Have you ever seen a pepper seed? If you’ve had crushed red peppers shaken on your Italian food, you’ve seen the small whitish yellow seeds; the crunchy non-red parts of the seasoning.
They are very small – not carrot seed small, but almost four times smaller than a squash seed.
We do have little tunnel diggers in our yard so we plant each seed separately in its very own little cup. These sprout into two tiny leaves holding the seed coat above them like a rocket punching through the atmosphere. Then we have sprouts! (the picture below show a mix of tomato and pepper sprouts)
We planted our second wave of pepper sprouts into a close bed of 4′ by 4′ with just enough spacing between each one for the plants to grow. They have a few small branches at this point as the picture below was taken about three weeks after transplant and about five weeks from sprouting.
Here they are seen with several little peppers hanging off of their branches. Can you spot them?
We’ve had one supper of stuffed peppers over rice, I harvest one to chop up and toss in my eggs or leftover rice for second breakfast, we even used some to make a salsa along with our fresh tomatoes!
I’m loving the peppers from our garden! (And both Lucas and Thea eat them right off the plant – at least Lucas will wait until they are big!)
When we grow our garden, we come across some interesting plant discoveries (probably because seeds are lost by little helpers in odd places) and have found some amazing co-growing companions.
This tomato was just found in the lily patch and we potted it as it was before the last frost and we wanted the free tomatoes! – no one knew what variety it was until the fruit came about. Turns out it is a sweet cherry tomato like the ones we like to get from Curries’ Market as Lucas’ favorite snack picks.
That is one little plant that has produced nearly a hundred tomatoes (most of which Thea has eaten green) – that is a side effect of allowing a toddler to help in the garden. She sees us eating things we pull off of bushes and out of the ground so why can’t she? Instead of puckering her face and wanting to know why the tomato is sour, Thea licks her lips and says “yum!” to little green tomatoes.
Another hidden plant is this one. He is protected by this huge wild plant in the tobacco family.
It isn’t a proper tobacco plant like those cultivated for cigars and such, but is a weed from the same family. It has stood guard in the same spot for three years . We trim it back to a 1′ stalk as the foliage dies in the late winter, but it grows back up to 6′ in a thick bush of shade. (Right now, the very tops are easily 8′ up!) This pairs excellently with tomatoes around because of two things: #1 tomato worms that can decimate a tomato plant almost overnight prefer this wild tobacco! So all the bugs get on these fine fat leaves for easy seek, squish, and destroy missions (Lucas is the bug catcher squisher most of the time). Our chickens won’t eat said worms so in order to keep them from eating away our tomatoes, we squish them. #2 It also grows tall at the same time as the tomatoes begin to fruit, providing filtered shade from the Florida sun. Awesome.
Then there are the little treasures like tiny citrus trees sprouting from the compost we lined around the garden bed!
A few carrot tops placed around make for beautiful parakeet snacks and pest repellent for tomatoes. Doubled with the onions (the root sides of green onions replanted), these pop up in “expected” locations.
Another fun thing are the wild foods that get cultivated along with our planted foods. Wild beets, those come from the undigested seeds from the Guinea Pig and Rabbit food, sprout around many of our plants. They attract the greens-eating bugs who love their leaves more than buttercrunch lettuce! The chickens eat not only the bugs but also the wild beet greens. Minuit and the Guinea Pigs love the wild beets.
Pusley, Spanish Needle, and Dollar Weed are excellent rabbit and Guinea Pig treats. They are all edible for humans too (along with our pansies and bougainvillea) and make a yummy greens mix for stews (Shhhh!). Pop in Rattlesnake Weed tubers and try that (chickens love them). We discovered bougainvillea is edible for the mammals in our house and safe for our avian pets. Although it is like a potato, as only part is edible. For a potato, it is only the root which is edible. For a bougainvillea, the leaves and flowers are edible. The thorns and stems contain a mildly toxic sap that causes upset stomachs and can cause dermatitis in birds.
Florida pusley
Pennywort (dollar weed)
bougainvillea
Kimberly said I can’t forget the Sweet Potato – that was one vine in the pot now it’s on the ground too & we’ve been harvesting greens from it (they are super sweet like a spinach-beet)
I love learning about and passing on this fun knowledge to my children. Once Jillian remarked, “cool, there’s so much food I’m stepping on all day!” I am a little concerned that Thea will be like her Uncle Buddy and try to shock people with “what a beautiful flower!” as she chomps on a pansy, rose, or bougainvillea flower. But that hasn’t happened… yet.
Today Louis, Thea, and I spent hours clearing the blight from our tomato bushes in the faint hope that we can eradicate the fungus or at least keep it away from the healthy tomatoes until they are harvested.
Blight starts harmlessly enough – it looks like this:
Blight on the edge of a Tomato Leaf looks like squiggly bug lines
Blight on a wild beet (rabbit food) looks like dust from chalk
Then it causes the leaves to curl up and die and produces brownish spots on the skin of the tomato fruit. If you open the tomato fruit at the early stage, they appear to not be damaged inside. However, shortly the tomato blight spreads to cover the fruit in a thick brown layer and will start to look shriveled; in reality, they are rotting from the outside in. Gross. Yes. Totally.
You can prevent it with fungicides. (we are well past that) You can destroy the plants and NOT use that area for planting tomatoes for the next two seasons – sometimes more!
We chose the in-between. We hope this works because there are so many big beautiful fruits not yet affected and looking gorgeous! We cut back all of the blighted parts of the plants (sourced the blight infection from a load of mulch) and burned them (okay, dumped them in the fire pit waaaay away from the plants).
Now we will keep a lookout for anything slightly infected and remove it from the plant. Hopefully, as blight is a fungus, this will keep the spores from spreading to the healthy plants and parts of plants. (An entire section of tomato bushes were blight-free.)
After pruning, we were left with these:
We’d like to see these guys grow big and red and juicy!
If you wonder what’s “Eating” your tomatoes and it looks like squiggly bug trails but no bug bodies, dying leaves, and browning yucky-looking fruit – it’s likely tomato blight.
One of my favorite garden bulbs is what we call “Elephant Ears.”
These are from three bulbs that we dug up in some weeds when we first moved in. They were tiny, neglected, and crowded. With good fertilizer and plenty of water, (we didn’t have to water them, God did it with the rain!) those three multiplied into fifteen by January when we replanted them in this nice half-shady strip between the carport and the side of the house.
We also leave the wild flowers that don’t crowd out our bulbs. Tiny white flowers that spread like ground cover are some of Jillian’s favorite because they look like “stars on green sky.” (Those are under the star lily in the above picture, but their blooms look like dots in the picture.)
These are the smallest ones. The elephant ears are now growing alongside a few lilies, six pineapples, tomatoes, and squash. (The clump of bushy leaves on the right corner are tomatoes.) The plants are called elephant ears because their leaves get to be the size of African Elephant’s ears. I’ve grown some before, which by their third year, had leaves that were five feet wide! (Since you have to clip the ears off at the stalk when the ears fall to help encourage new growth, the girls would save the clipped stalks for umbrellas!)
These are some of the “wild” tomatoes. This means we didn’t sow them there, they just came from our fertilizer/compost and we tended the plants as they sprouted. Jillian has the worm-picking job because we don’t use pesticides.
I love Florida bulbs, they are easy to grow and propagate quickly. I can give the many extras away and cover my yard in little groves of them within just a couple of years. Now if I can just get fruit trees like fig, citrus, kumquat, pineapple, and bananas to grow as well!
