more garden photos, or, someone teach this pony a new trick

Mystery squash appears to be a butternut. Fingers crossed for a hybrid
mutation that makes it grow twice as big and delicious.

Collards are tasty. Even in the heat.

The tiniest eggplant.

Cuban Black Bush Beans

Hawaiian currant tomatoes. Great for tiny salsa.

Pepper deformity. Disturbing.

Big ole Bells.

Well I've been calling this a serrano all along, but I'm now pretty sure that
it's something else. But what...

More of the mystery pepper. It's about as hot as a jalapeno (maybe it is a jalapeno?),
biggest fruits are ~4 inches, and they eventually turn red.

Flowering dill. Pickling here we come.

The mystery squash is mounting a full-on siege on the raised bed.

sow, weed, water, wait

Guys, I planted my plants. Not in containers. In the ground. Crazy, right?

So about a month ago, Levon (noroomforhipsters.com) asked if I'd be interested in helping him re-start their garden. They're lucky enough to have a big sunny yard, and had a garden that they shared with a couple other families, but when they left town and rented out the house a couple years ago, the renters mowed it over and let the bermuda grass go wild.

With talk of Levon & Ashley skipping town and renting out the house again, they saw fit to rope me in as an equal-shares protector and maintainer of the garden, with the incentive of pretty much giving me free reign.

So we tilled up a big patch of grass, and then let it sit there for a couple weeks, while I scrounged up a rag-tag bunch of plants and the weather made some characteristically unexpected turns. Then, finally, on Saturday the planets aligned, and Levon and I both had free time, plants, and a sunny day.

Six hours later there stood something that we could pretty unashamedly call a garden. A pair of mounded beds full of peppers and tomatoes, a nearly level raised bed (without the soil to fill it, as of yet), a fledgling bramble of raspberries and blueberries, and brick-lined pathways connecting it all.

It is, at the very least, a start, and will hopefully continue to push back the lawn, until we're ding-dong-ditching zucchini on every porch within a mile radius.

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!

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.