Banana Pepper Pickles

Here's my very first try at home canning/pickling.


The first little jar is banana pepper rings only.
The second and third jars are a combo of sweet banana peppers, garlic and Vidalia onion slices.
The fourth jar is like 2 and 3 but with red onion slices added. The red onion was HUGE, and much stronger than the mild Vidalia onion. I cried when I was slicing the red onion. :(

And that's NOT dirt or bugs in there, it's allspice berries, a peppercorn or two, and dill seed. In all my googling for recipes, most of the instructions mentioned that you shouldn't use powdered spices when canning, so that's why I added the whole berry and seed. Next time, I might make a little cloth bag and take all the spices out before I fill the jars. ;)

The first four jars have just a pinch of something called "Pickle Crisp" added, that's supposed to keep them crunchy.

The last jar, on the right, is mixed red and Vidalia onions with a slice or two of garlic clove, but no banana pepper. Instead of packing the veggies tightly in the jars raw, like I did the first four, I put all the onions I had left in the hot vinegar/salt/spice/sugar mix and brought it back up to a simmer, cooked them for a couple of minutes. Then I packed the hot rings in the jar. I poured in juice to almost fill the jar, and had enough left to fill the jar behind the small one, but it's pink from the red onion. This last jar didn't get any "Pickle Crisp" since I figured they'd be soft from cooking anyway. I was hoping also that the short cook time would make that red onion a little less strong.

I haven't tasted them yet - I'm going to wait a day before I try them, let the raw veggies soak up the vinegar and spices. It was less trouble than I thought it'd be, once I'd bought everything I needed, so I'll definitely do it again if they taste good.

These jars actually all sealed just from the boiling vinegar being poured over the veggies, all of the tops are locked down. I'm still going to play it safe and keep them in the fridge, though, because I didn't use a hot water bath on them.

Mid-May Garden Update

Ready for more tomato and squash pictures? Sorry, there's no snowpea pix, I've *guilty grin* eaten them all.

Here's my Cherry Tomato bush. Some of them are getting too big to really call them cherry tomatoes, but they're not ripening yet, still just as green as they can be. I hope they don't all ripen the same day! Between this bush, and the Grape Tomato bush you've seen already, I should be swimming in little tomatoes pretty soon.


I have two pots with banana pepper plants, and one pot has ONE immensely long pepper, and a handful of smaller buds. But this one looks too long to be normal, somehow. Maybe it's a mutant alien pepper... :)


My Early Girl bush has several golf-to-plum sized tomatoes, but again, all still very green.


I'm most proud of my squash plants though - lots and lots of blooms and lots and lots of teeny squash. Here's two of the biggest so far. Maybe thumb sized? Too small to eat, but a good size to drool over. After last year with no squash but lots of blooms, I was about to say that squash growing in a kiddy wading pool didn't work, but this year is a total reversal.

Garden Beginnings for April

Ready to meet my new plant family? This is Easter weekend, so that means planting time at my house. I spent three hours this morning, shifting dirt from container to container, repotting, and planting.

The squash in a kiddie wading pool first - last year this didn't work. Not even ONE squash. But I kept the extra seeds in the freezer and I'm trying again. This time, better dirt instead of the topsoil I used before. I also poked some bigger holes in the bottom for drainage. I have five hills of five seeds planted. Last year, I thought I was being smart and tried to stagger the planting times, thinking I'd have squash early, squash late, and even end-of-summer squash. Instead, I think I might have not had enough blooming at one time to fertilize each other. I also had rabbit problems - this year, once they sprout, I'm doing the stinky kitty litter trick around the outside of the pool earlier -- after I did that last summer, I didn't see hide nor 'hare' of the rabbit for the rest of the season. :)


I enjoyed the produce from my sweet banana pepper plant so much last summer, I decided I'd have two this year. I'm planting them in better soil this year too, so I hope I don't get massively over peppered! Meet Banana One and Twin.



And about the CD's -- I'm always tempted to lie and say they're providing some esoteric nutrient to the soil, or they're providing reflected sunlight to the understory of the plants ... nope, they're just there for bird scare. When my tomatoes get 'caged' I use scissors to cut a slice thru the CD and put them on the cages, where the slightest breeze spins them back and forth and sets them flashing.

I haven't yet had a surplus of tomatoes in my little garden, so this year I bought still another container, plus more dirt, and I'm putting out a bunch. First, a Better Boy. Lookie, three little yellow tomato blooms! I had one of these last year, and it did really well:


Then I'm trying grape tomatoes for the first time. I often buy these at the supermarket, and spend $2.50 or so for a little plastic box of them. I'll try to keep some account of how many the plant produces, and see if I save anything.


Next, a Big Boy. I'm hoping this will produce some larger tomatoes I can slice and use on sandwiches. I used one of my big new plastic terracotta containers for this - it's a normal sized tomato plant, not one of the little container 'bushes,' so I'm slightly worried that it may be too much for a container. We'll see.


Here's another I've had in the past, a Husky Cherry Red. This was one of the varities that got me started in container gardening - it was so much fun going out every evening and picking a couple of cherry tomatoes for my salad. Juicy, round, and sweet, they were great. And they weren't prone to splitting either.


I have had this one too, and couldn't resist another. I'm not sure if this Early Girl will have the first ones ripe this summer since the Better Boy already has blooms, I'll have to wait and see.


Now, a group shot of my container garden - and if you look off to the left corner you can see my two window boxes with snowpeas. I planted the seeds for that last week. When I was planting everything else this morning, I was delighted to see that I now have tiny little green leaves poking out of the dirt. I didn't have any mulch on them though, so I re-covered the little shoots with some loose mulch when I was adding mulch to the tops of the tomato containers.

Peppers, Tomatoes, and Repairs

I made a great chicken fettucini alfredo last night, and along with the chicken and some mushrooms, saute'd my first banana pepper. Stirred the whole thing together... mmm. I'd cut into the pepper and cleaned out the seeds before I remembered that I hadn't taken a picture of it - so here it is, with a couple of cherry tomatoes slid in there for eyes. That's my harvest for the last couple of days. Anyone know how long an un-cut-into unrefrigerated pepper will keep? Will it get hotter or milder as it ages, or will it stay the same?


Here's my banana pepper plant now. It doesn't look as green and nice, the leaves have spots, and something is eating them... but it's making great tasting peppers. Can you find the little peppers about to bud out? The inch long one you see had been pea sized for a while - then when I cut the two ripe ones off, within a day, bam, it grew an inch.


And I'm finally getting more new tomatoes. I suspect it was just too hot for a while, then we had some rain and cooler weather, now I've got little tomatoes again. The CD's you see there are for bird-scare. The wind catches them and blows them back and forth, the sun glints and flashes off them as they move. Between that and picking the tomatoes before they get too red and enticing, I haven't had many bird problems this year.


I'm going to wait until the end of August, then start another crop of snow peas. The package says they'll grow well in cooler weather, even through frost.

And in other news, I'm finally getting some repairs done to my house, painting and replacing of masonite board and trim. This board over the carport had some warping and birds had gotten in and made nests. Now it's all clean and neat again. They've been doing some sanding too. I had a trumpet flower vine growing up the post, and it'd spread those little root-things on the wood. SO nice to have it gone.


Here's the back door, out back by my container garden. They've replaced some door trim that had water damage and a whole sheet of masonite.


There's supposed to be thunderstorms tomorrow, hope it doesn't slow the repair work down. The paint will be the exact same shade it is now, Navajo white, with forest green shutters.

Garden Update for Mid July

Have you been wondering about my little container garden? Here's the status. First, some tomatoes - The Better Boy and the Early Girl plant both have maybe 4 green tomatoes on them, a bit bigger than golf balls so far. I ate a ripe one tonight. Here's two from the Early Girl:


My Cherry tomato bush is producing one or two ripe ones per day, barely enough to keep me in snacks. I really like these things. This is two of the clusters on the bush.


Finally, my banana pepper plant has finally started doing something, LOOK! Two cute little banana peppers. I got a turkey cold cut sandwich at Subway just the other night, with banana peppers, and was wishing mine would grow... and it HAS! I have Peppers! :)


And the bush is full of little hard peppers that aren't even half an inch long yet, I'm so excited.

Snow Pea update

My snowpeas have their first bloom. :) You can see one cherry tomato on the bush behind it, if you look close.


My banana pepper plant is producing more leaves. getting bushier and greening out, but nothing exciting:


The squash didn't like the transplant to the pool. Think I must have broken some roots? Some of the leaves turned yellow, but now they are finally producing more green leaves, so I didn't kill all of them off. If you look at this pic, then scroll down to see the first squash-pool pic, there's not much difference in the size.


But you can see the double leaves of the 4 new squash I planted when I transplanted the older ones to the pool, right there in the middle. They look nice and healthy, at least! End of this coming week, first of June, I'll plant 4 more, I think.

May Garden Update

Meet my new crookneck squash pool! I picked the yellow to match the squash. I'm sure my neighbors thought I was nuts to be out there hammering drainage holes in a brand new wading pool, but it's perfect for a container garden, lots cheaper than buying the lumber and making one.


Besides transplanting the two squash hills I'd already started, I also poked some finger holes in the dirt (near the bottom of the picture) and started 4 more new seeds. In June, if there's room, I'll start 4 more. Hopefully that'll stagger the ripening squash times so I won't be overwhelmed. But I can eat a LOT of squash, that and tomatoes are my favorite veggies.

I've also been inspired by Deborah Smith to start a sweet banana pepper plant. I'm not sure how much one banana pepper plant produces, perhaps I'll pickle my peppers if there's plenty. *grins*


But seriously, I do love the pickled banana peppers you can get on the sandwiches at Subway, so now maybe I can have some of my own. They're supposed to be very mild, I'm not a hot pepper type gal.

Here's my tomatoes and snow peas - Now that the peonies have bloomed, I took the rack and moved it to the snow peas, so they can climb. I couldn't figure out any way to get the trellis to stand up unless I moved them to the dirt and jabbed the ends in, so I put down plastic and maybe that will keep the grass from growing up around the peas.


Finally, the tomato plants ALL have little green tomatoes. The Early Girl has the largest ones (above) with about 5 tiny ones on the cherry tomato plant behind it. The two below are on the Better Boy plant.



How does YOUR garden grow? Does anyone know what kind of yeild to expect from one banana pepper plant? Any good recipes for them if I'm overwhelmed?

And I just had a horrible thought - do I have to have TWO pepper plants at least, for them to pollinate? Or, like the tomatoes, do they pollinate themselves?