Spiky Cucumber

Either this is a weird variety of cucumber, or it will grow out of the worst of the spiky bits.  I had no idea the plant was growing anything- I nearly pulled it up because it looked so sad.  Only time will tell!

Stay sweet,

Christine

Green Pepper Failure

Turns out that the sickly little California Wonder pepper plant didn't have enough leaves to produce a healthy vegetable.  This sad little vegetable fell off the plant half-way to its transition to red.  It never got bigger than a clementine.  Oh well...

Better luck next time =)

Christine

Great Heights

Uh so.. maybe I need to learn to be less awesome at growing tomatoes.  As you can see from this photo, the tallest bits of tomato plant are well over 6 ft tall.  Thankfully all of the fruit is currently growing in the areas under 6 ft... for now.  Already the topmost bows are flowering which means that fruit is not long off.  If you look carefully, you can see a green tomato hanging out in the top right-hand corner of the door frame in the picture.  That's about 4 ft off the ground. 

My fiance says that I'm taking my blog's name too literally. 

Start small, grow tall!

Christine

PUMPKIN

I PLANTED A PUMPKIN PLANT WELL TWO PLANTS AND LOOK WHAT I HAVE NOW YES IT IS A PUMPKIN. 

AHHH.

There's a fungus among us.

See that white powdery nonsense on the sad leaves?  That would be a moldy, nasty fungus.  I'll be spraying it with a vegetable-friendly fungicide, but I already had to pull up one of my zucchinis because it had such a bad fungal infection.

This kind of fungus can occur when it rains a lot and the leaves get wet in a humid environment.  The humidity prevents the leaves from drying out and hairy leaves like pumpkin, zucchini, and cucumber get moldy and then die.   Heavy rains followed by humidity?  Why, you just described Maryland's climate to the T.

Stay dry,

Christine

The Peppers of Leggett Farms

California Wonder bell pepper from the craigslist sale in May.

After making me feel like a terrible gardener for months, my pepper plants finally decided it was time to make some peppers.  As you can see above, that bell pepper is well on its way to being on my plate.  The healthy bell pepper plant has 3 peppers growing on it right now, the other two being much smaller than the one pictured above.

Click for more peppers!

Humbled by Cilantro

I probably should have read up on how to grow cilantro.  Apparently cilantro flowers pretty young in its life and, once it flowers, the leaves lose their flavor and it stops growing.

I love flowers.. normally.

There are all sorts of techniques for delaying flowering.  If I'm honest, I don't even really like cilantro that much.  It's not really worth it to me to grow something so short lived and fussy.  Apparently the dried seeds from the flower are delicious as well, so I'll probably harvest the seeds and then call it quits on cilantro for good.

Fun fact: Cilantro is the same as coriander.  Two names, same plant.

Re-Re-Re-Roses

Time for a break from regular vegetable posts.  About a month ago, the last rose on my rose bush dropped to the ground and the tips of the plant turned purplish read.  "Oh no!" I exclaimed.  "What is wrong with my one and only rosebush? Is it a blight? Is the soil too acidic? Is it too much nitrogen, is it not enough nitrogen?

Well, if plants could talk, mine would have said..

Woohoo!

Awesome.

Seeing Even More Red

Four. Four cayenne peppers.  So, what do you do when you have 4 freshly picked cayenne peppers?  You string them up and dry them!  Once they're all dried up I'll chop them up super finely and they will be red pepper flakes.  Stringing up the peppers is kind of a no-brainer.  All you need is a needle, thread, clear tape, a sun-facing window, and, well, the peppers. 

Seeing Red

!!!

The first tomatoes are almost ready!  They're very nearly perfect.  You may notice that the one on the left has some brown cracks near the stem.  That can happen when you over-prune the plant and cut back the leaves that protect the fruit from sunlight.  Oops.  It's harmless, just ugly.

I've already decided what I'm going to use the fruit for-  caprese salad!