Posted on 09/13/2013 1:04:36 PM PDT by greeneyes
In the mail today, I got these seeds: Pepperoncini (Greek) peppers that are mildly hot, and Golden Baby Belle sweet peppers, and Sweet Banana Peppers.
The directions for all the peppers say start them inside 8 weeks before planting them outdoors - that is a long time. It take 10-21 days before the seeds sprout. Maybe the grow lamp will shorten the time.
When they are available, I'll get two different dwarf actual sweet pepper plants. Don't remember the names but these plants are definitely made for containers.
Funny about that. I don’t grow berries. Only have pots which get mostly bright indirect light and grow a variety of edibles and florals. There are lots of bugs so there is no shortage of food supply.
If they’re big enough, core, slice, and simmer in brown sugar and mollasses, with a bit of lemon juice. Taste every now and then. When the bitterness is cooked away, you can use this mix the way you would regular apples in a pie filling. Or, puree and use it for applesauce or apple butter.
Some crabapples don’t have any bitterness, so those can be used as any other apple just as is.
I guess our wrens aren’t so particular. We put out some wren and bluebird houses a few years back when my dad moved in with us.
The birds moved right in.
I am so honored to be part of this band of eccentrics.
Hi, my name is Bender... Tube Bender and my current wife says I talk to my plants more then I talk to her...
If it’s a good crab, rather than an ornamental, I like to eat them out of hand, or pickled. Try adding a few to a batch of applesauce, too; it kicks the flavor up a notch. Never tried using them in applebutter.
I need to head into town, and ‘steal’ a batch; they planted a bunch of REAL, decent sized fruit, red all the way through, crab apple treess in the main park, and they are ready for the taking. Any more, they seem to be hard to come by, in most areas.
If any of us were “normal”, we would not be Conservatives; growing our own food; trying to personally and responsibly improve/enhance our own existence; nor attempting to live based upon mutual self reliance.
I may not be nuts, but I am definitely not normal!
Speaking of Toy Choi...
What I thought was all spinach was both spinach & Toy Choi; it became obvious when both went to seed. It did not look like what I had envisioned.
They come in both bush and climbing types, but the bush do better, and are easier to pick & prevent disease if you give them some support.
The pods look too much like leaves, so are easy to miss when picking if the plants are sprawled.
Also, it is too easy to break stems if they are a tangled mass.
If it ever again becomes an issue, I suggest sending “postage due” or COD to a fake address in Tijuana, with a fake return address.
I have an add-on shelf above the windshield in the truck. Late last spring, I parked it near the barn, and had the wind-wings open. A couple days later, I got in & saw twigs sticking out from that shelf, on the passenger side. A male wren had placed a stock pile there, to attract a female!
That is normal procedure for house wrens: he picks a half dozen likely spots, and builds a pile of nest building supplies in each, then hopes the love of his life will choose one of them, and be his mate. They then build the nest there, and he abandons the other sites and stockpiles.
POTTERY CHUNKS?!? Give me your address; I’ll send you all the rocks you want, mainly limestone. In fact, you’re welcome to show up with a truck.
The people who wrote those books never saw the (major national company) cannery where my grandmother & mother worked in the 1920s!
The bad ones & the ones shoveled back up off the floor went to the ketchup line! Neither of them would eat store-bought ketchup well into the 1950s.
Really, they HAVE to say that, because too many people like to push limits, and would use moldy, rotting, or otherwise grossly bad "imperfect" tomatoes. Cutting out minor blemishes or bad spots is fine, whether cooking or canning a sauce.
Last year wrens built in the grille of my Chevy truck because it sat still for a week or two, then my wife would not let me drive it because of the nest. After Mr Wren didn’t raise a family there, my truck was released to general usage again.
Welcome to the merry band of weird/eccentric gardeners on FR.
I am no pepper growing expert. Have grown some hots in the dirt, and have my Bhut Jalokia growing in 2 containers and have my first crop drying as we speak, with more peppers on the way. Bell peppers have not been easy for us. Next year we are not going to waste precious garden space trying to grow them. The banana peppers, we just stuck them in the ground and they did well.
There are some pepper growing experts on Youtube that can set you straight help you on what to do. When I start pepper from seeds, I grow them to about 4”-5” inside under the lights, but that is in Jan It’s always best to let the seedlings get a little size before going out into the world, then introduce them gradually to the outdoors by putting them in a shaded area where they can build strong stems by bending to and fro in the breeze, and getting used to the heat/humidity/sun gradually. Our soil in the ground is about 6.0ph and calcium and nitrogen are whatever a soil test tells us to add. We started with nothing and are building it up each year. County ext guy asked how we even grew anything that first year in Texas after looking at our soil test results. Soil testing by county ext service, Airport rd, tested at T A&M.
I know there are others here that grow peppers that can offer better help than I.
You helped me because you did it here. You let them get to 4-5 inches, then move them outside in a shaded area. I will plant the seeds in December, since it said start them 8 weeks before putting them out, and when they are that tall, will put them in the small outdoor greenhouse to keep them warmish and get used to the outside.
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