My First Pepper!

I haven't been able to sleep all night, so I finally took the birds outside for a morning stroll in the garden. It had just rained during the night, so the morning was fresh and cool. The birds fluffed up immediately and Charley started singing a mating song. He hasn't sung it so fully in weeks; lately, he's only been singing a few truncated notes at a time before losing interest. They like being outside.

Anyway, I've been trying to grow a veggie garden for two years now. This was the first year I successfully got my sweet peppers to sprout and grow into plants. I just read up on peppers, and found that I'm supposed to harvest the first central fruit to encourage bushier growth and more cropping. I had been saving my one good-looking pepper, hoping it would grow large and eventually red/orange/yellow. But, after reading that, I decided to go outside and harvest my one pepper.

My first pepper!

Maybe I'll post photos if I can figure out how to do that later. I hope the cropping works! I need some vegetables going here. All season working on the garden, and all I've had so far is two and a half heads of lettuce and a zucchini the size of my pinky. The spinach, eggplant, other lettuce, broccoli, bak choi, gai lan chinese cabbage, jalapenos, onions and tomatoes have all flopped so far.

Last year, I was able to get broccoli, basil, a bit of dill and coriander, and green tomatoes, so if the sweet peppers crop well, and I can get both last year's and this year's successes, then I'd almost have a real honest-to-goodness productive garden next year! I'm very excited!