I already bragged about my free veggies from my garden, free potatoes and tomatoes.  Today I will show you my FREE peppers.  How cool is that?

Honestly, these peppers are a product of my veggie kitchen scraps which I save and bury in my garden, as part of composting to enrich the garden soil.

Low and behold, once the numerous seeds sprouted, I was not sure what to do with all the seedlings.  At first I did not even know they were peppers, since I never grew peppers before, and was not accustomed to seeing their seedlings.   I weeded most of them out, but saved several of the stronger ones to experiment with growing them to maturity, and fruition.  As you can see, they did very well.

This is a close up of a flowering green pepper plant.

Tiny green peppers began to form.

A close up of a baby green pepper.

Here are some of the FREE green peppers, and some are turning red and yellow.  I read somewhere that peppers which have three knobs at the bottom, are sweeter than the ones that have four of these.  The four knobbed  ones are more suitable for cooking.

As exciting as it was to watch these grow, one needs patience to wait for the mature pepper, as their growing season stretches from April, when they sprouted,  through the end of September, and they still would probably be growing until the end of October, if I let them.  They look fairly large, but in reality they are more on the  medium size.

I also told you before about my experiment with an artichoke plant, which is a perennial, thus just growing this year, and will not bear an artichoke heart until next year…hopefully.

I started this plant in early April, indoors from a seed.  Here it is in mid June, and to the right of it is the same plant right now.   It surely has grown quite a bit and got much stronger.  I am looking forward to its maturity next year.

I also planted pepper seeds in a pot, and was hoping to harvest some red and yellow peppers, but instead, these turned out to be very small and suicidally HOT in flavor.  I actually gave them away, as I do not cook with such strong flavors. Don’t let the size fool you; they are tiny, but very pungent!

Gardening season is coming to an end already, and soon it will be time to get the yard ready for it’s winter snooze.