Garden Gossip

I’m sure you’re asking yourself So, Diana how is the garden? Well, good and bad. My largest, nicest bell pepper suffered from sun scald and then got attacked by some malicious, opportunistic insect that took advantage of its weakened and pulpy state, so the pepper had to go. It hurt me to take it off the plant. Literally, it was hard to get off and I had to go and get scissors to finally separate it from the plant.

And then I had to compost it. It killed me because this was the first little pepper button that formed and gave me hope the plants weren’t just mocking me. I was very proud of that pepper, it gave me hope about my legitimacy as a Gardner and then it died. I had other peppers though and that helped comfort me through my loss. The alpha pepper is gone but beta pepper and it’s little friends were still there. The plants have set more since than and so the loss of that one sting a little less. Five of the six plants have formed buttons and four of the six have set legitimate peppers. Plant 6 is still mocking me. Mock, mock, mock. Mocking bastard, I’m about to compost it. And I won’t feel bad about it. Ha! Take that lazy, mocking pepper plant.

I was feeling pretty secure about their progress to maturity until I came home and found that one was either very premature or it committed pepper suicide. I blame the mocking pepper plant, the Mean Girl of the garden. I came home after work and went to check on how everyone was doing and I found that one of them had snapped it’s own stem and was on the ground. It took scissors to take the other one off and this one just jumped off the plant. Popped right off and it was delicious, the bad feeling life left in it’s pepper mouth was not reflected in it’s taste. I hope knowing that posthumously improved its self esteem.

And playing with a setting on New Camera, the “food” setting, here it is being pretty tasty, thus filling it’s pepper destiny. I know there are those that prefer red bells to green, but this one was crunchy and sweet and it smelled Divine even in it’s very young green state.

The tomatoes for their part of rallying. The large tomatoes are coming back after producing six good sized specimens and three smaller ones. I wish they were coming in like they did before,in clusters, but the one at a time thing works for me just as well. The remaining fruits don’t have the same blossom end rot issues that took two of them early one. Actually, they are looking happy. Knock wood. The smaller variety is still producing hugely. I wish there was more that could be done with the smaller tomatoes, especially since I don’t eat raw tomatoes, but chopped and cooked they do make a nice addition to food, they are the redness in the pepper dish above.

The single eggplant is still an only child despite the multiple eggplant plants still in the ground. It keeps growing and developing and I’m not completely sure that it is not some dwarf variety since it all ready has a very nice purpleness to it and it looks just like a full sized eggplant, only smaller. I don’t know anything about eggplant husbandry and the books don’t talk a lot about how big they are supposed to get. I tried to get a picture of it with the old camera but it didn’t turn out and I didn’t get a chance to try to see if it would get over its camera shyness and thus be more photogenic with the New Camera. It looks like an eggplant, only smaller.

The cukes keeping cuking along. The vine is just covered with female blossoms and I would be thrilled if even half of them ended up pollinated, but sadly, since the plant seems have worked overtime producing female blossoms this time around and forgot about the need for pollination, for which we need male blossoms.. We also need bees and there are fewer bees than there are male blossoms! It’s not looking good for more mature cucumbers at this point, but maybe when I’m doing my morning visit with them I’ll get a nice surprise. You know what’s going to happen? I’m going on vacation in a couple of weeks and the plants are just waiting for me to go out of town to really start producing like gangbusters. The six pepper plants are going be bent under the weight of their fruits, the tomatoes of both varieties are going to go into over drive and get ripen dozens of fruits simultaneously and of course the eggplants are going to make bushels of eggplants and the cucumbers are going to go crazy...

While I’m out of town!