Hot or not?

Even the best laid plans run amok sometimes and in several of my plantings this year I ran into some problems. You see, I planted all my peppers which included sweet, paprika, and hot, all in the same area. I thought that I’d have no problem identifying them because they would look different.

I was wrong. There are just two plants that look different from the others, but they look the same as each other. But they aren’t planted in the same area, so they aren’t the same variety!

Now I have a bowl of peppers drying on my table and I don’t have a clue whether they are hot, paprika, or sweet. The only way I’ll be able to tell is take a taste of each one after they’re dry!

Unfortunately I did the same thing with my tomatoes. It was a little easier here, because some of them were obvious. A yellow plum tomato is easy to distinguish from the red ones. However, I had a number of red tomatoes and to this day I don’t know which we’re eating. This is because I do intensive gardening and the tomato plants were so intermingled that you couldn’t tell one plant from another.

So, even after all these years of planting I’m learning what works and what doesn’t. Next year I’ll have to have several locations for both the tomatoes and peppers, so that I can keep the varieties that could look similar separate.