... I has one.
One of my cayenne plants has begun to turn out fat peppers. A normal cayenne pepper is slender and bumpy as if it was wearing tights over its seeds. In the last month, however, one of them has begun to produce peppers shaped more like jalapenos, sleek and chubby. Dig this photo.
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| These two are off the same plant. The one on the left is normal. The one on the right needs to go on a diet. |
I'm actually quite happy about this turn of events. I figure the plump ones will yield more juice and make better Louisiana hot sauce. In any case, it's pretty weird.
The plants in this bed are now 18 months old. They were in with the cotton last year and I just let them stay after I pulled that crop. Their stems are thick and woody and the plants are very happy. I fertilized them about 6 weeks ago and that's when they started producing these gigantic peppers.
Way cool, no?
That's interesting. I understand that sometime plants have mutations in a growing shoot, and the stalk that develops from that shoot is then not quite the same as the rest of the plant. Maybe that's what happened here? Or maybe the influx of nutrients just made some of them go nuts, but not all of the plant had good enough circulation to get nutrition to all of the fruit.
ReplyDeleteHaving a nominally annual plant growing in your garden for over a year must be nice. The only way we can do this is to move them inside for the winter. Like our two pineapple plants, which are 3 and 4 years old, have spiky leaves that stick way out into the room, and may actually bloom one of these years. If we ever get fruit off of them, my daughters want to take at least one of them to the farmer's market and sell it as a "locally grown pineapple".