Wouldn't you like to be a pepper too?

So what if it's been 3 weeks since my last post? I do what I want!

Remember the whole "bringing peppers inside for the winter" business? Yeah, didn't think so.

The kitchen jungle.

So here they are. In total I have seven plants gracing any window where they can find a couple hours of sun and escape the cold. The idea was that many of these would be adopted by friends, but I keep delaying the hand-off with the excuse that they aren't well enough established yet for new parents. The longer I wait, the more attached I get, so I'd better hurry up and get them out of here.

Doe Hill Golden bell? Hard to tell once you've removed all the fruit.

The process of uprooting and pruning them back was pretty traumatizing for all but the smallest plants. Conventional wisdom says you prune the plants back by about 30%, so that the root system can re-establish itself without having to support as many branches and fruit. A couple of mine were still looking pretty pathetic after a week or so, so I cut all the peppers off of them and they perked back up. 

Cayenne

The varieties I have are (as best as I can remember): 1 cayenne, 1 sweet chocolate bell, 2 doe hill golden bells, 2 mystery bells that start lime green and turn orange, and 1 mystery hot pepper that is probably a serrano but looks more like a cayenne.

Mystery lime green bell.

Yesterday I noticed a pretty high concentration of aphids on a couple of the plants (you can actually see them on the stems of the leaves in the above picture), so I moved the worst offenders onto the porch in hopes that some natural predators like ladybugs would take care of the problem for me. The other plants received a visual scan and finger-squishing treatment, so hopefully that will keep the bugs at bay for awhile longer. One thing about having them indoors is that you have to hand-pollinate the flowers if you want them to develop into fruit, but I haven't been doing that yet since they're still pretty scraggly-looking for the most part.

An intrepid mystery sprout making its way for the window. Photo-tropism is neat.

 I've avoided naming any of the plants yet, but once I know who's headed to a new home and who's staying you can be sure they'll all gain distinct personalities and back-stories.

I've come to realize that this exercise is probably a symptom of my pack-rat nature, seeing as I'm not even overly-fond of most peppers, I just can't bear to see a season's worth of effort uprooted and thrown out!

2 things:

Remember those beans I had in my meager garden this spring? (http://danielaisenbrey.blogspot.com/2011/06/watersundirtfood.html) Well they've run their course, and I was able to collect a handful (metaphorical, not literal) of dried beans/seeds from the pods that I left on the vines to dry out.

Tennessee Cornfield Beans

Clearly not enough to make soup out of, but the Tennessee Cornfield bean is a semi-rare heirloom variety, so I'm glad to have these seeds to trade/plant next year to propagate tasty, non-Monsanto varieties.


In other news, I finally made it out to the Smokies Sunday morning to catch the Fall color before it slips away from me. Unfortunately everyone else was too, rendering the drive back a frustrating ordeal.

I've been wanting to shoot more water-related stuff in the park, so I opted for the Little River Trail, a stone's throw from Elkmont campground. This area was a popular vacationing destination prior to the establishment of the National Park, evidenced by a smattering of abandoned cabins and resort cottages, most of which were built in the 1920's, and some of which had been in use up until the 90's.

Leafy bacon.

I just cooked up the sweet potato greens we harvested from Beardsley before digging up the potatoes themselves.

They tasted like seaweed.

And a little bit like fish.

It was gross.

When the guy at our Farmers & Chefs event cooked them they tasted like leafy bacon...

Guess that's why I'm a farmer and not a chef.

You don't even know what's going on with this picture. Fast Break.

The endless summer.

Peppers! Guess what? They're perennials. Yup, you heard it right. If you protect them from frost, both sweet and hot peppers will grow and produce fruit for years. One local farmer and pepper guru has a 4-5 year old pepper tree that he claims produces as much fruit as 18 first-year plants!

So this winter the Noise Temple will be festooned with Doe Hill Golden Bells, Sweet Chocolate Bells, and some other Bell I don't know the name of. These plants are all coming from Beardsley, where the greenhouse also features a handful of the same. Why pull up and throw away perfectly healthy plants?

I'll try to keep you updated on the peppers's long journey through winter.

"Gentle Jesu, Mary's Son, be thine the wounds that heal our wounding. Press thy bloody scars to ours that thy dear blood may flow in us and cleanse our sin. Be thou in us and we in thee that we and thou may be a woundless one at last."

Reading Godric, by Frederick Buechner. Only 20 pages in and it's gone from ruthlessly snide to devastatingly poignant and back again. Looking forward to the next 150.

"Laugh till you weep. Weep till there's nothing left but to laugh at your weeping. In the end it's all one."

Sneedville camping trip

Tent city, first night.

What is camping without excessive amounts of bacon?

We did not eat fish.

35 degrees is better around a fiery blaze.

Who knew you could do that with a deep-fryer?

This afternoon Beardsley played host to a handful of local farmers and chefs as they rubbed elbows and had a free-for-all cookout with farm fresh local produce. Every once and awhile this kind of workplace benefit crops up, and I'm just lucky to have been present. Ryan and Jessica from Organacism Farms put the whole thing together, and even though Mother Nature didn't cooperate, there was a great turnout of representatives from farms and restaurants around Knoxville.

Imagine (you have to imagine since I didn't get any pictures) a throng of salivating foodies huddled under pop-up tents, waiting to get a bite of deep-fried cornish game hen, doused in fiery Aji Dulce hotsauce. Or sauteed sweet potato greens picked minuted earlier from one of Beardsley's raised beds. Or roasted fig leaf wrapped lamb belly, beer-battered white eggplant, oyster mushroom powder-coated deep-fried hard-boiled quail eggs...

Basically these guys were just going crazy with an array of meat, produce, and a deep-fryer. Lucky me.

In other news, here are some tunes I've been frequenting lately: