I Must Learn to Have an Original Thought Once in a While

I have started on the book of Numbers. And I have to say, the title is appropriate. There are some parts of the Bible I just skim. I know I will never remember the names of the tribe leaders and how many people were in each tribe. I admire anyone who can memorize things like that.

I feel the need for a break, so I am perusing my weekly Winn-Dixie ad. As you may recall, Winn-Dixie is the Florida supermarket chain which is NOT funding a lawsuit to make it impossible for people to carry arms in their cars. As far as I know. Wish I could say the same of Publix. I haven't shopped there in quite some time.

I was busy with nonsense on Thursday and Friday, so I neglected to check this week's ad. And it breaks my heart, because skirt steak has been on sale. Oh, the ache.

They're also selling boliche (eye round roast) for $2.99 a pound. This stuff is wonderful, if you do what the Cubans do with it. Open a channel down the middle and stuff it with fat and/or sausage. Brown it and put it in a pressure cooker with various stew ingredients. Give it an hour and a half. It will be excellent. I think you could make it better by adding a beef rib (nearly free) to bulk up the sauce.

Boneless pork roast, $1.99 a pound. Be still, my heart. The things I can do with that.

Rib roast, $5.99 a pound! Oh, yes. Get me some of that. The freezer is already full of aged rib eyes, but I can make room for more.

Lots of good stuff today. I better go grab something that cooks up fast and easy, so as to minimize the impact on my Sunday.

I ate a Cherokee Chocolate tomato and a Dr. Wyche's yellow tomato today. I managed to grow them, although they were small and not pretty. The flavor was magnificent. Much better than the heirlooms you get at stores. People keep telling me hybrids are the way to go. Whatever. I may never know, because I can't grow hybrids, either.

I have a new batch of tomato plants going. We'll see how they do. The Dr. Wyche's tomatoes are considerably better than the Kentucky Beefsteaks I grew, so in the future, I guess I'll just try to grow Dr. Wyche's. That offends my national pride as a person born in Kentucky, but I have to call them as I see them.

Mike tells me his plants grow beautifully INDOORS in NEW HAMPSHIRE with ONE HOUR OF SUNLIGHT PER DAY in TWO-GALLON BUCKETS. I am so mad. I gave him the seeds, so I know I could have done this. It's time for me to try. I should have known better than to trust the people who claimed plants had to have all-day sun. I'm going to put two plants indoors, even if I have to throw out furniture. In here, there will be no bugs and no fungus.

Mike and I are a lot alike. Neither of us does anything the orthodox way. I tried to follow the rules, and I got nothing for it. He did everything wrong and has tons of tomatoes. What was I thinking?

See you at the meat counter.

Posted by Steve H. at 3:22 PM | Permalink  

New Peppers

My tomatoes elicit nothing but pity and ridicule. However, I do quite well with peppers.

Here are the habanero gold peppers I grew from seed. Some are ready to pick.

Here's a yellow habanero, for comparison. Yellow habaneros are fairly big for habaneros, so this will give you an idea how big the others are. The habanero golds are about the size of Clementines, and they get even bigger.

As I've noted before, I don't think "habanero gold" is an authentic variety. I found these peppers at Norman Bros. Produce, a yuppie vegetable market here in Miami, and "habanero gold" is what it said on the bin. Store owners often mislabel peppers. I've never seen anything like these, online or in stores.

If you can grow only one type of really hot pepper, this would be a good choice. They're big. They look great. And they're super sweet. The first time I bit into one, I thought I was in for a sweet, fruity, mild pepper. Then my eyes exploded in their sockets. I exaggerate; they're hot, but not hotter than other habaneros. They're fantastic sliced on chili.

I'm also very happy with my cayennes, on the milder side. Sweet as candy, and mild enough to eat out of hand. You wouldn't want to eat a handful without a glass of water, but they don't compare to chinense peppers. A while back I ground some into a paste and fried them in oil with garlic, salt, and sugar. Man, that was good.

I have maybe a thousand prig ki nus. They're great, but I don't know what to do with them.

More

Hey, pepper heads. My Trinidad scorpion bush is starting to bear. It blew past the habanero gold, and it's going to be a monster. Envy me, losers.

Posted by Steve H. at 5:07 PM | Permalink  

Do Not Let Logic Become a Buzzkill

I wish I had the number for Al Gore's compost-powered personal cell phone, because I want to call him and thank him for this delightful weather. It's about 60 degrees outside, bright and sunny, at almost 11:00 a.m., in Miami, in mid-April. For this city, that is COLD. I'm sure this somehow proves global warming exists, because everything proves global warming exists. Global warming exists, therefore anything that happens is evidence that it exists. That is the position of leftists everywhere, and it seems totally logical to me.

Here's something that may make you laugh. One of the things I pray for every day is a collapse of the global warming fraud. Partly because it's destructive and expensive and dishonest, but also because I want God to remind us that He controls the weather.

It used to be that when natural events made human beings suffer, people examined themselves to see if they had sinned or in some way fallen short. Even heathens worried that they had upset their false gods. Academics claim early religions were motivated largely by a desire to assure good weather and good harvests.

Now we begin by blaming George Bush, regardless of the nature of the misfortune, and then we blame capitalism and the United States and, if at all possible, the Jews. The answer to our problems is to cripple industry and commerce, so we can be just as happy and healthy as people in primitive cultures, who die at 30, in the dirt, infested with parasites. The truth is, the ultimate source of health and prosperity and peace and so on is God. And you can only cheat Him for so long before he cuts off your allowance.

Wealth is a tremendous gift. But now leftists call it a curse, claiming it's "killing the planet." On the one hand, we're supposed to believe living things have the capacity to evolve and adapt to anything. On the other, we are told that a two-degree change in the average temperature will turn the world into a lifeless rock. And we're positive the change is caused by the things that make us prosperous. The things that bring us money to buy medicine and food and books. The things that enable us to give our surplus to the needy. The leftist position is, we should kill our prosperity just to be on the safe side.

Okay. Good plan.

Some leftists say we can save the planet if we kill the economy right now. But the leftists I truly love are the ones who say it's already too late. The world is definitely going to die because of the stuff we've already done! The first type of leftist, I understand. They want to use ecology as a weapon to inflict socialism and totalitarianism and atheism on us. A weapon to make us dependent on the state. The second kind...they're just FUN. They've completely lost sight of traditional leftist goals. They've forgotten that they're supposed to be manipulating us to change. They just want us to feel bad and die. For some reason, that cracks me up. They're like a yellow light at a traffic intersection. They don't inspire you to stop what you're doing. They inspire you to FLOOR IT BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE. Get out there and burn some gasoline while you still can! Eat, drink, and drive a big tasteless Humvee, because tomorrow we will fry like earthworms on a hot sidewalk. Like computer-generated polar bears in a lying documentary.

I still can't believe Al Gore says polar bears, which are semi-aquatic, are drowning. What next? Maybe we should go put little life jackets on otters! Parachutes for pigeons! I am too busy. I volunteer Heidi Cullen for these jobs. The otters will probably resist, because they're bitter and religious, but that problem can be solved with a tranquilizer gun. When the pain of the bites and scratches gets to be too much, they can shoot Heidi Cullen. That will make her feel better.

April has been really nice so far. Sometimes April is hot and miserable here, but this year, I've been able to sit outside and relax without sticking to the patio furniture. Thanks, Al. Keep the good weather coming, my man. You probably won't feel the weather, because you're always inside a climate-controlled mega-mansion or an SUV the size of an aircraft carrier, but the rest of us--the bitter, religious, gun-loving haters of immigrants--enjoy it a lot.

The unseasonable cold is doing good things for my plants. Supposedly, it helps tomato blossoms set, and I suddenly have a bunch of them on my previously pathetic Brandywine vine, so I have newfound hope that I may one day grow a full-size red tomato. The biggish yellow tomato on my Kentucky beefsteak vine will be ready to pick in a day or two. I'm hoping the city-fied squirrels here are too stupid to know what a tomato is. Otherwise, it may be time to risk arrest by shooting them from inside the house. There's a cool type of ammunition made for this purpose. It's called a colibri round. It's a .22 cartridge with no powder. The primer drives the slug at air rifle speeds. Very quiet. I guess if I were to go on a squirrel murder spree, I'd use a regular air gun, in order to avoid becoming famous as the nut who fired a gun in Coral Gables. Still, they're neat. I almost wish I still had rats.

Funny thing about tomatoes...the vines seem to grow from the ground out. If you drive a nail into a tree when it's a year old, the nail will be the same distance from the ground in a hundred years. Trees grow from their tops; the wood doesn't rise as the tree grows. But it seems like my tomatoes keep getting higher and higher, as if the vines are growing from the bottoms, not the tops. Is that possible?

I have a new batch of Tobago seasoning peppers, which are supposed to be mild but otherwise similar to habaneros. I grabbed a few and put them on takeout Mexican the other day. First, I tried a piece of one to see how hot it was. It seemed very hot for a mild pepper. Then I realized it wasn't hot at all, because I wasn't crying or drinking from a quart glass of ice water. My truly hot peppers are insufferable. Still, even though the Tobago peppers were good, I have to say I prefer my Home Depot cayennes, which have tons of cherry flavor and just enough heat.

My Trinidad Scorpion bush is a monster. Huge leaves the color of spinach. Lots of blossoms. And I think the bugs are afraid of it. I don't know what I'm going to do with the peppers. They are supposed to be hot enough to etch glass.

The peppers I'm most excited about are the habanero golds I planted from a store-pepper seed. The bush is beautiful, and it's loaded with huge peppers. They're nearly as big as Clementines, and they're still green! The pepper I used for seed was gigantic. Maybe three inches long. And the flavor was stupendous. If these are as good as that one, you might be smart to ask me for seeds.

I hammered the yard and, as collateral damage, myself with bifenthrin spray yesterday. "Orange dog" caterpillars are constantly attacking the citrus. And I will not have it. For some reason, the Persian lime is immune to everything. It's a beast. The other stuff, I have to keep an eye on.

Seems like I have no problem growing sour things and things that burn, but it's hard to grow sweet things. Perhaps this is a reflection of my personality. Maybe I should put Marv in charge of the tomatoes and fruit. He won't even bite the veterinarian.

Hmm...I spend a lot of time sitting. Maybe that means I could grow potatoes. That will be a useful skill in the full bloom of the Ethanol Famine.

Posted by Steve H. at 11:36 AM | Permalink  

We Can't All Worship St. Obama

Been busy with boring tasks today.

Yesterday's sabbath observation went well. I feel strange calling Sunday the sabbath, but I don't know what else to call it. I read a lot and relaxed and spent a fair amount of time in prayer, and oddly when I woke up today, I was still not perfect.

Maybe it will take two consecutive Sundays.

I am still confused about prayer in tongues. I reviewed some NT teaching on it, and the scriptural support is there. I guess what I question is whether I have ever done it, because when I do, it always sounds unconvincing. It's a tough issue for a sincere person. You want to do it, so you try, but how do you know you're not making it up? What if you're so good at making it up, you think you have it when you don't, and you quit trying to get the real thing, and it passes you by? And then you feel truly stupid in the afterlife, because everyone else got it and you didn't.

People being what they are, I can say with certainty that not all people who do it are really doing it.

I read more of the book of Enoch, and I tried to find information on why it was rejected by the Jews and by most Christians. The bit about angels reproducing is problematic for Jews, but it has also been suggested that they bailed on Enoch after Christianity appeared, because so much of the book seems to be about Christ.

I cannot buy into some of it. I do not believe there is a place where lightning is kept, ready to throw, like cigars in a box. But it seems like the facially weird bits can be pared away from the plausible parts that ring true.

I found out about it while I was researching Mt. Hermon. On my own, years ago, I got the idea that the Jordan Valley seems to be set up in a way that symbolizes the progress of human lives. I don't think God's symbolism is confined to the Bible. The water originates above, falls on Hermon, goes into several springs including one by an ancient shrine to Pan (the model for modern depictions of Satan), moves on to the lake where the disciples symbolically harvested fish, and then passes through the desert to the Dead Sea, which contains Sodom and Gomorrah. Not the new town, Sdom, which is on the banks. The actual cities. And we all know what they represent. From there, the only escape is evaporation.

If this idea pans out, it came from God. If not, it was all me.

The Enoch story lends a little credence to it. It says evil angels alit on Hermon and went from there to procreate with women, creating a race of superhuman beings which did all sorts of horrible things, leading God to flood the earth. The parable of the wheat and the tares seems to comport with this idea.

I don't have it all worked out, but anyway, I haven't yet accepted the notion that Enoch is garbage. Jesus's brother quoted it, so surely it's worth something.

I may sound silly talking about angels, but I know they exist, so I don't care. Some day we'll be dead, and you'll have to admit I was right. If you're a Christian and you don't believe in angels, you must be watching too much Oprah. You have to believe Jehovah and Jesus are two real beings, and that they are observing us at this very moment, and that Satan is real, and that there are legions of angels and demons. If those things sound ridiculous to you, what exactly is it that makes you think you're a Christian?

The shrine to Pan is located at a thing called the Banias. It would be called the Panias, or something similar, but Arabs don't have the letter P. Pagans used to worship false gods there and throw sacrifices into the spring. You would think that would defile the Jordan all the way to the Dead Sea, but I haven't read anything suggesting that the Jews cared about this.

I went to the Banias once while I was a kibbutz volunteer, on a weekend tour sponsored by the kibbutz. I didn't realize at the time that it was adjacent to the location of Caesarea Philippi, an evil city and the site of Jesus's declaration that he was the Messiah. Remember "Get thee behind me, Satan"? He said that near the Banias. Which may have some prophetic significance. He said it to Peter. But are we sure he was only addressing Peter, given the peculiar location?

The Banias is truly creepy. There's a giant hole in a red rock face, which the kibbutz volunteer supervisor told us was believed to be the birthplace of Pan. And there's a stagnant pool there, which used to be a bubbling spring. That's where they threw the sacrifices. Not sure if they were all animals.

I'm dying to go back to Israel. I should just get up and go. Spend a week. I wonder if I can still go to all the places I went last time. Jericho is out, I suppose.

A recommendation: for some reason I no longer recall, I had a copy of The Spirit-Filled Bible, and it seems very good. Maybe the reason I used to read the Bible too little is that the versions I had lacked useful annotations and so on. This book is packed with them. Background on each author, historical information, insight on the actual words used, and it was written by people who believe in the baptism of the Holy Spirit.

Sunday was very nice. There is more to it than I'm telling, but it was a very good day. Peculiar thing; my tomatoes and peppers seem to be doing much better, suddenly. I don't claim a causal connecition, but it's true.

Posted by Steve H. at 8:28 PM | Permalink  

One Fine Tomato

I decided to slice the one and only reasonably mature non-grape-size tomato I've managed to grow. It was a Cherokee chocolate. A bit undersized, but bright red with green on the stem end.

Man, what a tomato. Super sweet, like a piece of fruit. And sour. And full of flavor. The odd thing is, it's not like any tomato I've had. I think if you put it in a BLT, it would be too frou-frou. But out of hand or in a salad, it would be hard to beat. I just wish I could grow more of the damned things. There are a few tiny ones on the plant. They may survive.

This tomato was deep green inside, with red flesh around the bottom and sides. But it was definitely ripe. Not as ripe as I would have liked, but way past the crap I get at the store.

It would be worth it to buy a light and grow tomatoes indoors, if they were all this good.

Posted by Steve H. at 8:31 PM | Permalink  

"He's Out There Again!"

Got a few shots of the vegetables. I can already hear the whiners pointing out that they're really fruit. Hope I didn't confuse one type with another.

1. Prig ki nu peppers. A small sampling from a huge bush.

2. Jamaican hot chocolate peppers, on last year's bush.

3. Habanero gold peppers.

4. More habanero golds.

5. More habanero golds. Sometimes I like what "auto levels" does to photos. I believe Steven den Beste first mentioned it to me.

6. Kentucky beefsteak tomato. Looks bigger than it is, sadly.

7. Cherokee chocolate tomato. Small, but not freakishly so.

8. This is a tomato from a plant whose type I forgot. I liked this tomato because it looked sinister. Like the sentinels in The Matrix.

That's all.

Posted by Steve H. at 12:19 PM | Permalink  

Touch my Plants and Die in Agony

The gardening situation continues to improve, thanks to poison and God's grace. I just harvested an edible papaya. It wasn't worth keeping, but unlike previous papayas, it could be eaten without undue difficulty. I assume that when the full-size fruit get ripe, some will be table-worthy.

I had to kill a tomato plant (Kentucky beefsteak) today due to yellow leaf curl virus. But three of my other plants are trying to bear. So I'll have Kentucky beefsteak, Cherokee Chocolate, and some other type of tomato soon. My Brandywine vine is healthy, but it has battled with problems. Maybe I'll get a tomato out of it yet.

The peppers are coming back. I just harvested a couple of the yard-planted peppers I've been ignoring. Some kind of Jamaican thing. Geez, I'll look it up. Hell, I don't know what it is. It's flat on top and tapers toward the tip, and it's big and bumpy. I tried one, and it's not bad. Not too hot. Could be sweeter. Not bad enough to remove from the yard.

I have an endless supply of prig ki nus now. Probably a thousand of them. Great peppers. Unique flavor. No idea what to do with them.

The citrus is doing better, now that I know I have to kill the caterpillars that grow on it. There is a caterpillar known as the orange dog, and it looks like a big hunk of bird poop. When I realized they were caterpillars, I looked them up and started killing them. I used Sevin and bifenthrin, and I also squeeze them between the leaves, so their guts squirt out. They're supposed to grow into big, pretty butterflies. Looks like I put the kibosh on that.

My habanero gold peppers are doing great. The plants are a foot and a half high, completely healthy, and bearing. This will be a major coup. I may move them to the yard for permanent consumption. No chinense hot pepper I've tried compares to these babies. My little orange grocery-store-seed Scotch bonnets taste just as good, but they're smaller and not as pretty. My cayennes are great, but it's a different category and flavor.

If the habanero golds pan out, I will be willing to send seeds to people. I'll know in a month. Maybe I'll celebrate by making chili and patacons. Hey, these would make wonderful smoked peppers. Damn, that's a fine idea.

Posted by Steve H. at 3:22 PM | Permalink  

Give Nature no Quarter

In spite of Al Gore's fantasies and those of the dirtbags who have scammed useless ethanol contracts out of the government, March hasn't been all that warm here in Miami. Maybe that explains the NEW BABY TOMATOES I FOUND ON MY PLANTS! Can it actually be? Will I harvest enough tomatoes to make an entire BLT this time?

This would be another plus to moving north. Halfway up the state, it's several degrees colder than it is here. At least it is in winter. That would probably enable me to grow tomatoes quasi-reliably.

I'm not sure about my Kentucky beefsteaks, but it looks like I have a real shot at five or six more Cherokee chocolates.

I'm gradually figuring things out. One piece of data: container gardening is not the way to go. The roots of the plants get hot, and the plants think the weather has gone crazy, and they drop their blossoms. Now that I think about it, if I sprayed religiously, I might be able to get some summer tomatoes, provided I planted them in the ground.

I whomped everything with copper fungicide and Sevin today. Seems like daconil is pretty pathetic compared to copper.

I'm really not afraid of pesticides, except when I give fruit to my birds (more sensitive to some chemicals than we are). The more I read about pesticides, the more I think this is one more thing hippies are wrong about. Their idiotic objections to DDT have resulted in millions of human deaths. The FDA and the chemical companies seem fairly paranoid about releasing harmful bug killers, and I have a reasonable degree of faith in the human body's ability to rid itself of poisons. Adding it all together, I come to the conclusion that organic food is stupid. Besides, the Nazis were big on organic food. True fact. Look it up.

It's funny how hippies love so many things associated with the Nazis. Volkswagen Beetles. BMWs. Vegetarianism. Excessive concern about animal rights. Eugenics. Government control of industry. Anti-Semitism.

Life in South Florida was nearly impossible before bug spray. Today we only survive by paying the government to send trucks around at night, misting our streets with malathion. I sort of admire the people who lived here before we had the ability to poison insects. But another part of me suspects that they were insane. I doubt a typical American who lives in a relatively bug-free area can understand what Florida is like without insecticide. If you want to find out, try this. Drive down US 1 and go over the Card Sound toll bridge. Make sure it's dark out. Find yourself a nice remote spot. And get out of the car for five minutes, without applying repellant. You'll never make it. I promise you, you'll be in the car in less than a minute, and the mosquitoes will join you before you can close the door. Then you have to drive seventy miles an hour with the windows open to get rid of them.

Like I always say, screw the environment. The world isn't a museum; it's okay to renovate and rearrange. The longer responsible human beings occupy and modify a place, the more pleasant and livable it becomes. Frankly, I don't care if we occasionally lose an obscure, arguably nonexistent subspecies of louse or cockroach. You can't really live in harmony with nature. It's nature or us. Nature wants to kill us, and so far, it has done a damn fine job. The proper object is to subdue nature and render it harmless without destroying it.

So I plan to dose my tomatoes until they glow.

I do hope I get some fruit this time. Work is regrettable under the best of circumstances. When it doesn't pay off, it's downright criminal.

Posted by Steve H. at 1:37 PM | Permalink  

Gardening has Been a Challenge

Exciting news for all you gardening freaks: looks like I may succeed in growing a few edible tomatoes this season.

As you may recall, I planted a whole bunch of tomatoes in the wrong season last year, and tomato yellow leaf curl virus and various blights wiped them out. I planted new seedlings in the fall, and out of the twenty or so I planted, I have two producing plants, one that could conceivably produce, and one that is alive but not looking anxious to bear. Sad as that is, it beats previous efforts.

I have a Cherokee chocolate tomato that is nearly the size of a tennis ball, plus a Kentucky beefsteak which is rapidly catching up. One of my other plants grew a hideously deformed tomato, but it still has blossoms, so something good might happen. The Cherokee chocolate and the Kentucky beefsteak appear to have tiny tomatoes forming, so with any luck, I'll get a few more fruit before June comes and kills everything.

Another nice development: my Trinidad scorpion peppers look good, as do my "habanero gold" peppers. I use quotation marks because I'm pretty sure "habanero gold" is a BS name the local yuppie produce market made up. I grew these from seeds obtained at said market. The fruit from which the seeds were taken were gorgeous and delicious. They get about three inches long, and they're very, very sweet. They start out bright yellow and then turn red. Best habaneros I've ever seen.

I still have a lot of my old pepper plants, although I killed some because I didn't like them. My PC-1 peppers were flavorless, so they got the ax. My tepins died from overwatering. I killed a boring plant that produced boring red habaneros, and I also destroyed a prig ki nu I didn't need. I have a huge one in the yard, and it appears to be invulnerable to bugs and disease, so I don't need another one in a pot, taking up my time.

I decided to reduce inventory because it was a pain taking care of a whole bunch of different peppers that didn't contribute much to my cooking palette. I plan further reductions. I have very nice orange Scotch bonnets I grew from grocery-pepper seed, and there is nothing wrong with them, but the habanero golds have a similar flavor, and they're bigger and better. I should probably get rid of my Fataliis or white habaneros, since they taste pretty similar. And I guess I'll eventually kill my Caribbean red habanero.

I also have ornamental Thai peppers I bought by accident. They're just stupid.

I didn't succeed in getting Super datils to sprout. Maybe I'll try again.

My giant basil tree up and died on me. I thought it was immortal. Very sad. I have some basil seed. I may toss it out there and see what happens. I have oregano, sage, and thyme growing in the box I originally built for tomatoes. Basil would be the perfect addition. The herbs seem to do very well. Bugs just don't get anywhere with them.

I managed to obtain a few messes of shucky beans before the rust got my vines. But I'm not sure they're edible. I think some of them mildewed a little while they were drying. I guess I should cook them up and find out. I made shucky beans from a bag of green beans I bought at the store, and they look awful good. I kind of wonder if beans are worth growing.

It turns out potatoes grow here. That's a surprise. I guess it shouldn't be, since they come from South America. It might actually be worthwhile to plant a hill or two. I can't believe what potatoes cost. The other day I paid 89 cents a pound. I can buy gorgeous cuts of pork for that kind of money. Insane.

I guess if I want tomatoes after these plants croak, I'll have to get some kind of heat-resistant hybrids. They'll probably suck. I guess the question is, will they be better than the ones at the store? If so, maybe it's time to bite the bullet and go hybrid. They'll still be vulnerable to tomato yellow leaf curl virus, though.

I used to think Miami was a good place to grow stuff, but now I think it may be too hot and humid and bug-infested. Maybe it's easier a hundred miles north. Too far south for frost, but too far north for a true jungle climate. And coincidentally, that's the latitude where I'd like to live in a few years. Also coincidentally, my great aunt Gladys up in Frostproof wants me and my father to visit in a week or so. That will be nice. It may be hard to make me go home.

I'm still a crappy gardener, but the results are too good for me to quit. A lot of things in life are that way.

Posted by Steve H. at 4:30 PM | Permalink  

Yellow!

Because I'm dieting 5 days a week, I keep eating the same crap over and over. Filet of dolphin seasoned with salt, garlic powder, and dry oregano, fried in olive oil, plus a can of mustard or collard or turnip greens. And I keep trying my homemade hot sauces on them.

Tonight I used yellow habanero sauce. I had high hopes for this one, because the peppers are delicious. Yes, they're blazing hot, but the flavor is wonderful. Fruity and sweet.

I did these pretty much like the others. Dumped them in a food processor, added turbinado sugar, a clove of garlic, a peeled Clementine, and lime juice. I think. Pureed it and put it in a squirt bottle.

It's excellent. You have to grind it really find to get it to squirt, but it's worth it. The fruity flavor is pretty obvious in the sauce, even after you apply it sparingly to food.

I think the "habanero golds" I'm growing will be even better. It's a similar flavor, but they're bigger and sweeter. You can find the yellow habaneros (seeds) on this page: CLICK.

I have to say, I'm pretty disgusted with store-bought sauce. I have no idea what I'm doing, but the homemade stuff I threw together without thinking is a thousand times as good as anything I've had with a label on it. I'm probably going to cut way back on buying sauce. I think Frank's is good for wings, but really, shouldn't I be able to make something a lot better? Maybe a combination of lemon and fresh orange juice instead of the vinegar Frank's is based on.

You'd think the professional sauce people would have a clue, but apparently they're complete losers. I had no idea.

Buy yourself some peppers and see what happens.

Posted by Steve H. at 9:29 PM | Permalink  

Two Bucks, or a Full-Time Job

I'm kind of bummed out today. I planted tomatoes, beans, and peppers. Of those items, tomatoes are the hardest to buy in any acceptable level of quality. In fact, it's just plain not possible to get them. And they were the only crops I was totally unable to grow. We have a thing now called Tomato Yellow Leaf Curl Virus, and it's spread by the whitefly, which is one of the commonest and hardest to kill bugs in existence, and your plant can get it from very few bites, and once you've got it, the plant is worthless.

I'm still trying to grow tomatoes, using as much poison as I dare, but I expect them to crap out again. But the peppers and beans worked out okay, and up until now, I've been feeling pretty good about that.

Over the past few weeks, I've been stringing my Kentucky Wonder beans on threads and hanging them to dry, to make shucky beans. And even though the harvest was small, I was feeling somewhat pleased. But the last time I went to the grocery, on a whim, I bought a giant bag of green beans for $2.39, and while I was stringing my own beans today, I strung those too. And looking at the result, I am fairly sure that I am going to get fine quality beans, in amounts approximating my total harvest to date. No spray, no digging, no picking, no weeding.

So I kind of think the whole bean effort may have been wasted. I'll know in a few weeks, when they dry out and I've eaten a few.

This would mean only the peppers were worth the aggravation.

I'm starting to think the only way to get tomatoes in South Florida now is to grow the damn things indoors. What a pain that would be. I'd need a light and a timer and a place to put the pots. And anything more than 3 pots would take up too much room.

I never thought I'd live in a world where something as ordinary as a good tomato was impossible to come by. And if the beans are a waste of time, what do I do with the bed I prepared for them? I guess I can stick herbs and peppers in it, but how many peppers can I realistically use?

Maybe it's time to give up and plant something ordinary and reliable, like bananas.

Posted by Steve H. at 4:46 PM | Permalink  

Tabasco Sucks

Today I spent like 45 minutes cramming hot peppers into little bottles to preserve them. I already had a bunch of prig ki nus in lime juice, and after I went to the Container Store and bought three squeeze bottles, I was ready to attack some other varieties.

First I worked on a bunch of Tobago seasoning peppers. I'm very impressed by these things. They're about as hot as cayenne peppers, which means you can eat them like cherry tomatoes if you're brave. And they have the nice, fruity chinense-pepper flavor you expect from habaneros. I seeded them, put them in a food processor, and ground them up with lime juice and a clove of garlic. I also added a Clementine (seedless tangerine) and some turbinado sugar. I plan to add salt eventually.

After that I sliced some Jamaican hot chocolate peppers into big chunks and simply soaked them in lime juice.

For the third bottle, I used yellow habaneros. These are wonderful. They're very fruity and painfully hot. Everything a habanero should be. I pureed them with garlic, lime juice, a Clementine, sugar, and garlic. I'm a little afraid to go near the bottle.

I fixed myself another quick utilitarian dinner (Foreman grill dolphin plus canned collards), and I squirted some of the Tobago pepper sauce on it. It's excellent. Much better than any sauce I've bought, and I've bought some good ones.

You might want to try this yourself. Use whatever moderately hot, sweet pepper you can find. Or you could combine habaneros with sweet red peppers, to get a good balance of flavor and heat.

Posted by Steve H. at 6:25 PM | Permalink  

Great Answer to Annoying Problem

I think one of my two prig ki nu bushes is dead. It's green, but the leaves popped off. I may have overwatered it. Potted peppers can be tricky.

I picked around six ounces of ripe peppers off of it today to keep them from being lost, and I couldn't figure out what to do with them. Oil would be a great thing to preserve them in, but I'd have to cook them to prevent botulism. And that would ruin the flavor. And I didn't want to add vinegar.

Finally, I realized I had a better acid. Homegrown lime juice. I juiced two limes and dumped the juice into the peppers. This will be perfect. I'll put them in a little jar in the fridge, and it will be a miracle if anything manages to survive in it.

I considered using vodka, but I couldn't find a reference saying it was safe. Vodka would be good because it would be nearly neutral. Lime juice is good because it goes great with peppers and nearly any dish you would put them in.

My limes are wonderful. Because I don't pick them before they get ripe, they're big and yellowish and sweet, and they're full of juice. Nothing like a store lime.

Posted by Steve H. at 4:02 PM | Permalink  

Die, Bitches

I have poisoned the whole yard AGAIN. This makes once with bifenthrin, once with malathion, and twice with imidacloprid. If I can find a bag of plutonium, I'll be using that too.

Nothing seems to nail the damn whiteflies. Imidacloprid got them off the crops and shrubs, but it hasn't done diddly for the ones in the grass. I think that's because I didn't water it in the last time. So this time, I turned the sprinklers on as soon as I finished spreading the poison.

I will say one thing in praise of the poisons I've used. I haven't seen a roach in at least a week. In Miami, that's extraordinary. Almost creepy. And the giant South American millipedes are getting scarce. The ants seem to be doing fine, however. Last week I noticed they were swarming on me whenever I sat in this chair. Crawling through my hair and biting my legs. I bombed the house and foundation with three nasty chemicals, and things seem to have returned to normal. I don't know why they multiplied so suddenly. I guess this is the time of year when they breed and mount invasions.

Crop experts say you should rotate poisons, spraying first one, and then a few weeks or months later, another. That sounds stupid to me. Seems to me that you should use them pretty close together, if not at the same time. But I'm not sure. I tried to figure it out mathematically, but then I realized there are a whole bunch of factors I can't account for, so to hell with it.

All I know is, I plan to keep killing until the authorities take this stuff away from me.

Posted by Steve H. at 4:09 PM | Permalink  

Important Stuff

I bought an Olevia 527 TV. It crapped out. They told me they would send a refurb, if I paid the freight and gave them a credit card number. I was to put the old tube in the refurb box and send it back. It took over a month to get the replacement. I was mad, but at least it was fixed, right?

Well, this week I noticed that the new one hums all the time, even when it's not connected to other electronics, and even when I run an extension cord to a socket on another circuit. And then tonight the damn thing died.

Called Olevia. They're sending a third TV.

I'm not too impressed with the practice of shipping refurbs to replace new TVs. For one thing, you have no idea how old the refurb is or how many hours are on it. For another, it's a TV that has already crapped out at least once. So isn't it natural to expect it to crap out again?

My first Olevia is great, but after the problems I've had with the second one, I would never buy Olevia again. It's worth another hundred bucks to get a brand with good support. They just don't seem to have the kind of in-country investment they need to do an adequate job.

If my first Olevia dies, I am going to kill myself. Pure and simple. It's off warranty, and it's heavy, and I really don't feel like driving 37" TVs back and forth from the UPS Store, when all the shipping and repair expenses are my responsibility.

In other news, I finally got around to checking the fuse in the old Zenith I replaced with the second Olevia. Sure enough, it was blown. I replaced it, and now my trusty Zenith is working as well as ever. What a great TV that is. It's over 12 years old, and the picture seems as good as it ever was. I think I may build a TV platform on the wall in the garage, so when the garage is totally rehabbed I can sit under the ceiling fan and watch hot rod shows. If only I had room for a secondhand vinyl office couch. I have an extra stereo I want to put out there.

I should have checked the fuse before buying a new TV, but I have to admit, I wanted a flat panel, so I wasn't motivated to try.

Let's see. What else is happening? Oh, yeah. I tried two new peppers today. First, the Jamaican red Scotch bonnet. This is a saucer-shaped pepper which is supposed to be red, but mine are orange. It doesn't look like a totally normal chinense pepper. Supposedly there are peppers that are part chinense and part annuum or frutescens. It's not bad, but it's not worth the effort of growing. Not sweet, not particularly flavorful.

Second pepper: the yellow habanero. This is a very pretty bright yellow chinense. Medium-sized. Smaller than a hot chocolate. I ate a piece this afternoon, and it was very, very good. Very sweet, full of flavor, and hot as Satan's sphincter after a chili-eating contest. I like this one a lot. So I may kill my Caribbean reds and replace them with these. It's like they mysterious huge "habanero gold" peppers I found at a local store, only much smaller and not red. I'm growing those too, but it will be maybe two months before I get to try one.

I highly recommend the yellow habanero. It's right up there with the hot chocolate and the Tobago seasoning pepper in terms of flavor and usefulness. Not too prolific, though.

Oh, I forgot. I tried one of my prig ki nus the other day. They're really good, and the flavor is much different from the chinenses I grow. It has a ton of Thai personality; if you eat real Thai food, you'll recognize it. It's a keeper, although I'm afraid the bigger of my two plants is about to die from bug attacks. I was surprised at the heat in this pepper. It's supposed to be much milder than the other peppers I grow, but it damn near killed me. Recommended, but you need to remember that it has a different personality from habaneros and Scotch bonnets, so you can't expect it to be the same when you throw it in chili or jerk.

Posted by Steve H. at 9:14 PM | Permalink  

Where?

Here's a weird question. If you wanted to buy a bunch of paper bags, each big enough to cover a papaya, where would you go?

Posted by Steve H. at 3:56 PM | Permalink  

I Just Want ONE BLT

I got a bunch of tomato and transplants that I need to start moving to big pots, and I'm suffering a brand new wave of whiteflies and mealybugs. Wouldn't you know it? I can either find a way to get the bugs out of my older plants, or I have to kill them to keep them from infecting the new ones.

Fortunately, I think I have it. I think I made a giant mathematical mistake when I dosed my plants with imidacloprid a month or two back. I believe I was supposed to hit them with roughly 0.2 grams of active ingredient, and I ended up somewhere closer to 0.002. Oddly, the bugs went away. Maybe that's all it takes. But today I whacked them with the bigger dose anyway. I'll keep re-checking my math. For some reason, I find simple addition, subtraction, and multiplication more challenging than calculus. Variables just don't seem as slippery as numbers, when you're absent-minded.

Oh, hey. I have Mathcad 5,000 BC installed on this machine. I should have converted everything to variables and used that. Or--horrors--used a pencil and a calculator.

Oops, I forgot to install it when I upgraded my hardware. Rats.

They're saying now that imidacloprid is killing all the bees. So naturally I'm doing the responsible thing and using as much of it as I can before they take it away from me. Hey, I can't eat bees.

If it turns out I'm overdosing the plants by a factor of a thousand, at least they'll make nice ornamentals.

My second bean crop is starting to produce. I guess I'm going to get a lot of beans. They don't seem to be getting rust this time. That's good because my last batch generated about two meals' worth of shucky beans, which isn't much.

I have to get serious about cutting back on pepper varieties. I managed to sprout a whole bunch of "habanero gold" peppers (no idea what the real name is), and if they breed true, they're going to be magnificent. So I should get rid of my mediocre varieties and replace them with these. I guess that means the white habaneros, fun though they were, are history. And the Caribbean red habaneros. Also the orange habaneros, and maybe the yellow habaneros, which I haven't tried yet. I need to try the Jamaican reds now that I have a few, but I have a feeling they'll be getting the axe.

I have to narrow the tomato choices down to three or four varieties. I'm thinking Mortgage Lifter, Kentucky Beefsteak, Cherokee Chocolate, and Dr. Wyche's. Two yellow, two red. If I could get six reliable plants going, I'd be in heaven.

Still have to bag my papayas. Once they turn yellow, flies will lay eggs in them. Where on earth do you get paper bags the size of a papaya? It's driving me nuts. Will plastic work, or will they rot? I don't know.

My basil died. I can't believe that. Something found it, I guess. It was driving me nuts anyway, taking over the yard. Maybe I'll plant some new basil and take the "herb garden" raised bed more seriously. Right now, I have sage, thyme, and Greek oregano I could move out there. Add basil, and I have most of my herb bases covered.

The imidacloprid business is going to get very interesting. Tomato growers claim they'll lose half of their crop if they can't use imidacloprid. Bee lovers claim it will make bees nearly extinct. Who wins? I've read that a bee-friendly poison called spinosad may be a good substitute. Try finding it in a store, though.

Guess I'll bag those damn papayas.

Posted by Steve H. at 3:33 PM | Permalink  

If I Moved the Towel They Would Eat the Table

I knew I had to start picking peppers if I didn't want the birds and bugs to get them. So today I got to work. Here are the items I harvested this morning.

I think the ISO on my camera is off. Or something. My brown peppers aren't that dark. I'll tell you what you're looking at, going clockwise, starting at top left.

1. Jamaican hot chocolate
2. Fatalii
3. Suspected Jamaican red Scotch bonnets, which turned out to be Caribbean red habaneros
4. White hababero
5. Orange "Scotch bonnet" from grocery (probably a habanero)
6. Tobago seasoning
7. Cayenne
8. Caribbean red habanero

I cut up about 40 Caribbean reds and vacuum-sealed them, and I followed with all the fataliis and most of the hot chocolates. I went through about six nitrile gloves. I threw the bags in the kitchen sink when I was done and washed them with soap. I put every utensil I used, plus the cutting board, in the dishwasher. And I still have to figure out a way to neutralize the surface of the vacuum sealer.

I really don't know what to do with the peppers that come later. The cayennes are great, so I'll save them. And I guess I can use more Tobago seasoning peppers. But the others...I think I have enough frozen for about a year.

I have hundreds of PC-1s, but they're still green, and I don't really like them. I only picked a tiny fraction of my white habaneros, and I still have a ton of Caribbean reds in the kitchen and on the plants.

It's time to do triage. I think I'm going to get rid of the Caribbean reds. They're good, but the grocery habaneros are actually better. And I suppose I ought to lose the white habaneros. They're not exotic enough to be really interesting, and they are so damn hot they are almost useless. I may dump my yellow habaneros, too. I haven't tried them yet, but I suspect they won't be that thrilling.

I have to make room for the datils I'm growing, as well as the Trinidad Scorpions and 7 Pots.

I tried the Caribbean Reds again today, alongside the peppers I thought were Jamaican Reds, and they seemed about the same. Pretty sweet. Very hot. Fruity. I can't figure out how I ended up with two pots of Caribbean Reds, but fortunately I have a Jamaican Red in my bean bed, so all is not lost.

Wish my tomatoes had done this well.

Posted by Steve H. at 2:07 PM | Permalink  

Never Trust a Redhead

I would already be at Northern Tool, were it not for my hesitance to get on the road right after a McDonald's breakfast and a mug of hot coffee. It would be tempting fate not to wait for at least one kidney cycle.

I'm eating Mickey D's on a Thursday because I was having a hard time scheduling both of my weekly Fat Days on the weekend. I have stupidly taken an interest in tools and gardening and home maintenance, so weekends are busier than they were back when I laid on my ass and watched things disintegrate. And my Nowlive show has also eaten into the fun.

I truly despise the local Mickey D's. The one near Maynada street. They must have hired a medically certified pinhead to take over the management ("Has that custom paper hat arrived yet?"). They have screwed up the last four times I've gone over there. Three or four; I forget. Let's see...they let me sit in the car waiting for hash browns until the food got cold. They tried to serve me a large drink in two cups because they were too stupid to keep big cups in stock. They sold me a gross bacon and egg McMuffin and charged me for a biscuit. They made me wait in the car while they changed their Dr. Pepper tank, AFTER filling my drink three-fourths of the way and letting the ice melt. They ran out of ice cream! Can you believe that? How can you run out of delicious McFlurries? What about the precious public trust?

I was not happy just now, as I choked down the last bite of bacon egg and cheese McMuffin dipped in Hunt's ketchup. It would be one thing if I were a 24/7 fatass. But I'm a 24/2 fatass, which is completely different. Two days a week I get actual food, and I truly look forward to it. A McDonald's breakfast is one of my favorite meals. And these incompetent turds keep ruining it.

What hope is there for you if you can't make a McDonald's restaurant work? Whoever is running that place should be put in an institution for life.

I decided that I need a chain hoist and a couple of slings to move the compressor. I was going to use a come along, but a chain hoist costs roughly the same amount of money, and I have noticed that cables cause a lot more problems than chains. The cool thing about getting this stuff is, I can leave the hoist attached to a roof truss, permanently. Then whenever I need to lift anything (once in ten blue moons), it will be there. I wouldn't want to hang an engine from it, but it could be useful for other stuff. Notably as a safety device when using a motorcycle lift. It could give me a few seconds to get out of the way. I figure a thousand-pound hoist will be way more than adequate, since I'll never put that kind of weight on it.

I ate the only real tomato I managed to grow today. It was a Mortgage Lifter. It was about half as big as it should have been. It started to go funny, so I picked it and took the seeds and planted them. It was very sad; I could tell that it would have been a wonderful tomato, had it not been ruined by a virus. Maybe the seeds will pay off.

Posted by Steve H. at 12:10 PM | Permalink  

Strangers on my Patio

I keep trying to figure out what's going on with my peppers.

I planted Caribbean red habaneros and Jamaican red Scotch bonnets. The first variety is supposed to be habanero-shaped. The second should have a pronounced ridge around it and a classic Scotch bonnet shape. But they all look like habaneros. Or so I thought. Anyway, I was confused.

Earlier in the year I had too many plants for my pots, so I put a couple of peppers in the yard. A prig ki nu and--I thought--a Tobago seasoning pepper. This is a very mild chinense pepper. Should look more or less like a habanero. Today I checked the plants in the yard, and I'll be damned if one of them isn't producing bonnet-shaped peppers. So naturally I'm wondering if I screwed up somewhere down the line.

I also have some pretty orange peppers shaped like pumpkins. The ends are kind of flat, and they pooch out in the middle. They're supposed to be either yellow habaneros or Tobago seasoning peppers. But they're not yellow, and they don't look like seasoning peppers. What the hell are they? Some of the seasoning peppers in the photo at Seedsavers.org have the boxy, nearly hexagonal shape my peppers have, but they're red, and mine are orange.

I regret doing so many transplants. That's how I lost track of the plant names.

I suppose I should eat one of these things and see if it's hot.

More

I would not call this a mild pepper, but it's not as vicious as the others I grow. Maybe it IS a Tobago seasoning pepper. Lots of nice fruit flavor. Could be sweeter. Strong apricot smell.

Great pepper, regardless of what it turns out to be.

Posted by Steve H. at 1:55 PM | Permalink  

I Miss my Nose Hairs

Whee, Lordy. I did another hot pepper taste test.

Today's list:

1. Jamaican red Scotch bonnet

2. Fatalii pepper (yellow), from the Central African Republic.

That was all I could handle.

The Jamaican red had a little bit of a fruity smell to it, and you can smell the capsaicin before you cut it. The taste is a little sweet and somewhat fruity, but not as fruity as a really good hot pepper. It's a nice pepper, but not fantastic. A good, basic, versatile Scotch bonnet. The heat is about like the Jamaican hot chocolate pepper I ate the other day. A little less intense than typical grocery habaneros.

Now the fatalii. This one is supposed to be a real son of a bitch.

When you cut it, it smells about like a white habanero, only more intense. A slight lemony scent plus a sharp scent like a beaker of acid.

It tastes a lot like the white habanero, too, except it seems to have a little sweetness. The heat seems tolerable at first, but it slowly spreads and gets worse until you wish you hadn't eaten the damn thing. Nearly as bad as a white habanero. This one would be better for cooking, because it has a little more flavor.

I like the Jamaican hot chocolate because it's unique. The smoky flavor will surely be useful, and the pepper is not too hot to be practical. The Jamaican red is a good all-purpose chinense pepper, but not so good I'd grow it again. The "habanero gold" peppers I bought at Norman Brothers Produce are a lot more flavorful, and they're very sweet.

The white habanero would be great for heating up food without a lot of pepper-picking, washing, and mincing. One pepper or two should light up a pot of food.

The fatalii is pretty similar to the white habanero, but perhaps easier to control.

Man, I'm sweating. That fatalii is something. And it made my nose run for 10 minutes.

I now have enough peppers for a year of cooking. The Jamaican red Scotch bonnet is covered in fat fruit, and they're turning bright red fast. The hot chocolates keep getting bigger and bigger. The cayenne plant seems ill, but it's producing anyway. A couple of other plants are starting to come on.

I'm wondering if I got the full hot chocolate effect by eating a fairly small one. Guess I can try another.

I hate to say it, but I should start cutting down plants I'm not in love with. It's fun having a variety of peppers, but what's the point, if they're not all fantastic?

Tomato season is finally here. We're supposed to dip below 70 degrees tonight, for the first time this year. It would be wonderful if my existing plants managed to pump out some fruit. I don't think they will, but at least the new ones will be moving into a pleasant environment, where the weather is cool, it doesn't rain too much, and I've murdered every bug in the yard with poison.

Now I have to get ready to make jambalaya for Sunday's Code Blue Cooking. I wonder which pepper I should use. I think the boring old cayennes would be great.

Posted by Steve H. at 2:25 PM | Permalink  

Licensed to Kill Varmints, by The Government of the United Nations

I have one nice Mortgage Lifter tomato. That's about it for this season. I'm worried that the squirrels will eat it.

Is there anything that actually repels squirrels? I mean, not snake oil, like the ridiculous ladybug/mealybug cure. The real deal?

I'm so paranoid I'm considering getting a decent air rifle and popping the little shits from a window, so the Gables Nazis won't see me killing them and cite me for violating their pansy ordinances.

My dad would love it. He hasn't had squirrel in years.

Posted by Steve H. at 11:42 PM | Permalink  

Grown by Yours Truly

Took some peppers off my plants today, because I was afraid the storm would ruin the whole garden.

Take a look.

From left: fatalii, Jamaican hot chocolate, immature (green) Caribbean red habanero, three white habaneros, Jamaican red Scotch bonnet, two PC-1s in the center.

Not bad.

Posted by Steve H. at 9:31 PM | Permalink  

Food is Always too Slow

Shot some nice video already. I put my curry ingredients on cutting boards and filmed them, and I filmed the beef browning in the skillet, and I filmed the ingredient paste frying in the beef grease. Now the curry is in the oven.

I used two of my Jamaican hot chocolate peppers in the curry. I had to try one before the cooking started, and I was wary, to put it mildly. I cut a thin slice, got a big glass of water with ice in it, and started chewing. Surprisingly, the pepper wasn't that hot. It had a nice fruity taste, but not as sweet and fruity as other chinense peppers I've had.

I may have picked the peppers before they got their full heat. I ate a tepin the other day, and it wasn't fully mature, and it had no heat whatsoever.

If the curry isn't hot enough, I know how to fix it. One tiny white habanero. If I can stand it.

In all likelihood, it's hot enough. While I was frying the paste (spices, onion, ginger, garlic, peppers, etcetera), I couldn't keep my eyes open. It was like a mustard gas attack.

I may make the rotis tomorrow. This is a real job.

Posted by Steve H. at 4:28 PM | Permalink  

No Poison, no Tomatoes

I think it's time to admit defeat and kill my hanging Beefmaster tomato plant, as well as the other plant that managed to produce a tomato. The biggest tomato on these two plants is the size of a golf ball, and it just started turning pink. I assume that means it's done growing. It should be more like a grapefruit.

Damn that yellow leaf curl virus to hell. That is one tough virus to beat.

I may as well slaughter all of my container tomatoes, except for the isolated Dr. Wyche's that doesn't seem sick. The whiteflies have gotten to almost every plant, and once they find it, the virus follows.

It appears that imidacloprid is my only hope. I'm going to hammer the entire yard with it one more time before moving my transplants outside, and I'm going to drench the dirt under the transplants. "Drench" is a powerful word for a few drops of poison in a gallon of water, but that's what I'm going to do.

It's annoying that growers are allowed to pound their crops with imidacloprid and I'm not And it's kind of insulting that they will sell me the chemical for the lawn and shrubs, as if I can't figure out that it's the same stuff and use it on tomatoes. I'm not sure I get it. If imidacloprid is bad, and it's a systemic, and if most Miami lawns have fruit trees, why sell a lawn product that contains imidacloprid? Won't it find its way into the roots? If it's not bad, why not admit it and sell it for use on fruit and vegetables?

Just wait until yellow leaf curl gets to your area. You'll be as mad as I am. You're going to go outside after weeks of work and find little yellow leaves popping up on your plants, and that will be the end of your growing season. And it's on the way, unless you live on Mars. Google and see. I finally waded through the Happy Shiny Hippie Organic bullshit and found some sites that told the truth. The only answer to the epidemic. And here it is: IMIDACLOPRID! IMIDACLOPRID! IMIDACLOPRID! Spray it! Drench it! Swim in it! That's good enough for the giant farmers, so it's good enough for me. Apparently I also need something called thiamethoxam, to rotate with the imidacloprid. I'll get it. I don't care who I have to kill.

Damn hippies. They take the good stuff off the market, and then they fill the Internet with bullshit about ladybugs. Why? Because they don't eat vegetables. The only eat cookies, because they always have the munchies.

In other news, my gorgeous Jamaican hot chocolate peppers are finally turning a glorious brown.

I have a couple of people asking for white habanero seeds, even though my white habaneros seem to be suspiciously yellow. So I've been slicing pods open and removing the seeds. I wore a nitrile glove on my left hand. I have learned to respect the white habanero.

It's actually a good thing I planted tomatoes in the wrong season. It taught me about the whiteflies and the imidacloprid and the blight and so on, on a batch of tomatoes that were not likely to do well, regardless. I'll be better prepared when the real season gets underway.

I WILL have tomatoes. You wait and see.

Posted by Steve H. at 4:33 PM | Permalink  

I Know What Matters

I can't believe how big a job plant-watering has become. It's now taking something like 16 gallons per day. And for what? Lots of great peppers, okay, but also a few very sad-looking tomatoes.

Looks like the whitefly problem has been conquered. It's hard to buy imidacloprid in a formulation for tomatoes, but I checked the ingredients on the Bayer Tree and Shrub stuff, and the only active ingredient is imidacloprid, so I decided it was safe to use it. It's unbelievable how much you have to dilute it. Using recognized guidelines for per-acre active-ingredient amounts, it comes out to a few drops per plant. About .0025 grams of active ingredient per square foot. I can't believe it works at that concentration, but it looks like the whiteflies are dying. I kept rechecking the math, and I can't see any mistakes.

It makes me wonder if the dirt around the shrubs I've drenched is permanently radioactive. I'm using a cc at a time to mix tomato poison for several plants, and the shrubs take a pint at a whack. God only knows how big a dose the yard got. I used granules, and I don't know how much active ingredient they contain. I didn't put the poison right up against the fruit trees, but it may get in via migration. I am not too scared of this stuff, since they use it in flea dip for cats. But I don't want it in my fruit.

Seemed like some of the citrus was doing badly, and the common problem I noticed was exposed roots. So I buried them in extra Miracle-Gro Garden Soil and mulched over it, and they seem to be having a sudden growth spurt.

The papayas--over seven feet tall now--are blossoming. The things I thought were fruit were buds. I guess that should have been obvious. You generally have to have a flower before you get a fruit. Now I have to watch them. As soon as the papayas are big enough, I have to bag them to keep the flies from putting maggots inside them.

My fatalii peppers are finally turning brilliant orange-yellow. They are magnificent. And my PC-1s are turning red. My white habaneros must be getting ripe, because some have gone past white, directly to light yellow. I long for the day when my Jamaican hot chocolates turn glossy brown.

My seedlings are trying to damp off even though they're indoors in fresh dirt, so I'm hitting them with fungicide. Either they'll live or they won't. This must be a moldy, moldy city.

Thank God for mangoes. I don't have to do a damned thing to those.

It sort of looks like it's possible to salvage plants with yellow leaf curl virus. I cut the sick branches off of some of my plants, and some of them are growing healthy new branches. Others are growing new sick branches. Maybe the virus doesn't travel backward from the infection site to the rest of the plant. That would be a nice break.

My little Eaton compressor arrived. Og really called it this time; the box says "Eaton Compressor" on it, but other than that, it reeks of China. It has one of those diamonds on it that you always see on Chinese boxes. Am I wrong, or is that pretty much unique to China? They sent me a pretty blue one instead of the cruddy cream-colored one they advertised. Dodged a bullet there. I can't have a frumpy compressor.

Seems heavier than the advertised 75 lbs.

I just realized I have enough stuff to get it running. I have the 1/4" hose I got for the tire inflator, plus some fittings. And a box just arrived which could be my pencil grinder.

I have to go now. It is my duty to play with this thing.

Posted by Steve H. at 12:12 PM | Permalink  

Poison = Success

I know I'm killing my traffic, writing about gardening and tools. Fortunately I don't care.

Because I have decided to annihilate everything in the yard that moves, I got in touch with a yard-spray guy recommended by my friend Pat. He's supposed to come by today, but it's rainy, so maybe he won't. I truly look forward to his visit, because I want to see all the bugs bow down to me and retch their rotting guts out before dying in agony.

I think I'm going to drench the dirt around my existing container tomatoes. With imidacloprid. It's safe to kill whiteflies with this stuff even after the season is underway, and I would rather do that than throw out plants which might very well produce after the first cold front.

The tomatoes are still looking hopeless, but boy are the peppers taking off. The Jamaican red Scotch bonnet suddenly decided to spread out yesterday--pepper plants do this for some reason--and now it's maybe five feet wide. The Jamaican hot chocolate next to it jumped up about a foot this week. Soon the gazebo's sun will be very nicely blocked, to a level of six or seven feet. If I could keep bugs from killing them, these would make a very interesting hedge. With juicy-looking red and brown fruit hanging on it. For the dear little unsuspecting children to pick.

None of my Scotch bonnets or habaneros are getting ripe except for the tiny white habaneros, but my PC-1s started turning bright red, and I can see yellow bits on my huge fatalii peppers.

After transplanting several times, I got lazy about labeling pots, so I have three or four mystery peppers. I'm still not one thousand percent sure my Caribbean red and Jamaican red aren't...each other. And I've been trying to differentiate between my prig ki nu, yellow habanero, and Tobago seasoning pepper. Today I had some breakthroughs. Maybe. The peppers on one of the plants have turned out kind of boxy-looking, so they can't be Tobago seasoning peppers. That makes them yellow habaneros, I think. And the prig ki nus are pointy, like PC-1s, so now that I can see a few tiny peppers, I can eliminate that plant from the chinense confusion.

Chinense is the species name for most of the world's really nasty peppers. Habaneros, Scotch bonnets, naga jolokias, datils, 7 pots, etcetera.

The cayenne plants look sort of peaked, but they're producing like crazy. My second crop is already hanging on the plant; I'm just waiting for it to turn red.

It is becoming apparent to me that I need a plan for these peppers. I am going to be swamped in around two weeks, and after that, it will only get worse. I figure I should dry and grind up a fair amount of each pepper. I will of course collect seeds. And I should vacuum-seal and freeze some peppers for later use.

I will never be able to give these away. Can you believe that? People are such wimps. Eventually I'll have to start throwing peppers out. It's a shame, because crazy-hot peppers are very useful in the kitchen. You can taste the flavor when using an amount too small to make a dish inedibly hot. I've had a bowl of chili for dinner three times this week, and every time, I threw a teaspoon of minced habanero or Scotch bonnet in it, and it wasn't hot at all. I mean, not REALLY REALLY hot. Tasted great.

I should start offering seeds to my readers. Just to get rid of them. The seeds, I mean. There's a small chance you'd get something cross-pollinated, but peppers generally self-pollinate. Right now all I have are PC-1s and cayennes (which could be hybrids), but later...Katie bar the door.

The hardest thing to get used to, about writing cookbooks and studying food, is the waste. I throw food out constantly, and now it looks like I'll be doing the same thing with produce. And don't tell me to give it to the homeless. First of all, it's impossible and a stupid suggestion, second, I hate coddling bums, and third, the homeless aren't going to be very grateful for habaneros. I mean, come on. They get pepper-sprayed twice a week.

Come on, poison guy. Daddy needs his tomatoes.

Posted by Steve H. at 11:35 AM | Permalink  

Read Only Through Smoked Glass

I grew myself some white habaneros. For whatever reason. Insanity, I guess. And today I tried one.

These are tiny habaneros that get about as big as a white seedless grape. The biggest one I have is s