The Case of the Jalapenos without Spice

I harvested the first jalapeno pepper a few days ago and used it in a delicious couscous salad along with chives and parsley from the garden (and a few other bought veggies). Much to my surprise, the jalapeno has no spice. Zero. Not even a hare. What's with that? Is it the seeds, or the growing conditions? How does one grow spicier peppers? You'll see in the photo here that there are more jalapenos to come, and the yellow peppers are gypsy sweet peppers. They should taste like the bell peppers we're used to, but just have a different shape.

In other news I trellised the cucumber in a pot because I read that they produce better when trellised. And I have to say, "bush" cucumber or pea for that matter, is a total misnomer. They should be called "short", because you still need to trellis them, especially the peas, which I didn't realize until too late.

The first of the tomatoes are ripening - the ones in the sunny spot. After my last post I did a major prune on the tomatoes, thanks to Christine's encouragement and link to a video on how to do it. They look rather naked now, but I think it's what they needed. I'm already plotting how I'll do things differently with the tomatoes next year.

Elsewhere in the garden, the third planting of lettuce has been picked twice now, and there is one broccoli crown left, with little shoots sprouting on the plants where I already cut the crown. The zucchinis are rotting, which I think must be due to lack of sun. I've started watering them less so we'll see. Beets are actually looking okay after a rough start, and the carrots are fantastic (we've eaten a few that I've thinned). I planted a third try to spinach and a cat or racoon already dug up the patch and pooped in it. Maybe some will survive.

I am reading Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle right now and am totally absorbed in it. Book review to come!

The case of the mysteriously different tomato plants

I just watched the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency BBC show on the plane. What fun stories with a serious thread, and really go the spirit of the books. So in this post I am a garden detective. I'm not the No. 1 though, and I have few leads in the case of the mysteriously different tomato plants.

I started five varieties of heritage tomatoes from seed. Planted one of each in a pot for the patio that gets a lot of sun. Then, having run out of space of the patio, planted one of each in the back garden bed also. I know that tomatoes need a lot of sun, and that this garden bed gets about 6 hours a day, some filtered through tree leaves, so unlikely to be enough for tomatoes. but I thought it would be a good idea to try the experiment and see what I could learn. At this stage there are more questions than answers. The top picture is the tomatoes in the not-so-sunny garden bed, and below are the tomatoes in pots on the patio. Garden claw for scale. What you can't see in the pictures is that the fruits on the patio plants are more advanced than those in the bed. But the plants in the bed are huge, like really really huge. And they are huger today than when I took this photo 5 days ago. They just keep growing while the plants on the patio basically stopped growing weeks ago. None of the fruits are getting red yet. I can't really compare how things turned out until the summer is over and there are harvests to compare, but at this point there are so many questions about the factors that are making these plants grow so differently. And perhaps the most important question at the moment is do I start pinching off all the new growth on the huge plants so they can focus on growing the fruit? Seriously, these plans are growing inches a day it seems, and producing more and more flowers. Help? Thoughts? Advice? Leads?

Broccoli salad and plans for plum jam

Now things are getting to be really a lot of fun. I feel like I've actually succeeded in having a vegetable garden that produces some real food, and it is so rewarding. Sure there are many, many failures, but we have recently picked and eaten huge, delicious broccoli as well as green beans. And there's a lot more broccoli to come.

Green beans from the little white pot (planted another bunch in the garden, and will see if they have time to fruit before the summer is over)

Can you believe it? Real broccoli...

That I used to make this salad from the "Simply in Season" cookbook.

And now to the fruit trees that I can't take total credit for, but we did do some major pruning jobs on these old, neglected trees. I did two big batches of dehydrated apples, after freezing a bunch and making some apple sauce. It's shocking how much they shrink down when dehydrated, and how easy the are to eat. All that work...

And today's task is plum jam.