Caliente

Isn't this the cutest little thing you ever saw?

It's the first habanero pepper. While the other pepper plants have been setting fruit for several weeks now, the habanero plant has stubbornly refused to even flower. We did read that habaneros take longer than other peppers. We're growing a variety called Caribbean red--heat index of 400,000 Scoville units. That's C-A-L-I-E-N-T-E!

Did you know that these peppers are named after La Habana, the capitol of Cuba, known in English as Havana? My dad always kept a glass jar in the fridge. The jar contained vinegar, habaneros and whole garlic cloves. Sometimes olives or pearl onions would be added. On occasion mom would dip into the jar and pull out a few garlic cloves to add to whatever she was cooking. But mostly the jar was my dad's idea of snack food.

--Curmudgeon

Battening down the hatches

We're waiting for our first windstorm of the season--expecting winds 20-30 mph with gusts up to 40. That's half of what we got last year during the December 14th "Hanukkah Eve" storm. Nevertheless, 20-30 mph winds can make inanimate objects come to life! During a bit of a let up in the rain I ran out and put in the garage anything that would be likely to fly away--patio furniture, empty pots, etc. I found the dahlia tubers drowning in one of the empty containers. I also picked the remaining peppers--another 3 dozen! The first batch I picked did ripen to red sitting on the kitchen counter. Hopefully this batch will too!

I took this picture under our newly installed track lighting! Now we can read at the kitchen table--and see what we're eating too. We've been thinking about installing some kind of light over the table ever since we moved in. However, track lighting involving hardwiring sounded too overwhelming. But this weekend Wing Nut decided this was one project she wanted to cross off her list. WiNu rocks!

Around 2 the rain stopped completely and the sun came out. Yippy! A sun break! I dropped everything and headed out with Diva Dog for our walk. The sun only stayed with us for a couple of blocks. The leaves were whirling and whooshing and whizzing by! But we managed to catch a few pretty ones. We made it back just in time to see the neighbor's patio furniture start to fly away, oh my! And while listening to the radio just in the past 20 minutes we've gone from 4,000 homes without power to 10,000.

Peppers

It's a pretty good pepper harvest! Over 3 dozen picked and about 1 dozen still on the plants.


HOW TO STUFF A PEPPER
by Nancy Williard

Now, said the cook, I will teach you
how to stuff a pepper with rice.

Take your pepper green, and gently,
for peppers are shy. No matter which side you approach, it's always the backside.
Perched on green buttocks, the pepper sleeps.
In its silk tights, it dreams
of somersaults and parsley,
of the days when the sexes were one.

Slash open the sleeve
as if you were cutting a paper lantern,
and enter a moon, spilled like a melon,
a fever of pearls,
a conversation of glaciers.
It is a temple built to the worship
of morning light.

I have sat under the great globe
of seeds on the roof of that chamber,
too dazzled to gather the taste I came for.
I have taken the pepper in hand,
smooth and blind, a runt in the rich
evolution of roses and ferns.
You say I have not yet taught you
to stuff a pepper?
Cooking takes time.

Next time we'll consider the rice.

Wow! Have we got peppers!

Italian relleno

Tiburon

Astry

The plants are just bending over with the weight of all those peppers!

Today is a very gray and rainy day. We've been having a rather wet and cool summer--the coolest and wettest since we moved here. Usually we get almost no rain all summer long. This August we've had 1 or 2 rainy days a week and the temps have been hovering in the 70s. Already the days are markedly shorter and the nights are getting cooler. In an attempt to get as many peppers to full size and to turn red, I've started pinching off any new flowers that I see. I'm hoping we get a mini heat wave in the next week or so.

Peppers and more peppers!

Last week was very cool and rainy. This week we've had a couple of days in the 80s and the peppers are responding. We have more peppers than we can count!

Here are some pictures of the garden patch next to the patio. We didn't do a veggie garden this year due to sewer problems we had back i n January. Instead, we planted some seed packets we had. The nasturtiums are doing really well. Next to the purple potatoes (in the pot) you can see some little deep red flowers. These are corn flowers.

At the other end of the garden patch are the rhubarb and bronze fennel. Wing Nut is stilll apologizing to the rhubarb for having said it was dead and we should yank it out. It did look pretty sad when R & N first brought over the cuttings from their garden. And it did die back pretty completely before springing back to life.

The sedum on the hillside garden is starting to turn pink. It took some serious persistance to convince Wing Nut to put in some sedum. We found this dark purple sedum at our local Fred Meyer. It's called "postman's pride" for the Belgian postman who found it growing in his garden.

This stump sits at the bottom of our hillside garden. Wing Nut captured the play of light one evening as the sun was setting.

My mommas have melons!

The melons have absolutely nothing to do with our garden, but since Annoying Little Creature struck a pose and the title line instantly popped into my head, I decided to run with it. Melons were on sale at our grocery store this weekend.

It's a perfect sunny summer day. The Blue Angels are in town for Seafair. We heard them thundering by overhead earlier today. Seafair is a huge local summer festival that takes place around Lake Washington. Besides the air show there is also the Chevrolet Cup which features hydroplanes, the fastest boats in the world, racing along the surface of Lake Washington. They are freaky looking crafts.

Here's the weekly pepper update. They are big! I bet they'll start turning red this week. It turns out that all the varieties we put in will ripen to red. We can't get over how big the plants have gotten. The peppers we grew last year never got half this size.

Any guesses as to what's growing in the pot with the pretty lavender flowers? It's purple potatoes!

This week the hibiscus bloomed on the hillside garden. It was spectacular.

And then there is the ribbon grass... Well, we said we'd be sharing gardening fiascoes too. The ribbon grass hasn't become a fiasco quite yet. But we are planning on removing it this evening, before it does become a fiasco! It's growing way too fast and we fear it is living up to it's classification as a noxious weed. We have some lovely variegated sage to put in it's place.

We have peppers!

One of the Italian Sweet Relleno plants has two peppers and one of the Bulgarian Chervena Chushka plants has one pepper. And ALL of the plants have lots of flowers that will hopefully produce more peppers!

And the hillside garden continues to amaze. The lobelia are blooming!

I hope the peppers enjoy this heat!

I hope the peppers are enjoying this heat because I'm certainly not!! Ugh. 90+ degrees in Seattle?? The East Coast had hot summers. The blast furnace prairie plains had very hot summers. Seattle is not supposed to have hot summers! So today I'm very grateful that I'm not a plant! Okay, there are many days when I'm happy I'm not a plant, but that's another story...

The peppers seem to be growing and there are more buds and some flowers now on the Italian Sweet Peppers. Ivette said she waters the box daily as the six little plants are really soaking up the water. Here are some new pictures of them. The plants are now between 8 and 9 inches tall. We should have measured them previously, but didn't. Oh well. Trust me - they're growing!

It's amazing what the right tools for the job will do. Last summer we purchased a 50 ft hose to replace the one the previous tenants left behind. Well, apparently, 50 feet is just not long enough to reach the end of the garden bed or the top of the hillside garden. Curmudgeon complained that the bronze fennel and rhubarb in the garden patch and the various plants on the hillside were not getting enough water. We recently bought a 75 foot hose and she is able to not only reach the top of the hillside garden, but also the spot where I park the car! I wonder if she'd hose down the car if I sprinkled a few flower petals on it? It could really use a bath! But I digress. One of the plants on the hillside is something we planted 2 or 3 years ago. We no longer remember what it is and cannot find the tag for it. But it is blooming more beautifully this year than any previous year! I think the longer hose and better watering is really making a difference. Here's a picture of the mystery plant. If anyone can identify it - please let us know!

Getting Started

One sunny Saturday in July Curmudgeon had an idea. "Let's set up a blog so that Wing Nut's parents can see how their gift is progressing." In April B. and L. sent us an EarthBox. We couldn't decide what to put in the box so nothing got planted until the 4th of July. We finally decided to plant peppers: 2 Italian Sweet Relleno, 2 Chervena Chushka (sweet), 1 Ancho Tiburon (hot) and 1 Astry (hot).