoli plants (sown many months ago for harvesting next spring) had no leaves - just ribs!
The culprits were detained. (This was less than half of them!)
Fortunately the damaged plants are putting out plenty of young fresh shoots so I think they’ll survive and have enough time before harvest to catch up. I’ll try to note if the harvest is reduced compared to others in the patch (there are a dozen, all told).
There was at least one cabbage white that got into the netting earlier in the year so I’d made a mental note to keep an eye on them, but had not noticed anything until today. I suspect the scale of the damage increases logarithmically as the buggers all get bigger.
ETA - there you go - a gif:
(It took me multiple iterations of resizing and cutting length and optimising to get under BB’s 4mb limit!)
Pity you don’t have chickens, and cabbage white caterpillars(sp) were got me to realize what wasps constribute to the ecosystem…
Unfortunately wasps are excluded. Too many pigeons live at our allotments and their favourite pastime is to sit on brassicas and peck out the tender growing points. All brassicas need netting if they are to survive.
Mushrooms! I started these less than 3 weeks ago using the @anon29537550 method. 
Gray oysters coming in, too!
some things are still growing and producing…
looks to be the last of the purple long beans. those things really made a lot this year!
From the article: “The majority of the mushrooms that you see growing in your potting soil are Leucocoprinus birnbaumii , formerly named Lepiota lutea , which are small and varying shades of yellow. These are so frequently seen in pots in greenhouses and homes that the common names are plantpot dapperling and flowerpot parasol.”
very cool! i have been buying bags of organic garden soil with worm castings in it and augmenting with manure tea from our local nursery. i had kinda assumed there were spores in one or the other, since i have been getting tiny little brown 'shrooms coming up in clusters in newly potted plants or in the new garden beds. this was the first yellow one. rather striking appearance, so it got a pic.
I had a bunch of them come up in my tomato containers last year. They were prettier than the sad tomato plants I had that year.
Good morning.
I noticed a colony of small black ants have installed in my tomato vase. When I was watering It today, the ants get nervous and started to flee the Deluge.
Do you know how to get rid of the ants? I don’t know if I can use any pesticides, as I have a cat.
Borax-based liquid ant bait has worked well for me. (Brand name Terro here in USA.) Low toxicity to pets and humans, the bait stations keep it contained, and the stuff works. No idea about availability outside US market though.
Thank you. I was tempted to transplant the tomatoes again and throw away the infected dirty.
There’s a frost advisory tonight, so this could be the last harvest for the year. Total potato crop, about 9 ounces…
Also about a 3rd of our total greenbean crop.
Squash, melons, corn and chard were all failures this year. Though if the chard pull through the frost, there might still be a small chance for them.
Did get a couple nice flushes of shitakes though (not pictured)!
Excellent argument for growing your own! As easy as oysters are to grow, I think I would skip wild foraged.
