Monday, June 22, 2009

My Little Peppers and How They Grow

Coming up with titles for these posts is often an inside joke for myself. Today the title is patterned after a children's book called "Five Little Peppers and How They Grew," written by Margaret Sidney. The Peppers are a family of six, five children and their widowed mother, at the turn of the century. Extremely poor, starving, on the brink of death, and remarkably cheerful. I love books.

Anyway, this post is about MY peppers, which I have not posted about in awhile.

I've been lackadaisacal about posting updates on the pepper plants. I have three: a jalapeno, and an orange and yellow bell pepper. Or is one of them red? I can't remember. One is definitely orange. Anyway, since i posted a long time ago about the pest eating holes in the leaves, i've just left the subject alone. The plants were kind of wimpy and have been slow to develop.

The jalapeno had one lone pepper and that was it for awhile:
But all of a sudden the rest of the flowers dropped off and developed quickly into peppers:
That photo was taken on June 15. Now pay attention to the top of the plant where the newest peppers are developing.

Look at those hot peppers! Aiy-yai-yai! They're growing like hotcakes. whatever that means. Like the comics in the background?


Then we have the bell peppers. FINALLY they are growing
These are the orange bell peppers, I think. I can see five peppers beginning to grow - the really visible one by my hand and some other myriad tiny baby ones around the plant. I wonder how long it is going to take for them to grow and ripen?

Here is the red or yellow one, whichever it is:
And about four visible peppers developing on this plant so far. I wonder what tripped the development of the veggies on these plants? We have only begun having really hot days, and I know that the peppers are supposed to love sun and heat , , ,

The great thing about this is that soon I can make salsa from my own garden. Some of the cilantro has not completely bolted, the jalapenos are looking great, i can cheat with onions and garlic from the store, and if the tomatoes would just cooperate and ripen!
Because pretty soon we are going to just have green tomato salsa! My brother comes this weekend and i want to serve from the garden!

4 comments:

Chris said...

Nice! I didnt know you were doing peppers. I was just telling my mom that I wanted to grow some. Funny./

TKW said...

Fried green tomatoes, baby! YUM!

Last year we had hot, dry weather and peppers went gangbusters. This year, lots of rain, piddly peppers. But the basil is a bunker crop!

AutumnalEquinox said...

Cute peppers! My two baby bell pepper plants nearly died, but they seem to have recovered now. I'll post the deets in my blog soon. Oh, and I did a post regarding your questions about cucumbers and melons.

Your garden is progressing wonderfully! Next year, I'll try to get started earlier....

AnnaKusa said...

Garden looking really great Siren. Not to jinx you but how are you keeping the birds from attacking your tomatoes? Everytime I tried to grow my own the birds would feast on them just as theY got ripe enough for me pick!

A thought about your weeds. I don't know if this would help with the grassy weeds, but when landscaping they use a fairly thick black plastic sheet where they don't want weeds or plants to grow. I'm wondering if you split open a large black garbage bag and put that beneath the newspaper if that would help. The reason I think it would is it prevents any light getting into the soil beneath it, whereas once the newspaper breaks down the weeds can get light to grow. Anyways just a thought.