Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Green Thumb Season 2 - Ep. 4

If you remember the plan from last time, while we were away from the Country we had my brother-in-law Chris come by the house to water our plants. After getting back from Europe into Philadelphia Int'l Airport, on Thursday, Chris picked us up. I asked him how long it had been since he'd been there to water the plants and he said Tuesday. I was worried. I asked how often he'd been going over and he said every couple of days. I was even more worried. We got home and I made a b-line for the deck with water in hand. Yeap, I had reason to be worried.


irregular growth

The cucumber plants were just about depleted. They require a bit of water due to the size of the fruit and since this had been a particularly hot and dry week, some of the major veins had dried up. There were a couple cucumbers that hadn't been picked yet, so we took those off and tended to the cucumber plants to see if they could make a recovery. Now this wasn't as bad as it seems, as the cucumbers didn't have much more fruit in the tank for the season. The pepper plants on the other hand had thrived; they didn't need as much watering attention, obviously, and all the plants had produced more peppers while we were gone.

Italian Sweet pepper.

Yummy pepper.

Post-trip bounty.

After a week or so passed I decided to ask Beth, who was off for the summer, to make her way to the local nursery's to see if should could find some other herbs or something that we could replace the cucumber plants with. No one in a radius of 10miles had anything; it's odd too because there's at least two months left of warmth with the way the seasons go these days. Anyways, the focus was now on the evolution of the peppers. We took a few jalapeños off and used them in different food dishes and we were pleased to find they had good kick. The Thai peppers weren't quite as strong. Their seeds packed a decent punch, but they were no where close to as hot as I hoped...and I like hot peppers.

Last weeks' chicken fajitas.

Not too much later the Thai and Yummy peppers began to mature. The Thai Hot peppers can be picked while green, but red is preferred. I'm not sure if red necessarily means the flavor and spice has matured, but why not. The Yummy peppers have a similar picking option, green or orange-yellow. We've been having the Yummy peppers in salads and the Italian sweets and jalepeño's have been included in peppers and onions sauteed up for dinner with chicken sausages, beef and chicken fajitas. Unfortunately I don't have many pics of the dishes due to how busy I've been lately, but here are some shots of the last few weeks of growth.

Week 15:

New Yummy's on the way.


Week 16:

Yummy's starting to turn.
The jalepeños have been the best performer this year.

This may be the end of this series as there's a ton of effort going into recapping Eurotrip 2011 through the Fall and editing about 10k images taken over the past month (and more coming up). Never fear, Season 3 will start when the next crop is planted!

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