What’s in your vegetable garden?
There won’t be many more gardening columns as we slip into “where the sun spends the winter” and the rest of the year, too. The only thing left growing in our yard will be cactus, desert trees, and sunflowers. Hardy sunflowers. Oh, yes, peppers too, but they are just getting established.
The garden is flourishing now. Tomato plants look beautiful, and there are green tomatoes coming on. Also, lots of flowers that may fruit since I erected two sun shades over the backyard boxes to prevent the plants from getting too stressed in 100-plus weather. Eggplant transplants have grown slowly, so I don’t know if I’ll get any eggplant before it gets too hot.
It feels like an accomplishment to have grown most of my veggies from seed this year. Some seed I brought home from Italy. The problem appears that I started too late. If you want to use seeds, begin several months before you plan to put them in the ground. I did OK with lettuce, but I was late in getting tomato, pepper and eggplant seedlings planted in the ground. So for next season, I’ll start seeds in September.
Gardening is a wonderful endeavor. We are always learning, and it has provided me with greater empathy for small farmers in the United States. There are numerous variables the farmer has to contend with to bring in a crop. I worked in West Africa for two years. There, if the rains don’t come, or if the rats eat your stored seeds so that you can’t plant, you and your family are in big trouble. As a backyard gardener, I just go to a garden store and buy transplants. I have it easy.
I picked our first tomato today, an Early Girl variety. Problem is, it wasn’t very early. OK, I started the tomatoes late. A neighbor who loves chili peppers asked us if we had any ghost peppers. I checked with Vince who said they are all the rage right now. So I looked at the peppers offered in a local gardening store, and sure enough, there were ghost peppers. I planted three in a well-watered circle out front where I’ve successfully grown various chilies. That afternoon, our neighbor wanted to know how it was going. The plants look good in the shaded area, but I was not encouraged when I read more about the plant online.
Ghost peppers, Bhut jolokia, are a hybrid, a cross-bred plant, from northeast India, so one would think that they grow in really hot climates. No. We live in a really hot climate, and the ghost peppers drop their flowers when daytime temps top 90 degrees. Plants are sensitive to soil temps as well as ambient or air temperature. Oops! It will be too hot for the ghost peppers to set fruit till October or November. And then there are lots of warning about these peppers.
“In 2005, New Mexico State University’s Chile Pepper Institute in Las Cruces, found Bhut jolokia grown from seed in southern New Mexico to have a Scoville rating of 1,001,304 SHUs by HPLC.” What this means is that ghost peppers are 400 times hotter than Tabasco Sauce. Yes. Bonnie Plants, the grower who produced my plants, recommends harvesting the peppers wearing gloves and a longsleeve shirt. Goggles, too. Hey, I thought I was buying pepper plants and not uranium fuel rods.
When a fellow garden shopper asked why I was buying such hot chilies, I told her I have a neighbor who is into pain. Maybe it is better that the plants don’t flower. It may save a life.