When I eat a hot pepper, I go into violent hiccups so I tread lightly when I am offered one. (Oddly enough, I was starting to react the same way when consuming sweet peppers but now no longer have that reaction.)
Because of my allergic reaction, I generally do not plant hot peppers.
However, I have the greatest respect for this great vegetable when used in sparingly in sauces, vegetable stir-fries, and casserole dishes. Therefore on some occasion, I will add one of the milder hot peppers or a dash of Tabasco sauce to spice up a recipe.
Capsaicin is the product in the hot peppers, which causes the burning sensation. This burning sensation is fondly called "heat." The sweet bell and other sweet peppers do not have capsaicin hence they are tolerable for most of us to eat.
Capsaicin is tasteless; however, it does a cause a reaction to the pain receptors in the mouth, eyes or skin. To rate the degrees of capsaicin heat, in 1912, Wilbur Scoville created the Scoville heat scale. Though the methods of determining Scoville units has changed, the scale still runs from 0-16,000,000 heat units.
Sweet peppers have a rating of zero Scoville heat units; pimento and banana peppers have a rating of 100-500 Scoville heat units; the pepper product Tabasco sauce and Cayenne peppers have Scoville heat unit ratings of 2,500-8,000 units. And as a person with the violent reaction of hiccups, I cannot conceive of eating peppers with Scoville heat ratings of 855,000 to 1,460, 000 heat units. (Police pepper spray has 5,000,000 heat units!)
To grow hot peppers, the cultural requirements are the same for sweet peppers and tomatoes.
Choose a site with full sun where the soil is moisture retentive but well draining.
Only if you plan on collecting pepper seeds avoid planting sweet peppers and hot peppers in the garden close to each other. These two varieties of peppers can cross-pollinate and you may end up with a sweet looking pepper plant next year that may turn out being hot!
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The sweet peppers are a cultivar group of the Capsicum annum (chili pepper) which like the tomato are native to Mexico, Central America, and South America. The pepper seeds were collected and new varieties were developed in Europe, Asia, and Africa.
The familiar hot pepper varieties produce capsaicin. Capsaicin is the chemical that causes a strong burning sensation sought out by many cooks and hot spicy food daredevils.
The sweet peppers do not produce capsaicin.
Green peppers are actually unripened sweet bell peppers and have a more bitter taste than the fully red-ripened sweet bell pepper. Oddly enough, the sweet red bell peppers have almost 3xs the Vitamin C content of an orange.
The cultural requirement for growing sweet peppers is similar to tomato plants. Sweet peppers need full sun, grows best in a loam or silty-loam soil with good water-holding capacity. But they can grow on many soil types, as long as the soil is well drained.
When harvesting sweet peppers (either fully ripened or the unripened green) it is best to cut them from the stems. Green peppers are one of the few vegetables that can be frozen without blanching. Wash them thoroughly, slice or chop them and put them in a single layer on a baking sheet to freeze them.
If you have not planted tomatoes this year, it is not too late as you should find some reduced priced plants this week at your garden centers or green houses- - - but I would not wait too much longer.
So enjoy your Father’s Day, but come Monday stick some plants in the garden.
One year, I decided not to plant a vegetable garden, and after going to a vegetable stand and purchasing locally grown tomatoes, I made a commitment to plant some tomatoes each year. As most of us know, tomatoes coming out of the garden provide a taste that green house tomatoes can never rival!
So, here are some basics tips for growing tomatoes even if you are running late.
This is a tip that most of us find difficult to follow---but it does work:
- Bury tomato plants deeper than they come in the pot, all the way up to a few top leaves. Tomatoes are able to develop roots all along their stems. You can either dig a deeper hole or simply dig a shallow tunnel and lay the plant sideways. It will straighten up and grow toward the sun.
Other tips:
- Fungus problems can ruin your tomatoes. A very hot and wet season or a very wet and cool season can often times stimulate tomato fungal problems as evidenced by browning shriveling leaves. To help reduce this problem, once the tomato plants are about 3' tall, remove the leaves from the bottom 1' of stem. These are usually the first leaves to develop fungus problems that can spread up into the plant. The lower leaves get the least amount of sun and soil born pathogens can be unintentionally splashed up onto them.
- This particular tip, I do not follow only because I have over twenty plants and just do not have the time however, pinching and removing suckers that develop in the crotch joint of two branches will help produce a better yield of tomatoes. These suckers won’t bear fruit and will just take energy away from the rest of the plant. (I also don’t pinch suckers, because in all likelihood farmers who grow tomatoes in the fields most definitely would not have the time or manpower to do so!)
- I tend to allow nature to handle the watering----however, provide water deeply and regularly while the plants are developing. Irregular watering, leads to blossom end rot and fruit cracking. Once the fruit begins to ripen, lessening the water will coax the plant into concentrating its sugars. Don’t withhold water so much that the plants wilt and become stressed, as they will drop their blossoms and possibly their fruit. Mulching with grass clippings or straw around the plants can help conserve water loss as well as reduce weeds
- If you are running late in planting, you will probably select the plants, which are still available, however, next year with careful planning, determine if you want determinate or indeterminate varieties of plants. Determinate varieties tend to set and ripen their fruit all at one time, making a large quantity available when you’re ready to make sauce as with the case of Roma tomatoes. Indeterminate varieties produce tomatoes throughout the summer and with determinate varieties should you wish, you can get earlier fruit setting by pinching off the tips of the main stems in early summer.
If you never planted tomatoes before and this is your first year, most likely you will have good results, however, soil preparation is important so here are some basic tips for next year:
- Tomatoes grow in neutral soils with a pH between 6.5 and 7.0. The soil pH indicates the acidity of the soil and can be quickly tested with a do-it-yourself kit from a garden center. Soils may need agricultural lime amendment to bring the bed into the proper pH range. Apply the amount of lime recommended by the test results. It's preferable to add the lime the fall before planting so it has time to become active in the soil, but you can apply it as late as two weeks before you plant. There are people who never test their soil and just habitually add lime to the soils. In Ohio, most soils are generally acidic and adding lime does help.
- Very important to note that tomatoes prefer well-drained soils. Take the time to improve your soils by adding compost or peat moss. A well-composted soil provides organic matter to poorer soils, helps aeration, improves excess water drainage and helps ensure proper moisture retention.
- You can grow tomatoes using organic fertilizers if you wish. I use chemical fertilizers sparingly (see my previous blogs on fertilizing). Fertilizer should be added to the soil prior to planting to ensure there are enough nutrients for the tomatoes to grow well.
A soil test helps determine the exact type and rate of fertilization necessary for your garden site. If you don't perform a test prior to planting, apply 2 lbs. of a general-purpose 5-10-5-analysis fertilizer per 100 square feet of garden. Fertilizers should be replenished throughout the season particularly a second application at the same rate used at planting applied once the fruits begin forming.
Everyone has an opinion on growing tomatoes.
If you were to google, "Growing Tomatoes," you would find millions of sites with ten or more gardening tips for each blog.
According to the National Gardening Association’s 2009 survey, tomatoes are the number 1 selected vegetable plant for homegrown gardeners. (Cucumbers, sweet peppers, beans, and carrots are listed as the remainder of the top five most popular homegrown vegetables.)
Though the tomato may be the favorite plant for home gardeners, it only ranks number three in the top 10 most popular vegetables. (Potatoes and iceberg lettuce place ahead of the tomato.)
This high ranking of the tomato is quite remarkable when you think of its original beginning.
The tomato originated in South America and was spread around the world following Spanish colonization. The tomato is botanically considered a fruit but for culinary purposes it is called a vegetable.
Belonging to the nightshade family, the plant grows to 3-10 feet and when unstaked will crawl over other plants. In its native habitat, the tomato is a perennial and in temperate climates the tomato is an annual.
Some gardeners prefer determinate plants, which produce fruit all at once and do not need support. Others prefer indeterminate plants, which grow tall, usually require staking and produce fruit throughout the season.
There probably over 7,000 varieties of tomato plants and it can be difficult to pin down the exact top favorite variety of tomato. However, the following varieties are probably some of the most common:
- Beefmaster
- Better Boy
- Burpee’s Big Girl
- Celebrity
- Champion
- Early Girl
- Juliet
- Roma (determinate variety)
- Rutgers (determinate variety)
- Super Sweet 100
The above mentioned tomatoes are easy to grow, commonly available as seeds or plants in American greenhouses or seed catalogs, and are resistant to verticillium and fusarium wilts and nematodes.
For tomato aficionados, heirloom tomato varieties have caught on in demand.
Heirloom varieties are open-pollinated, which means that the plant runs true to seed and the seeds are saved from year to year.
Heirloom tomato seeds have been collected and passed down for several family generations. In the case of commercial heirloom tomatoes, the tomatoes are again open-pollinated varieties, were introduced before 1940 or have been more than 50 years in circulation.
Sources For this Blog
http://site.cleanairgardening.com/info/10-most-popular-vegetables-grown-at-home.html
http://www.emerils.com/cooking-blog/2509/top-10-most-popular-vegetables/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomato
http://www.ehow.com/list_6331198_popular-tomato-varieties.html
http://www.indepthinfo.com/tomatoes/varieties.htm
http://www.tomatofest.com/what-is-heirloom-tomato.html
This past week, my wife, elderly mother-in-law, and I took a ride down to the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center (OARDC) in Wooster, Ohio.
We ran a bit late this year and missed the crabapple display, but as we were driving through the country and looking at the rural residential landscapes, I noted the vast array of blooming iris which are as striking as any flower you can see in the month of June.
The Iris takes its name from the Greek word for rainbow and indeed the variety of Iris colors lives up to the name rainbow.
This indeed spectacular flower and many of its different species has been painted by many artists including Vincent VanGogh and serves as the state flower of Louisiana. The fleur-de-lis is a stylized iris promoted by used by French King Louis Xll in the French colors of his reign. The fleur-de-lis continues as part of the New Orleans Saint NFL team logo and appears in other international flags and emblems.
Unlike the flowering bulbs of narcissus, crocus, and tulips, the Iris species most commonly grown, come from rhizomes.
Rhizomes are characteristically the horizontal stems of a plant (in this case Iris) that form underground sending roots and shoots from its nodes. As with most of the more familiar bearded Iris varieties, the rhizomes grow at the surface of the soil.
There are many varieties of Iris, way too many to explore in this blog. But Google the following key words:
- Bearded German Iris
- Re-Blooming Iris
- Beardless Iris
- Japanese Iris
- Siberian Iris
- Dutch Iris
And you will quickly appreciate the diversity of iris varieties.
Rather than go into specific minute details of each species or variety, I have included several photos of each variety and a brief description, which should serve you well when looking for the variety you want for your garden.
Bearded German Irises are the most visible irises found blooming in June gardens.
The beard of this iris is the fuzzy "caterpillar" part of the flower, which lies across the lower three petals (falls) of the Iris flowers.
Today, there are varieties of bearded iris which not only bloom in the spring and but may re-bloom again in the fall.
Beardless Irises include the Siberian Iris and the Japanese iris.
Unlike the bearded Iris, the leaves of these iris appear almost grass like, their rhizomes are fibrous versus the typical fleshiness of the Bearded German Iris, and they do not have the fuzzy caterpillar part of the flower laying across their lower flowering petals (falls).
Three varieties of the beardless varieties to grow are the Siberian, Japanese, and Spuria (they thrive in hot sunny climates and grow tall in very large clumps.) soil will cause them to wilt as will lack of enough moisture.
Reticulate irises are grown from bulbs versus the fleshy or fibrous rhizomes of the bearded or beardless varieties. These small irises bloom early in the spring and can grow in many diverse light climates. The familiar Dutch Iris is a variety of reticulate iris and often times the reticulate iris appear in floral arrangements due to the variety of colors, long stems, and lasting power in a cut bouquet.
