a brief, unscheduled update regarding emotional container gardening
My troubled, grouchy rocoto chile pepper plant has finally decided to get up off its plant-ass and make a pepper.
Naturally the pepper came out while I was away on vacation. Now that I'm back in town it will probably shrivel up and fall off within a few days, or develop some sort of exotic mold or infestation. I think I've finally gotten the plant food thing down, at least, because its flowers are a deeper purple than they were before.
My other pepper plant, a serrano, seems to be making up its plant-mind as to whether it ought to make peppers this year. It appears to have recovered from the period of malnutrition I apparently subjected it to, but I can't yet tell whether it's a full recovery or merely an "I'm not dead" partial recovery: there are a ton of new flowers, but no fruit yet, and it recently dropped a bunch of leaves. Either I brought on a freak-out by giving it too much nitrogen, or it was startled by the sudden appearance of its neighbor's vivacious new pepper.
Festive GIF from I'm Revolting.
And what a vivacious new pepper it is! Surely its arrival merits a celebratory tipple as well as a GIF?
ReplyDeleteMight we see it next on a plate, in some form?
I'll try to remember to drink to its good health.
DeleteThat is my problem now, how to eat it if there's only the one. I had a bountiful harvest in mind when I started the seeds, culminating in home-made hot sauce.
Unrelatedly, I was just going to send you this article about the spotted antbird:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/25/science/spotted-antbirds-feathered-freeloaders-at-the-ant-parade.html
Now they are ants that would make a character in a story's skin crawl. The antbirds seem foolhardy to mess with them, but I guess grasshoppers, beetles, spiders and small lizards are a Panamanian avian gourmand's dream.
DeleteI love the phrase 'mutually vocally ornamented' too. I'd not come across that before.
Those ants do sound like a terror. I wonder how often the researchers dream about being carried off by them.
DeleteThere were quite a few good bits in there -- the mutual vocal ornamentation, and I liked the "pie plate eyes" on the birds, too.