pepper update, Monday 10/17/16

[edenfalling]

First, the general overviews: all twelve pepper plants. The bottom left photo shows the three peppers whose fruit I have picked and which are now done for the year. The bottom right photo shows the peppers that still have fruit and/or flowers. I will probably toss the reproductively finished peppers onto the compost pile (and their dirt into the garden patch at the base of my back porch) sometime within the coming week, but I feel a little bad killing them out of hand even though there's no real point to them anymore. Peppers are not, after all, a perennial plant.


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twelve peppers, Monday, 17 October 2016


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1) I have picked the peppers from these plants; they are now done for the year
2) the remaining nine peppers that still have fruit and/or flowers (or are sharing a pot with one)


The ultimate point of my pepper projects is, of course, to produce food. To that end, I have picked and chopped up two more peppers. In both cases, this was because they'd been nibbled by squirrels and those wounds were vectors for various infections by nasty gunk. I had to clean some black spots out of the interior of the first, larger pepper on Saturday, and I just cut the entire top off the smaller pepper Monday afternoon.

The baby was from the plant that got waterlogged by gutter overflow earlier in the summer. I am not sure exactly what went wrong, but its stem just shriveled up and the pepper itself went soft and funny. It was too small to bother saving, so I just chucked it into the compost bin.


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1) the rain-catcher pepper on Saturday, 15 October 2016
2) close view of the damage
3) all cleaned and chopped


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1) the squirrel attack survivor on Monday, 17 October 2016
2) closeup of the damage
3) cleaned and chopped (note the thinness of the outer walls)


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1) I added both peppers to the frozen pieces of the pepper with the fungal infection
2) and this poor baby just shriveled up and died; I tossed it into the compost bin


And now for the fruit-and-flower spam. :) The first three photos are flowers and flowers-becoming-fruit. The next six are just pepper fruits. (The water droplets, incidentally, are because it rained heavily last night and today was cloudy so evaporation was quite slow.)


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1) the Lazarus pepper, still working on its buds
2) an extensively nibbled pepper, just starting to turn flowers into fruit
3) the decapitated pepper, fruiting!!!


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1) the waterlogged pepper
2) the pepper that lost a whole branch to squirrels
3) the pepper I had to repot (because of squirrels)


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1) the sideways pepper (its branch was damaged when squirrels knocked over its pot)
2) two other peppers on the same plant as the previous photo
3) the plant that has had nothing bad happen to it ALL SUMMER


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

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

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