Great Bell Pepper Harvest - But Why?

I told you in my last post that we have had success with onions and peppers. The Bell Peppers have continued to be incredible this year. We have Green and Yellow Bell Peppers and now some are beginning to turn red for us. There are so many peppers on each plant!

 

The size of these peppers are much larger than I'm used too as well.

 

In years past, I never got such great peppers unless I used great big plants liquid compost on them like I did the year before last.

You may think I'm bragging about these peppers but I'm not. You see, for whatever reason I usually can not grow very good Bell Peppers. Most of you reading this probably grow peppers like this every year, but I usually only get one or two small bell peppers from each plant.

So what is different this year? Did I amend the soil or use fertilizer? No, but something is different next to the bed that is producing these wonderful peppers.

They are right behind our new chicken coop that has a slanted highly reflective silver roof!

 

Could these pepper plants be benefiting from the reflective rays? I think so, because I also planted peppers from the same batch of seedlings elsewhere in the garden that are performing in their normal lackluster way. Here is a picture of one of them:

 

That is how my pepper plants usually look! Pathetic compared to my bed of bountiful peppers.

This summer has been unusually cool and wet which have not been good growing conditions for tomatoes. Peppers are supposed to do best with heat as well. Do you think it is possible that my peppers are so good because of the chicken coop roof? I guess without conducting soil samples in the two locations we can't be sure that the soil is the same, but I think it is. I really think the only difference is the reflective roof.

Am I crazy?

Frost is a real Danger for Tomatoes and Peppers

Here in Northern Kentucky, most people believe that everything should have been planted in the vegetable garden already. Most people plant on the first nice day in May and believe that planting on Mother's Day is definitely safe. Most of the time this is true but the official average last frost date in my area is May 15th.

It is now past May 15th so it really should be okay now, right? You would think so, but the May 15th date is an average of the last 50 years or so. If you remember from Math class how to find the average, that means that sometimes the last frost is after the average date. That is what almost occurred last night. The weather forecast called for a frost advisory, and since frost is deadly for tomatoes and peppers, I had to protect them. 

It was easy to cover the beds that I used last Fall as my stoop houses because they were already equipped with a place to add hoops. I then just covered the hoops with plastic. The main tomato bed that I have planted was not used last year for hoops so I had to do something different.

I simply pounded some scrap lumber in the ground as end posts and attached a cross beam.

 

Then I draped a piece of plastic sheeting over the beam to make a quick tee-pee over the tomato plants. The only thing you have to be sure of with this method is that the plastic is not touching the plants. The frost and cold can go right through to the plant leaves if they are up against the plastic.

The temperature in the garden got down to 35 degrees, only 3 degrees above freezing! I don't think we actually had a frost, but I was still glad to protect these heat-loving plants. They seemed to make it through the night okay.

 

I only have about 15 of my 75 tomato plants in the garden so far, so it wasn't hard to cover them all. I'm glad I still have the others inside the greenhouse because the weather this spring has been cold and rainy. I will not be getting ripe tomatoes by June 5th like last year. At this point, having ripe tomatoes by July 4th sounds good.

Oh well, I just hope that we don't have any more 35 degree nights at least until October.

Heirloom Pepper Plants Attacked!

Today I managed to plant out many tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, more potatoes, and peppers. Before I could get the peppers outside to harden off and then to be planted, they were attacked. I got them at the Baker Creek Festival. They were only inside under my lights for a few days when I noticed holes in some of the leaves and other leaves were outright missing.

There was a lot of damage but I couldn't tell what caused it. These were heirloom sweet bell peppers. I once wrote about pests being more attracted to heirloom tomatoes than hybrids. I guess its also true for heirloom peppers.

I just had to figure out what caused this devastation so I set up my new Cannon PowerShot G9 camera on a tripod with high speed motion detectors set to take a picture of the perpetrator overnight.

When I checked the camera the next day, I found this!

That's right, Macy - our pet cat was eating my precious pepper plants! There have been hundreds of plants in the basement under lights since Valentine's Day and she has never bothered anything before. These must be pretty sweet sweet pepper plants.

On the bright side, only one plant is damaged badly - the Chocolate Beauty Pepper. The others should still be okay even with holes in their leaves. I went ahead and planted them all out in the garden and we will just hope for the best.

As for Macy, after I scolded her a bit we made up and she apologized.

Of course I quickly forgave her since she is such a sweet kitty.

Perfect Pepper!

For some reason, I have never been able to grow adequate bell peppers. I know, I know, peppers are easy to grow. Bell Peppers have never been easy for me. It's a curse. Well this year, the curse has been lifted!

It's a big and beautiful green pepper! To be exact it is a Park's Whopper bell pepper. We ate half of it in stir fry last night, and the other half in a salad today and it was delicious. The plants have several more almost ready too. So what did I do different this year? The only thing I can think of that helped break my curse is my Great Big Plants liquid compost that I got from greatbigplants.com.

You can read more about Great Big Plants in my previous post about it.

I can't wait till the next whopper pepper is ripe. The next one is getting grilled with some garden fresh onions! I'll stop there. This is supposed to be a gardening blog, not a cooking blog.

Happy gardening! (and cooking and eating!)