Picking Pecks of Peppers

We always plant our peppers from seeds on January 1st.  We've eaten plenty of peppers all throughout the year.  Unusually high rainfall earlier in the year sickened our peppers, even causing some of them to die.  It hurt their yield.  Now that cooler weather has set in, the peppers are very happy and they are producing peppers faster than we can eat them.  That's a good problem to have, I guess.

We picked two buckets full of jalapenos the other afternoon.  We have a mild jalapeno and a hot jalapeno.  I planted them too close together and they have cross pollinated, so they are all very hot now.  Even as we picked the larger ones, the sheer weight of the smaller peppers weighed down the branches.

We've cooked with them, dried a bunch of them and eaten a whole lot of them.  We'll make jalapeno poppers again pretty soon.  That's our favorite thing to do with them.  I'll have to check our inventory of Pepper Jelly in the pantry to see if we can make more.  That's a good snack!

The sweet bell peppers are producing nicely, too.  Just the other night, we had "dirty rice" for supper.  The next evening, Tricia picked some nice bell peppers, stuffed them with the leftover dirty rice, baked them, and we had stuffed bell peppers for supper.

The Lilac bell peppers are very healthy now, too.  We like colorful things in the garden and these fit the bill nicely.  Named lilac for their purple color, these peppers are just beautiful.  They are sweet, so the taste resembles a normal bell pepper.

The peppers are full of blooms and will continue producing until the first freeze kills them.  Until then we'll continue to enjoy.  Long about the time the freeze kills the mature plants, we'll plant replacements for them from seed on January 1st and start the process all over again.