If you’re like me, you’re scavenging up those last green tomatoes and tiny peppers in your garden, hoping to bring in one more late harvest before it all goes into the deep freeze for the season.

My late tomatoes aren’t getting any riper on their dwindling vines, so I’m going ahead  and picking them, figuring that they’ll have a better chance ripening in our warm house. And those green pumpkins that just never made it to orange are now sitting on my deck in hopes that the waning sun will do a better job in that spot.

I love my home garden, and anything I harvest out of it becomes an extra-special addition to our family meals. But the one thing I’ve learned as a vegetable/flower gardener and novice orchardist is that the growing process can be, well, brutally unpredictable...

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