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.

Sowing Seeds of Corn (not weeds)

“Your mind is the garden, 

your thoughts are the seeds.

The harvest can either be flowers or weeds.”

– William Wordsworth

Don't you just love planting seeds?  There is something miraculous about it that no matter how many times I work up the soil, dig a hole, drop a seed in and cover it, I still am in awe to see a living plant pop up out of the soil from a seed.  From such a small thing comes so much!  Take the time to look at the food on your plate and realize that so much of what you are eating came from a tiny seed. 

Several weeks ago I worked up the patch of ground in the side yard.  While I had it worked up real good, I applied a good dose of agricultural lime.  I think that is going to help unlock some of the nutrients that have been tied up in the soil.  I wanted to raise this bed up since in heavy rains, the north side of this patch will flood.

The Corn Patch

There is a part of me that likes order.  According to some publications, corn is to be planted 4-6 inches apart.  I'm not going to measure each hole, but I made a guide to help me.  I found a cane walking stick in the corner of the garage that Benjamin or Russ had made in our Webelos Den quite a few years ago.

I used a Sharpie to make lines 5 inches apart on the cane pole.  I laid the pole down and made holes in the soft soil at each line.  Then I moved it forward 8 inches and repeated the holes. 

Here I have a handful of corn seeds.  See how shriveled up and dry they look? 

This year I'm planting a new type of Sweet Corn.  I enjoy planting the open pollinated, heirloom seeds and I still intend on planting them.  However, I have experienced some issues with the ears not filling out completely.  This year I found a Non-GMO hybrid sweet corn called "Gotta Have it."  I hope it lives up to its name!

Russ helped me by dropping a corn seed into each hole.

And then we filled each hole with some garden soil.

We watered it all in and in just a few days, like miracles, they popped up out of the ground with purpose.  Hopefully that purpose will be to provide our family with delicious sweet corn in about 78 days!

Now, we'll keep the corn patch watered and weeded...