Well, the bell pepper plants which had been threatening to pop open all those flower buds have followed through, and we’ve got some actual peppers growing on them. As with the jalapenos, the first round of flowers opened up and fell off without pollinating, regardless of all my efforts to diddle them into submission. Shortly after, though, the flowers actually stated producing fruit.
Bell peppers, unlike the jalapenos which grow through the withered flower (and wear them like a sad little tutu for a while), just pop the flower off and grow from there, looking for all the world like a miniature green little fat dude backing through a tiny round doorway. I swear, the metaphor doesn’t stop there… as the tiny bell pepper continues to grow and bulge from the crown on the end of the stem, it looks for all the world like a green baby’s butt. Sadly, I have no pictures of that, but I do have some of the bell peppers looking a bit more bell peppery. The current batch are all a little larger than my thumb, and growing visibly every day.
The jalapenos have gone nuts, and each of our five plants have at least a dozen or more maturing peppers hanging from them. We decided that we’re going to let them continue maturing until they make it to the red stage, making them a little sweeter. We’ll harvest them then, along with any of the larger green ones, and do what we will with a good sized batch all at once.
Last week we had a ton of rain. In the words of my family matriarch:
Shouldn’t you be blogging about all the rain Austin is getting, rather than about zombies? If I got more rain for my drought-cursed area in one day than in the past 5 months, I’m sure I’d want to shout about it.
Here I am, mother-of-mine, talking about it. We had so much rain over the span of three days that the ground stayed happily saturated for a week, the weather dipped into the 60’s during the day (and started to feel all Fall-like), and my previously-thought-to-be-dying pumpkin vines took off and grew like kudzu on amphetamines, and started flowering.
Sadly, I have no pictures of the gorgeous, gigantic, vibrantly yellow-gold-almost-orange flowers in bloom, as they open early in the morning and don’t stay open long, and my brain being deprived of caffeine doesn’t process things like “go get the camera, numskull” very quickly at such an early time of day. Suffice to say, I do have pictures of the post-coital male flowers, and some that have yet to pop their cork — all taken quite artfully, so as to distinguish it from common garden-variety porn (I made a funny!).
Our herbs are doing well… so well in fact that I think we’re about ready to do a second harvest of both types of basil (pictured below on the right) for dehydrating in a week or two. They’re also contributing to the beautification of our little DeJockamo garden shrine, but I think that next season we’re going to have to move them into larger planters to give them space to continue growing.
The last thing we have in the actual garden (rather than in planters all around the yard) are our peanuts… the great peanut experiment of 2009! We planted four seedlings to see how they’d fare in this environment, and they grew admirably… at least above ground (we’re about to dig them up and see what’s been happening in the soil). They have done so well, in fact, that they didn’t die off when they were supposed to — which is an indication that they’re ready to dig up. They just kept on going, producing more flowers and sending more shoots into the soil. The flowers, by the way, are gorgeous.
And finally, a picture of the plant we’ve finally managed to keep alive in Persephone, a wall-mounted planter that has the soil capacity of the average mouse’s bladder, and also lives outside in partial shade and extreme heat condemning any living thing planted into it to a life of Lazarus-like death and revival every few days. Except for the aloe we planted into it four months back. It likes drier soil, heat… and apparently being root-bound, as it has not only survived, but thrived in the pot, easily doubling its size since being planted there.