Easter weekend + dreary weather + chilly temperatures = Easter Cold Snap! Couldn’t get any closer to Easter either, could it? Perhaps in the coming days spring will have sprung for good.
My planting itch is pretty itchy, but some Lesya Peppers I started from last year’s seeds seem to be struggling. I’ve got about a dozen tiny plants and replanted last week hoping to get a better start. Then the Easter cold snap snapped.
The peppers came from a co-worker of my wife’s last year and we were immediately impressed with the bright red, sweet goodness. According to Baker Creek Farms “Rare Seeds” the Lesya Pepper is “believed to be the sweetest of all peppers and with the thickest flesh, the Lesya is a total crowd pleaser. The unique pointed heart-shaped fruit ripens to a deep red and has intensely juicy texture. Plants are stocky and high yielding, an overall rugged and easy-to-grow pepper! A superior flavor and texture that every gardener and sweet pepper lover should experience. A sweet treat from Ukraine.”
That’s all pretty much the way I would describe them too. We took the ones we were gifted last year and stuffed them with fresh corn, shredded chicken, and cheddar cheese, and cooked them on the grill. They are very, very good that way.
We saved some of the seeds in the sunroom over winter and now, we hope, we will have our own plants in the ground and producing by summer. They also freeze very easily stuffed and ready to cook, or just cleaned and ready to stuff. We’ll see how it goes on our own.
I’ve also got a plan this season to plant my own little crop of Black Eye Peas. We love black eye peas on New Years Day, and any other day too. We happened upon some fresh ones years ago and we were really impressed by the taste difference when compared to dried beans.
Hopefully that plan will come to fruition.
Other than those two new additions to our gardening efforts the remainder will be those goodies that we use everyday when in season. I don’t plan on planting okra this year because last year it was spindly, puny and didn’t produce much more than a couple of tiny pods here and there. I’ll just have to buy the okra off of someone that has better luck than I do, or perhaps better knowledge of what they are doing than I do.
I will have tomatoes, of course, but will shy away from some fancy heirlooms of years gone by for which I had high hopes but little if any yield. I’m going to stick with the tried and true and hopefully return to the days of bowls full of Sweet 100s sitting on the kitchen counter for snacking, and plenty of fat juicy slicers for sandwiches and soups. Surely that can’t be that difficult. I used to have great luck. Again we’ll see!
In addition to the Lesyas I’ll have a good crop of jalapenos. I eat a lot of jalapenos fire roasted on sandwiches, scrambled with eggs, stuffed with that same cheese, chicken, and corn mixture and grilled, and just about any other way there is to eat them, including raw. As a matter of fact, I have a roasted jalapeno on half a turkey sandwich every weekday for lunch as long as the peppers hold out...store bought, or home grown.
I also have a love affair with poblano peppers. I like them grilled on sandwiches too, but my favorite is stuffed with an egg omelette mixture of sausage, jalapenos, onions, and sharp white cheddar baked in the oven until hot and bubbly and topped with diced tomatos and salsa. That’s my go-to Saturday breakfast and I go to it just about every Saturday morning!
I’ll probably stick a few other things in the ground just to see what they will do, but my garden is very small so other than a few herbs, basil, flat leaf parsley, oregano and thyme what you see here is about all there is going to be in the Beeland garden of 2023.
Last year’s garden pretty much sucked, so I’ve got high hopes for the coming months. Obviously, things can’t get any worse than 2022.
Well, I suppose they can, so good luck to us all!
