First tomatoes

We ate the first six cherry tomatoes yesterday. They were very sweet. The Paragon tomatoes are beginning to blush so should be ready in another week or two. We also picked two more pickling cucumbers, one of which should have been picked several days ago. It eluded discovery until it was extremely large and turning yellow. The dahlias that we started from seed back in May(?) are flowering.

I decided to try dropping the Japanese beetles in rubbing alcohol. This works well, they expire within seconds. I collected about thirty of them and now the grape, cherry and peach leaves have an opportunity to recover.

I did some research on green pepper plants not setting fruit and found that it could be due to too much nitrogen in the soil, not being pollinated, needing more time... I learned that pepper plants will survive for years if brought inside during the winter and will produce fruit much earlier in subsequent years.