A New Addition to the Raised Bed Garden

As I've probably mentioned a few times, we live down the street from a sort of permanent farmer's market.  They grow corn and loads of petunias, which they sell in giant hanging baskets.  I was drawn into their store the other day because of a giant 30% OFF LILACS AND AZALEAS! sign (woohoo for my lovely lilac).  While wandering around the store, I noticed a table with a little sign that said, FREE.  The table was covered in some sickly looking plants, mainly tomatoes of the roma variety.  When I say sickly looking, I mean practically dead, leaves shriveled, mostly-brown plants.  Call me an optimist (or unrealistic), but I decided to take home a California wonder sweet bell pepper plant.  I already have one California wonder, but it hasn't done much except get big.  No flowers, no nothing.  So, when I saw this California wonder with two wee flowers, I thought, "Why not?"

Most of the leaves had been cut off, but the flowers still grew.

I put that sad little plant into the garden on Thursday.  I watered the plants all weekend and today, Monday, I found this:

Our first bell pepper! From the saddest plant! You never know.

 Voila, the littlest pepper from the saddest plant.  The wee pepper is about the width of a nickel right now, but I just fed the whole garden it's weekly/biweekly plant food, so gourd knows what will happen to this pepper in terms of growth. 

I did do one additional thing to encourage fruit, and that is I stuck a pinkie in each of the two flowers and swapped their pollen.  You have to be very gentle doing this to peppers- the flower stems have a tendency to snap clear off of the plant. I've also heard of using a Q-tip, which I used with the cayenne peppers, with great success.

After I saw this little pepper growing, I noticed that the big California Wonder plant is starting to flower.  I guess it took the encouragement of this little plant to get him going ;)

Keep on growing,

Christine