Peppers to plant to pepper again

Time to look into what's happening in the garden now:

The story so far can be found out on the following pages:

Green fingers
Peppers...
We have Pollen!
Peppers swelling






At some point in April the plant pots were all taken outside onto the balcony again. The weather had cleared and nighttime temperatures were now consistently above 10 degrees Centigrade. It was just as well we had brought them in for the winter as all those put into plant pots not inside died horribly. The pictures show the situation at 21 April 2006.






By 27 April, some of the peppers had begun to redden as seen in these two pictures. We had what must be two different varieties growing on the balcony - one producing fairly regular conical fruit, the other producing more elongated and irregular, sometimes curved or cornuform. This picture depicts the conical regular fruit.




On 8 May 2006 I had the first harvest! I took one of each type of now fully ripe pepper for use in a spicy stir fry sort of thing that K was putting together. The knife is an IKEA purple knife (if you know how big this is, you get a sense of scale.










On 11 May 2006, we have a plethora of cornuform fruit ready or almost ready for the taking.










Just in time for the Eurovision Song Contest, I harvested these three peppers and took them with me to my sister's eurovision party. Jolly japes all round. Only George managed more than a couple of exploratory bites - so hot were the peppers!









Three peppers in three different stages of ripeness, shown on 22 May 2006.











Some time before 28 May 2006 I had taken to the plants with clippers to remove the unnecessary bits of plant that had been holding the peppers up while they were growing but had no role to play any more. Despite the heavy pruning, more buds were appearing regularly.




This image is from 6 June 2006 and represents peppers of both sorts, collected and given to Komni. The plants were then pruned back a hell of a long way, and we now have a second batch of peppers on the way. I will leave this second batch to use for seeds.

So - peppers from peppers to plant to flower to peppers again…

More writing about balcony-gardening when there is time.