Out of the weeds

I went out to my weedpatch garden in hopes of finding a tomato or two.  No luck; the vines are healthy and vigorous, but the tomatoes have rotted before they ripened.  Very depressing.  I might have known something new would come along to stifle my tomato-canning plans.
I glanced over the rest of the crabgrass and saw something red gleaming there.  Hmmm.  That's not the tomato patch.
Lo and behold, it was a beautiful, big sweet pepper turned red.  Then I saw a yellow one and a couple of green ones.  I went to get a basket because my hands were pretty full by this point.  The basket says "eight quarts" on the end, but is what I usually call a peck basket.

I'd almost be willing to bet there are that many more out there; you just can't see much for the weeds.  There are hundreds of jalapenos, too, for which I really have little use.  When I ordered a packet of mixed peppers seeds, they were in the mix.  Maybe my daughter would like some of these pretty peppers to grill with their next meal.
I had a little trouble navigating through the pepper plants because the twelve sweet potato slips Cliff planted right after I got home from the hospital have sent out treacherous vines.  Directions said to allow them six feet on each side of the row, which we did.  Those vines must be on steroids, because they've stretched out twice that far!
My cousin who visited last week brought us some huge sweet potatoes which we wasted no time in consuming.  One was so big we had to quarter it to get it to bake in the microwave.  Of course, sweet potatoes continue to grow until frost, but I decided to dig just one hill up and see what I had.  I wasn't expecting much.

Ok, so the huge one my cousin brought us probably weighed more than all these together.  Still, these are some nice sweet potatoes.   Again, it's an eight-quart basket. 
So although I've done nothing but complain about my garden of weeds, we got at least a dozen cabbages, a nice early crop of corn, better radishes than I have raised in years, beets, carrots, and now peppers and sweet potatoes.  I won't go into detail explaining the things that did not do well, since they probably made up 2/3 of the garden.  But hey, I got something.  I'm still undecided about whether to even put forth the effort next year.  But you know, when spring starts beckoning we all go a little crazy.  If only there were a guarantee that I'd get some tomatoes...