 |
| Click on Image to Enlarge Home-Grown Orange, Yellow and Red Peppers on a Plate |
This summer we planted three varieties of sweet bell pepper seeds. Only one pepper - an orange one - grew to normal size. The others ripened and delightfully changed colour, but remained appetizer sized.
When frost threatened, I brought the pepper plants indoors to complete their ripening but they didn't respond well to the climate change. So, we tried eating them.
Oh, my goodness!
The small red peppers were not sweet as we'd thought: They were in fact, hot - incredibly spicy hot peppers - grown from seeds that were obviously mislabeled. As I write this, my mouth and the eye I mistakenly rubbed are still reacting, and not in a good way.
Next, we tried the small yellow peppers, and found the under-developed fruit unpleasantly bland - neither sweet nor hot - so, we discarded them.
The fully formed orange bell pepper - our only one, unfortunately - proved quite sweet and tasty. It's really too bad that only one of them developed.
All in all, the colourful plants sure prettied up our garden; and, though our pepper project might appear to have been somewhat unfruitful, we did manage to grow some spicy-hot red peppers that will be threaded and hung to dry for flavouring of foods later on.
I will, however, have to wear gloves to process the peppers any further: I can still feel the burn every time I touch my fingers to my lips, even after washing my hands several times.
