The 2010 Peppers

This was my first successful season with a few new varieties of hot peppers. The three best were Beaver Dam, Tomato Pepper, and the Fish Peppers. All three of these varieties were harvested before the first hard frost.

I love the Beaver Dam Peppers so much, I dug one out of the garden a few weeks ago and put it into a large pot in the greenhouse. It is still producing and living happily amongst a few other peppers in hanging baskets; Paper Lantern and the world's hottest - the Bhut Jolokia or "ghost peppers."

From what I've read in garden books, pepper blossoms are self-pollinating just like tomatoes, so no need for bees or other insects to do the job. These are blossoms on a paper lantern pepper plant.

The Paper Lanterns have a ton of baby peppers on them! And one of the Bhut Jolokia plants is forming its first flowers.

There must be 30 peppers forming on each of these two Paper Lantern pepper plants!

These plants will remain in the greenhouse until the begining of December, then I will have to move them inside. I have read that some folks have successfully kept pepper plants alive for many years - I'm eager to give it a try!

During sunny weather I make sure to set the onions outside to cure. At night they go back inside the greenhouse. After a week of curing, I will hang the onions from the rafters of my breezway (nexy to the hanging garlic) in custom made burlap boxes to access throughout winter.

here is a crosscut section of a tomato pepper. Not many seeds, but I saved every single one I could find! This variety is pleasantly hot - but not too hot, just like the Beaver Dam peppers.

I suppose this is why the Tomato pepper gets its name, it is shaped simular to a flat tomato or a mini version of a snow white pumpkin.

And last but not least, my favorite the Beaver Dam pepper shown cut open. The seeds are located on the top of the pepper just as you would see in a common bell pepper. And yes, I have saved well over 100 seeds for next season.

I can't get over how great this variety tastes and produces. I still have one plant in the garden that is hearty with new peppers on it - even after half a dozen frosts! This makes me wonder if I can set them out earlier in the growing season... I will have to try in 2011.

:)

April - A Warmer Than Usual Spring

This area has been blessed with a warmer than average spring season. I’d venture a guess that everything is a full two weeks ahead of schedule as compared to the last few years. The above photo is a tribute to how azure blue a spring sky can be.

Here is a photo of one of the apple trees in silver tip stage just two weeks ago. I sprayed the trees using organic dormant oil with my newly acquired backpack 4 gallon sprayer. But I don’t wear it on my back…

That’s right; I use the shoulder straps to secure the sprayer from falling over in the back of my trailer. And it works very well! There’s a fine line between being called “lazy” or “smart”…

Ah yes, the garlic is up! If you go back a few years in this blog, you’ll see that I started with 10 cloves planted in October of 2008. In October, 2009, I planted 46 cloves and it appears that 44 have made it through the winter. This variety (German Extra Hearty) can have 4 or 5 cloves per bulb. I’m making a prediction that I should have approximately (10 x 5 = 50) + (4 x 34 = 136) = 186 cloves to plant in fall of 2010.

I found some of these combo thermometer clocks at Home Depot and decided to create a nice housing for them to display at each garden. This one gets direct sun at sunset so the reading is off a bit. Actual temp was about 75 degrees.

These two photos don’t really show what I wanted to illustrate, but you might be able to get an idea of what I am doing. I added more turnbuckles to my overhead wire staking system. I liken it to winding a guitar string tighter & tighter. Each 70 foot wire now has 2 turnbuckles to keep them tight enough to bear the weight of whatever I tie to them; i.e. Tomatoes, cukes, squash, pole beans, etc.

And now for the inside… Here are two photos of the seed trays basking in the warmth of T8 fluorescent lights. There are about 400 seedlings growing right now, mostly 31 varieties of tomatoes and 7 varieties of hot peppers.

This is an amazing photo of my Tomato Pepper – yes, that’s the true name of this variety. These seeds were written about in the 2010 Winter edition of
The Heirloom Gardener Magazine
(in my opinion, their best issue ever! You can order copies by clicking on the link to their website).
What’s so amazing is that I found only one source for some seeds and the only seeds he had were seven years old! So what you see here is 17 out of 24 seeds planted that made it after 7 years of dormancy – wow!

:)