...of Pickled Peppers

 Peter Piper Picked a Peck 

of Pickled Peppers.  

And when you have a peck o' peppers, its time to get pickling.

I am using my Havasu peppers for refrigerator pickles.  Now last year I ended up eating these fresh with hummus.  They have a nice thick wall and were not particularly hot.  Their cone shape makes them perfect to slice up for scooping dip.   This year they are hotter and I haven't enjoyed them fresh.  Last year I planted them intermixed with Sweet Banana Peppers.  There is a rumor out there that if you plant your sweet peppers and your hot peppers together, that the sweet will be hotter and the hots will be sweeter.  That would certainly be true if the plants cross pollinated and you planted the seeds. This year it is probably just the weather, but that is how rumors get started.  Maybe next year I will buy another pack of Banana Peppers and see...

Anyway, I have all of these (too) hot peppers and I had intended to try pickling them for my husband.  I chose a random recipe off the internet which used ingredients I already had on hand and hit paydirt on the first try.  These peppers are awesome pickled and they have been a big hit here for snacking with friends and neighbors for the past few weeks.  From the beginning I put a little twist on it of my own.

My ingredient list for one pint is:

1/2 cups white vinegar

1/2 cups apple cider vinegar

1/4 cup sugar

1 teaspoon mustard seed

1 teaspoon celery seed

1 teaspoon of pink peppercorns

Mix the ingredients and bring to a boil.  Pour the liquid into a jar of peppers sliced in spears or rings.

I forgot the sugar in the first photo.  Sugar is very important.  The brine is wonderfully sweet, then you get the fresh crunch of pepper and finally it socks it to you with the hhhhhot.  The amount of hot depends on how much of the seeds and pith you remove when you are slicing your peppers.

The addition of Brazilian Pink Peppercorns was an inspired choice based on a pickle kit I've used in the past for dilly beans.  I can't get that mix anymore and was thinking I would just recreate it.  So I bought pink peppercorns.  I haven't gotten around to trying the horseradish beans and I have all these peppercorns...

I make these as refrigerator pickles because I like the fresh crunch.  There is no reason why you couldn't water bath can these to make them shelf stable.  I feel that the real merit of refrigerator pickles whether they are peppers or dill spears or dilly beans is that they are garden fresh and oh so crunchy.  My husband has declared these the tastiest peppers ever and they are so easy.

Moving Things

 It is finally getting to the time of year where I can move perennials around again.  The weather has been mild and we just got a good soaking rain.  Its time to start dealing with this blank slate.

The bed to the right had become quite crowded and was being used as a temporary storage place for a couple of things. Over the past couple of years, if I had something that I wasn't sure what to do with I would stick it there.  Some things worked and will stay.  Some things worked too well and outgrew their space.  I decided to start with the Peony which became too tall and wide to look right up front.  I will also be relocating the apple tree next to it and there was a Candytuft that was being crowded out so that came out too.

I put the Peony in front of the corner post which will come in handy of the Peony gets very tall and needs to be anchored to something, and the Candytuft went in front of a rock (to the left)

I also marked the center spot where I will put the apple tree and began working up the soil where I want to reseed the lawn.  Next year I will consider some low growing color for the front edges.  I call the area to the right "the spring garden" because there are a lot of Daffodils and Primrose and the Peony was also an early bloomer.  I usually plant Marigolds along the front to the left, but I want some perennial summer color in front of the green shrub backdrop on both sides.  That's just a whole lot of plain ole green.

The End of Sweet Corn

This week I picked the last dozen ears of sweet corn and froze it.  It held well on the stalk, but was beginning to lose a bit of its sweetness.  It was still very good, but more ordinary than what I like to put on the table as "corn on the cob".  I again got four dozen from one raised bed.  I had thinned the plants down to about 65 plants.  Some plants tried to produce a second ear but they were later and didn't amount to anything so I removed them from the plants.  There were also some plants that just didn't produce early enough and those ears (about a dozen) were late to the pollination game so I composted them as well.

You can see that these ears are quite mature.  We prefer them that way because the flavor is more developed.  The pollination was absolutely excellent.  We had eaten three dozen ears as corn on the cob, which was as much corn as we wanted for several weeks.  The husks on these was actually beginning to fade to tan.  Picked at the last minute.  This stage is perfect for cutting off the ears and went right into the freezer.  They say this variety, Gotta Have It, and sH2 super-sweet hybrid variety, retains its flavor in the refrigerator for three weeks.  That would have been an interesting experiment had my fridge not been full of cucumbers!  From Gurney's website:

Gotta Have It has tender kernels with a rich, oh-so-sweet flavor and an incredibly long shelf life – over 3 weeks when refrigerated in its husk! The kernels are slow to get starchy, and they retain their sweet flavor even when frozen. The flavor holds up for a wide range of maturity, so you have a longer window of harvest than with many other corn varieties. The 7-1/2 ft. tall plants are shorter than the average corn, but just as strong as field corn. If given enough room, it will produce up to 3 ears per stalk. It's a very productive variety.

I have heard that farmstand corn in our area is between 70 cents and a dollar an ear this year.  Here in my garden it certainly was a good year for sweet corn.

Dahlias and Annuals

August and September really are the most beautiful months for annual flowers.  We all start early and want them to look this amazing in May and June when gardening is fresh for the year and we are longing for some color.  But we have to wait.

I am beginning to start more of my annuals from seeds and it is so rewarding to know that these were the same tiny plants that were in the basement under lights early in spring.  So full of promise.

Century Mix Celosia
Started from Seed

 

Coleus Giant Exhibition Mix
Started from Seed

The dahlia bed is looking amazing.  There is an awful lot of deep green foliage in there.  One might think I went a little too heavy on the nitrogen.  But it is also full of buds and blooms.  They are just now hitting their stride.  I am also pleased to note that my care and planning to get the tallest plants in the center of the bed paid off.  The shorter varieties are on the outside where they can be fully enjoyed and not lost in the jungle.  I have eleven varieties in this bed blooming and three more varieties still to bloom.

Dahlias
with Super Hero Marigolds and Celosia (started from seed)

Summer's End

Peaches and Dreams

Cornell Bronze

Spartacus

Begonias started from tubers

Queeny Lime Red Zinnias and Madame Butterfly Bronze Snapdragons
Started from Seed

A pretty good showing, overall.

This is the time of year when there is not a lot to be done in the garden except enjoy the flowers and wait for frost.  There is a lot of work ahead when we clear everything out for winter.

But for now, we will just enjoy to show while it lasts.

One of those days

Very rarely I draw a complete blank on what to title a blog post.

This is one of those days.

The lettuce has done really well and last week I began using leaves for sandwiches. While lettuce needs consistent water I found earlier this year that the butterheads did not do well with a lot of direct water down in the leaves (rot), so each day when I water I take the shade cloth off and water between the plants with my water wand.  There is a volunteer cucumber in there.  I hate to pull it.

 

I am still covering the cantaloupes each night to keep them from cooling too much.  This has been a mild summer and we have already had night time temps in the low 50s,

I finally stripped all of the available beans off and have been freezing them.  I keep watering the plants because there are still some new beans developing at the top and I want to encourage the vines to keep trying.

The green beans are not easy to photograph on the vine.  But they're in there!

I usually pick them slimmer than this but wow, they look awesome.  And they are not tough or stringy.

Another thing that is difficult to photograph is a territorial bird.  The hummingbirds have been very active this week, and now we have finches.

I'm a pepper, he's a pepper...wouldn't you like to be a pepper too?

The gold finches have been working on the sunflowers.  There are sometimes as many as three brightly colored males maneuvering around trying to claim the food source for themselves.  In the mean time the females eat in peace.

Always on the wing

The finches are quite shy and I have to sit quietly about thirty feet away, which does not make for dramatic photos.

The female is sitting on a flower on the right side of the picture.

Today I found a little powdery mildew on my zucchini plant.  I removed the affected leaves.  It will be a long time before it damages the overall health of the plant.

The vegetable garden is looking a little dry and weary, but there is still plenty of food in there.

I picked a few small cantaloupes yesterday.  They had slipped on their own but were small and ordinary.

The best is yet to come out of the melon patch.

Still tidy.

Being Watched By A Fox

We were sitting out on the deck today trying to block some of this persistent wind when we had a visitor.

The tall grass at the edge of the lawn was pretty good camouflage.

What she was really looking for was probably field mice.

But she was also a bit concerned about what we were up to.

Even 30 yards was a bit much for the cell phone zoom

She watched us for awhile. just a pair of ears in the grass

 

Then off home to her den.

Tidying Up

Yesterday I finally tore out the tired looking Cucumber vines and prepped the bed for next spring.

There were still a lot of nice cucumbers in there.

 

I had one volunteer potato plant

Which yielded enough to make a potato salad.

I have been eating tomatoes for weeks from two other tomato plants but my PaPaw's variety is about to bury me in tomato sandwiches.