Monday's pepper haul:
Seriously, I just harvested the Shishitos on Friday for Friday Night snack. I think I'm going to have to pickle a batch (thank you Pepper Geek for the recipe). Also featured are the first of the season red Biquinho peppers (which will also end up pickled into Sweety Peps once I have enough), and immature Jimmy Nardello, Poblano, and Shepherd's Ramshorn peppers. Harvested early and let to finish ripening to red inside because of thieving critters. Also because apparently the Poblanos are very susceptible to sun-scald? Or at least mine seem to be.
Here are two of the Shepherd's Ramshorn peppers, the one on the right was harvested last week when it was the color of the one on the left.
And here are last week's Jimmy Nardellos. The plants bore really heavily this year and I harvested as many as had started to color before the awful heat wave just in case.
Went to grab some of last year's gingerroot yesterday and:
Oops! Looks like the heat wave warmed the house too much and everything sprouted, wrinkling into unuseability in the process. Guess I'll have to rely on what I put in the freezer until this year's ginger is ready to harvest. I ran around sticking these into the dirt wherever they would fit, trying to get them into part-shade since they're an understory plant.
Also tackled about half of the sweet potato plants languishing in their tiny pots on the front porch. Got all of the decorative burgundy sweet potatoes planted in this pot I scavenged from the alley a few weeks back. Threw the one Lime Green nicotiana seedling I got to germinate (finally) in the center. I filled the pot half full with mostly-finished compost from the tumbler (chock full of earthworms!) and filled it the rest of the way with sifted recycled potting soil. Should be plenty of fertility there.
Also filled up two new bucket planters mostly the same way (had to add some dirt taken from the area surrounding the chicken run since I ran out of potting soil) and put two starts of the orange eating-variety of sweet potatoes in each. Just in case one of the vines dies, I'll still get sweet potatoes.
I also threw a white-fleshed Japanese sweet potato start into the sidewalk raised bed to take the place of another zucchini plant taken out by squash borers. The other zucchini also had them, but still looked otherwise healthy so I dug three worms out with a knife and fed them to the chickens with extreme prejudice. It's pretty obvious that the moths got to the vines before I was able to cover them with insect netting. But this final plant has two fruits set so I'm crossing my fingers the plant will survive long enough for them to make seed since it's the San Pasquale variety I got from the seed library.
I checked the tags for the dates I sowed the seed and it looks like I have enough time for another shot at it, so I sowed a six pack with Dark Green zucchini seeds (it's what I have left). I have too many problems with seed predation to sow directly, unfortunately. This time they'll be under cover from Day 1 of transplantation so it should work.
Speaking of replacements, I finally was able to transplant in the Mammoth Russian sunflower seedlings I started after someone stole a number of my black oil sunflowers. I had to hold off until the heat wave was done, so they're a little spindly. They went in the same spots behind the sidewalk raised bed and between the bucket planters of peppers. They got 8 feet tall in those spots last year and the blooms are enormous so hopefully they won't be as appealing to a young dude trying to impress his girlfriend.
The pink hollyhock seedlings are doing pretty good. I sowed the seed (collected last year from the green waste dumpsters) in between the pear tomato plants in the sidewalk raised bed after the plants I had started and transplanted back in the fall didn't survive the winter. These here in particular are larger than the other sections because they've just had the carrots in front of them until recently (now there are cucumber vines too) so got more sun than the other sections that had taller plants. Hopefully these will survive the winter, having had a whole season to establish, and will flower next year.
The soapwort I planted last year (from seed gathered from an alley plant) is finally blooming! It had no problem surviving the winter and seems to like this hot sunny spot. Just need to remember to snip off the spent flower clusters before they set seed since they can be invasive.
And finally, the mountain mint that I winter-sowed in plastic jugs is also starting to bloom. Looking forward to seeing what the bees and other pollinators think of it. Will have to seed-save so I can grow more of it this winter since that worked out well.
