An incomplete list of some of the veg we've grown. Some good and some not so good.

A few seasons ago I carefully  selected, dried and stored the seeds from my recent crop of Fatalii peppers. I love the flavor and heat these peppers create and wanted to make sure that I had another successful harvest.  I germinated the seeds during the darkest part of the winter; put the embryos in new pots with wonderful starting soil and watched them grow. In mid April (after out last frost date) I put these Fatalii children in the dirt and staked them up for the season. A few months later I was surprised to see a weird bumpy orange fruit ripening on my yellow Fatalii plants. What happened? Others call this phenomenon “Pepper Joed” after growing seeds from a certain on line source and the results were not what they anticipated. I finally figured out that the Bees were visiting all my plants and the ripening fruit on my Fatallii plants had cross pollinated with the Carolina Reaper plants in the same garden bed. These peppers were good and hot but lacked the citrusy flavor t ...

Sooner or Later your beautiful green brilliant tomato plants will start to look like the pictures on the “What’s Wrong With My Tomatoes?” page. It’s just one of those things. Your gorgeous plants are off to the burn pile (I don’t put any tomato parts in the compost heap anymore- it is a disease vector for future tomatoes) Around here we can burn or if you are inclined, you can make a separate pile away from your garden or dispose of the debris at  your local landfill.

Our soil really sucks. We have a very thin layer (at best) of dirt over a few miles of red clay. Red clay has has two properties when it’s dry it sticks to  you. When it’s wet you stick to it. Solution? Amend the soil The way I’ve done this is to create Raised Beds using concrete blocks. They are pretty inexpensive and they don’t rot like the landscaping timber (Red clay is also very acidic so any organic material, even treated stuff doesn’t last)