Can This Garden Be Saved?

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My focus is all about reducing cost and labor in the future. I tell you what, this body is getting old, and if I don't find ways to cut corners and achieve either the same or better, I'm going to be crying "Uncle" from some hammock in a very cheap area south of the Border, trying to live on 4o bucks a month and learning to love, and I mean REALLY love, rice, beans, and naked chickens hanging from questionable tin roofs.

One of last weeks projects was to see if we can bring any of the garden in with us to live through the winter and get a head start next year. I've known that peppers are actually a perennial, in tropical climates, so they can be saved in a pot indoors. I will do that as soon as I'm done harvesting peppers.

I've been also taking pinchings and cuttings from just about everything. I have simply never been good at making them grow, but I've certainly been doing a lot of practicing this month.

Here are some failings. These little plants never thrived up there, but they were tough. It took me 4 years to kill them, but they finally died completely about year ago. So I figured it might be time to dump them out.





Do you remember the houseplant I grew so frustrated with, that we whacked it off and stuck the branches in a vase? That was 6 months ago.

Some of those branches were still alive and had grown roots.









So, not having a clue what to do with them, I laid them to rest in this pot.





And covered them up.





Then refreshed myself with a blueberry, strawberry, banana smoothie.





Since I was in a transplanting and cutting mood, this little grass-snuggling-errant from the compost bucket caught me eye.....





Nah. Don't go crazy girl!

The first week of September I planted these lemon seeds. And after about 2 weeks I had a little lemon tree!





As of today, I have a 7 tree lemon grove, and my tangerines and key limes are just about to break free from the soil that buries them, and reach for warm blue skies in Florida. Boy, are they in for a surprise.





And the ginger roots I planted are doing well!





Here are some philodendron (those are easy, except for the time I failed at that, too) I am sprouting for friends, the celery heads are doing well, and..... I'm not sure what else is there in the tiny drag-and-drop view I see. I'm going blind.





So now I'm heading down to the garden to take tomato, pepper, and eggplant cuttings. There's that evil wild amaranth with all the spikes and billions of seeds on every branch.





The tomatoes are feeling better now that the weather cooled off, but it's too late to get much from them. Next year I'll set them up a little better.





I end up with a few tries at tomatoes.









Some peppers.









And the missing giant Jalapeno made a marvelous home for the eggplant I decided to give another shot at life.









The ristras are still coloring nicely.





A special treat, a couple of latent watermelons to enjoy.





I've found my mind wandering more and more to how nice it would be to have a thermal, double-paned, glass greenhouse built all along the south side of a home, about 10 feet wide and 75 feet long. You close it off to the rest of the house, keep it toasty warm, maybe add a few grow lights, and you've got a perfect garden to grow things all year round. Nice seating areas, a fountain, yada-yada. No more of this seasonal prepping, planting, harvesting, and preserving madness. Open it up and cool it off when you can plant a small garden outside...

ah........





Minus the pool.
Maybe.

Reality calls.

~Faith

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Ristras! - August 24, 2010

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Have you seen those gorgeous dried pepper bunches, in intense red colors anywhere before?

Well, these are not them.

These are semi-gorgeous ones.

Last year I learned to braid onions and this year I attempted to make ristras. Of all the plants we grew this year, of course the peppers are producing the most. I have the hardest time letting anything go to waste, which is why I was eating about 2 melons a day for a few weeks.

Well I've got peppers coming out of my ears. You can only use so many of them.

Bell peppers





Anaheim peppers





Sweet bananas





Hot bananas





I apparently forgot to give the Jalapenos their 15 minutes of fame. And I really miss having the beautiful purple peppers I had last year. Those were the loveliest peppers and blossoms!

I also had rafia. Even better than string!





Here's how I did it.

I first pulled out a rafia string and doubled it for stringth. Get it? String-th? Pretty clever, eh?





Get three peppers in a bunch, with stems long enough so that the spicy buggers don't whisper peppery little insults to one another in Spanish about you as you attempt to lasso them.





With a little tail of rafia, so you have pretty raffia tails all through the ristra, wrap the stems tightly two or three times.





Then take the longer, looped end and go down, between two peppers and back up again.





Pull snugly, and you have your first three strung up.





Get three more peppers.





Do the same thing to them, with the long end of the string, maybe about an inch higher.





Draw that string down again to bring the string back up through two peppers. Or one, depending on how you look at it. I never did figure that part out, but you eventually get the hang of it and it doesn't seem to matter whether you know if it's one or two or not.





Pull it up snugly and you've got your second tier.





I kept tying on extra strings as I went up. On later models, and there have been a lot of them, I took to tying all my strings together before I began, making sure to leave each joint with about 5 inches of rafia string on each side of the knot, just to be all pretty and everything.

This is my first one. I later decided that I liked doing about 36 peppers per ristra, or twelve sets of three on each.






And after I'd done three of them, I hung them together, braiding the top of the strings. I am trying to decide if you are supposed to braid the part of them that actually have peppers on them, but I've been so busy with this first stage that I haven't bothered with that yet.





I currently have about 20 of these hanging around my kitchen. Some are on the pantry door, some on my baker's rack and some on dining room chairs. And the peppers are still coming!

I want to let the rest turn red on the plants before bringing them in. I hope they don't rot first. But they are a bit heavy to do while still green, and that makes them a bit more awkward to string up. These are slowly turning red, but I don't think they are as pretty as when they redden on the plant.

By the way - rotten peppers smell really bad. Just so you know.

~Faith

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