Gardening in the Valley of Heart's Delight

Peppers and Corn


	These Corno di Toro (Horns of the Bull) peppers are surprisingly large for the size of the plants they're growing on. They're about eight inches long, and the plants are only about 24 inches. I've tried a couple in the green stage, and they were pleasant enough. But I'm more a fan of ripe peppers, so I plan on letting most of them stay on the plant another few weeks. More on them next month.
This little purple Firecracker pepper is less than an inch long, which is why the picture is a bit fuzzy — it was hard to focus on it. (See the dark splotch in the center? Right, that's the pepper.) If you go back to the bowl of tomatoes picture on the main page, you'll see one of the green Corno di Toros with a little Firecracker pepper laying on top of it, for a good size comparison. The plants have been very pretty in their own right, with dark stems and lavender flowers. True to their name, the peppers are very hot. A single pepper spices up a batch of salsa nicely. The next question is, will they change color if I leave them on the plant to ripen? Stay tuned.
	I've never planted corn before, so this is a real thrill. There's a strip of land between our driveway and our neighbors' house that's about 2 1/2 feet ours and 2 1/2 feet theirs. We've agreed to communally farm it. When I asked Dan what he thought of planting some corn in the strip, I received "Great, I grew up in Missouri!" as my enthusiastic answer. So here it is!
I didn't have time to order seeds at that point, so I went down to the nursery and selected Kandy Korn which, despite the, um, corny name is supposed to be a good variety: sweet, full-flavored, unaffected by cross-pollination. The fact that it has beautiful rosy pink silk and tassles is apparently just a bonus. But the corn will be a normal yellow color.
	Last time I talked about the various beans I'm growing, and here's a good picture of three of them: the flat, Italian-style Romano, Yellow Wax, and Royal Burgundy beans. They all have great, and subtly different flavors. The purples, which look nearly black in this photo, are a actually a very dark purple. As I mentioned previously, they turn a normal green when they are cooked, but it's still fun to see them growing.