pepper update, Monday 7/18/16

[edenfalling]

twelve peppers, Monday, 18 July 2016



the funny leaves, one week on



the one that got mauled by squirrels. AGAIN



the pepper with fusarium wilt



mulberry seedlings. SHUN THE EVIL!


As you can see, all twelve are still alive. One (the second from the left in the windowboxes in the first photo) is even taller than its stake! The funny-looking leaves with probable chemical damage did indeed grow in weird, but the newer leaves on that plant seem fine so apparently it was one-off damage rather than a continuing thing. The leftmost windowbox pepper got squirrel-mauled yet again, losing two leaves in the process, but its stake kept it mostly upright and I was able to fill in the holes the damn animal dug around its roots.

My little fungal victim is still not dead, but not really recovering either. It is caught in a sort of zombie limbo. :/ I continue to apply fungicide around its roots.

Lastly, a picture of The Enemy (well, the other enemy. squirrels will always be the main enemy). Mulberry seedlings! They're not as prevalent as last year, for various reasons, but they are a persistent minor annoyance. I pull them out periodically and chuck them off the side of the porch.

I saw what I think are tiny buds developing at the growing tips of several peppers, but they may only be leaf-buds rather than flower-buds, and they are in any case too small for me to effectively photograph with my phone. Maybe next week!

[[original Tumblr post, for when the embedded images inevitably break]]

Comments

[heliopausa]

They look wonderfully green and sturdy - well, all bar the little wilted one. :)
Does the mulberry tree fruit?

[edenfalling]

The mulberry tree fruits like fruiting is going out of style. ...Well, usually. This year was a little slim, perhaps because of the drought.

The berries are not actually useful, for three reasons. First, birds and squirrels eat 90% of them. (I am okay with that! Last year, when I sprayed effective squirrel repellent on the tree trunk, birds couldn't pick up all the slack. This meant at least 40% of the berries fell onto my porch, where they were a dreadful squishy nuisance, and I had about ten times as many seedlings to pick out of my pepper pots.) Second, the tree was left to grow wild/as a shade tree rather than pruned into an orchard tree. It is therefore about thirty feet tall and the vast majority of the berries are too high for convenient picking. Third, the berries are white mulberries rather than red/purple mulberries, so you have to look at them from very close up to determine which are ripe and which are not; they go from solid white to a semi-translucent white rather than solid white to a deep semi-translucent magenta.

[heliopausa]

Not very promising for mulberry jam, then. Well, at least the peppers are looking good! Or most of them. :)

[edenfalling]

Nope. I thought about trying to harvest the berries my first year or two in the apartment, but I gave it up as impractical. (Even if I did successfully harvest them, I have neither the materials nor the know-how to make jam, and I'm probably allergic to the raw berries so just eating them as a side-dish isn't feasible either. *sigh*)