Something is Lurking in our Pepper Patch

Texas Brown Anole Lizard has been lurking around our pepper garden lately. We wrote about these last year and are really good for your garden. They love to eat insects and are able to help keep the numbers down on the flies.

 Hot Big Guy Peppers

 California Wonder Bell Peppers

Camelot Sweet Bell Peppers

Costa Rican Peppers 

 Mariachi Peppers



Alejandro Texas Salsa

The fruits of our Alejandro labors. Making salsa using peppers from our pepper farm! Very satisfying and very good! We chopped up Serrano, Costa Rican, and Hot Big Guy peppers. Picked up some Roma tomatoes, green onions, and red onions at a local produce store called "Fruit King" which is downtown Corpus Christi.

 Our mixture of chopped peppers, onions, and tomatoes with other spices.

 Added tomato Sauce and paste and heated to boiling for 10 minutes.

 Canned hot and boiled jars for 10 more minutes.

Walla, canned Alejandro Texas Salsa.

Lastest picture of Alejandro Pepper Farm. Not bad using a side of the house driveway area where we use to store a Sea Doo trailer. ;o)

Pepper Plants Baring Fruit

It's been a few weeks since our last post and the peppers are really multiplying. It's exciting to see your work start to payoff as we are getting very close to harvesting time for many of these peppers on the Alejandro farm.

Mariachi Peppers

Hot Big Guy Peppers

Sweet Costa Rican Peppers

Sweet Heat Peppers

Serrano Peppers

California Wonder Peppers

 

We added a new shot of fertilizer to the irrigation and moved to a 3 times per day watering as we get closer to harvesting.

Peppers Have Arrived

Just received our plant order of peppers for our Alejandro pepper farm from Burpee. We selected Hot Big Guy, Mariachi, California Wonder, Costa Rican Sweet, Sweet Heat, and Tangerine Dream. We also selected a Big Daddy tomato.

I was impressed by the packaging specially created for this type of product. Each container provided protection for 3 plants for shipping. I was curious how they would ship these.

Shipping these plants by ground, they arrive very much starved for water and sunlight. Many of the leaves had fallen off. I placed them out on our table for water and let them stretch and bathe in the sunlight hoping to bring them back quickly. The pictures are as they arrived right out of the box on 5/24/2012; 11:48am.

The ground shipping journey these peppers took from Harrisburg, PA to Corpus Christi, TX was 7 days. As you'll see this journey took it's toll on these plants. I'll be nursing these plants back to health but may take a few weeks. I'm somewhat surprised that burpee would ship them this way or even provide ground shipping as an option when it exceeds a livable time frame. As you can see it's very disappointing to begin this way.

Hot "Big Guy" Peppers

Mariachi Peppers

Big Daddy Tomato

Tangerine Dream Sweet Peppers

Sweet Heat Peppers

Sweet California Wonder

Costa Rican Peppers

When you compare these plants to the Serrano peppers we germinated from seed, I would have been better off purchasing seed. One of the Big Daddy Tomato plants arrived with just a stump. I don't believe this plant will survive. At almost $5.00 per plant plus shipping makes this a very expensive way to begin. Next year I'll plan better and get started in January.

Update: June 1st, 2012

After a week of nursing our plants purchased from Burpee we'll be able to plant some this weekend. Burpee gladly provided a refund at our request. We decided to request a refund for the tomato's, tangerine peppers and the mariachi peppers. These will take extended care to be able to plant them. All the other plants came back after a few days. 

Burpee's customer service certainly accommodated our concern and requests quickly. Certainly makes you feel like they care for their customers and stand behind their products.