Pepper Blog: Week 15 at the Baines Farm: Slow Pepper Progress (toward eventual death)

The pepper plants continue to develop new peppers and drop leaves. This whole growth process has been much slower than on Andy's end. Aside from cooler temp at night than Andy's garage, my hypothesis is that my slightly smaller pots might be confining the roots and leading to slower growth and maturation. Amazingly, one of the three plants still has most of its leaves (although leaf drop seems to be slowly accelerating). Last week, this plant had no peppers - now there are a handful of small peppers which have formed. It's like this plant has been dormant for the past few weeks (although there has been steady vertical growth). The leanest plant now has somewhere around 40 peppers on it. I'm hoping the larger ones start to show some indications of changing color soon. Otherwise, I may pick some of the green peppers before all the leaves are gone! The middle plant, which at one time was the smallest plant, is in between the other two as far as leaves/peppers go.

The herbs are mostly superb. It does appear that the Basil picked up the Bacterial leaf Spot from the Pepper plants. I'm thinking about just scrapping these plants and waiting until I've gotten rid of the pepper plants until planting new Basil. Luckily, Basil grows really fast. The Rosemary continues to make very slow progress, but I think a growth spurt is nearing. I need to get back to cooking more so I can make use of these amazing fresh herbs.