While I'm at the (winter-)garden pictures - here's some more:



This, according to the seed packet, is a "Tenessee Teardrop" chili plant. It's also supposed to have these light fruits, at least at the start. They should turn proper yellow later, then purple, then orange and finally red as they ripen. I'm looking forward to that. (And yes, I have a thing for chili peppers that have purple or violet fruits at some stage. Or black - black is fine with me, too.)

And it's now the time of the year that the physalis plant is starting to flower:



The plant is several years old now, and it stayed in its pot in the wintergarden all this year. It could theoretically move outside during summer, but I was too lazy to lug out the heavy pot with a very long plant support in it, and then lug it back in again.

The plant needs quite a lot of water, and will grow much better with regular doses of some kind of plant food, but otherwise it's rather uncomplicated. Apart from needing some support that you tie the very long stems to, that is. I prune it back vigorously after all the fruits have been harvested; that's usually the case in late spring or early summer. Flowers start again in autumn, when it's getting colder outside. The fruits stay smaller than those you can buy in the supermarket (though with enough water and fertiliser, they do get bigger than without). There's lots of them, though, and no transport for them - if you don't count the very short way from off the plant and straight into me!

I've blogged before about my chili pepper plant shenanigans - after sadly killing off all my Ecuador Purple chili plants, I tried to grow new ones from my seeds, but alas, they were too old and didn't germinate anymore.

So I threw seeds from a spice jar into soil. They were taken from my own chilis, so there would have been a chance of them being Ecuador Purple, but I had no luck there. In parallel, because I wanted to make sure, I mail ordered some chili seeds, and some tomato seeds while I was at it. Those, obviously, included Ecuador Purple seeds.

Well. The spice jar plants all have rather similar upright, slender, pointed peppers in a boring green, maybe with a hint of black in one or two plants. Some have a curved fruit here and there. Altogether... rather boring; I'd have expected some more variation, because they were taken from different plants that, by all rights, should not have been true-to-seed (yet). Anyways, one of them at least now has produced a single fruit that is sort of dancing out of line:



Possibly that is an effect of cross-pollination; our place and the chili plants were definitely well-visited by insects working hard to pollinate. If it is, the same effect may be the reason why this oddly-shaped fruit is growing on an Ecuador Purple plant:



This is definitely not the shape you'd expect it to be. However, I suspect that the guy I bought the seeds from does not grow his plants well-separated from each other. There was a lot of variation between the individual pepper and tomato plants regarding their size and growth shape. One of the tomatoes and several of the pepper plants were also very far away from the breed description.

Also, there's this, which is also supposed to be an Ecuador Purple chili:



The plant has several of these weird winged fruits.

I don't mind too much, since I mostly want the chilis for their decorative value, and that is certainly quite decorative - but if I had wanted 'proper' breed seeds, I'd certainly be very disappointed. I am a bit disappointed about the tomato seeds, in that regard. I'm also not really happy with the germination quota (which was not very good - and yes, I note down how many seeds I stick into the soil, and how many plants come out). So I'll definitely not order seeds there again.

What I will do, though, is grow plants from those odd fruits, and see if anything even odder will come out!

What you see on this picture is my current little bit of fun. Actually, it's not really very current - this has been going on for a while: I'm trying to grow caged distaffs.

This is a willow bush, and since willow grows fairly fast and makes new branches from where it's cut, I thought that maybe it might be possible to grow shoots with enough smaller branches at the top to form a cage.



Jury's still out on whether it will work or not, and on how long it will take to grow a distaff once I know how best to do the pruning and forming, but there is some progress on some of the shoots.



Forming the top part will be the next interesting step...

I've already told you about my chili plants, at least a few things - and now, finally, they are starting to bloom. Slowly. And with some hiccups.

There's a variety of chili breeds in my pots (moved, again, outside, but out of hare's reach, or so I thought), and some of them are unknown (as the seeds came out of my spice rack, so it's either Ecuador Purple or some unstabilised mixed breed). All of them were started rather late, with the seeds sprouting mid-April, and there have been some losses due to snails and hare bite.

Now one of the larger plants has sadly lost its head.



I don't really know how that happened; it was not eaten, the lost crown lay beside the plant in the pot. With all the nice little buds it had. I'm quite sad about that, especially as I have only that one so far along of the kind, but I hope it will rally itself and make a bunch of side branches with flowers.

That was one of the more vegetable-y peppers, which tend to be quicker than the chilis in my lineup here. One of them actually has produced fruits already:



They will take a bit longer to ripen, though I'm very tempted to try how they taste still green. I like green peppers best anyways...

But yes, slowly, the chilis are getting ready as well. There's no open flower yet, but that is a question of days, as the buds are growing larger and larger on some:





And here's a view of Ecuador Purple buds - pleasingly purple, too:



I'm quite happy about all that, I just hope there won't be more losing of heads to whatever made that one plant shorter!

I am quite, quite fond of tomatoes - though I remember that as a child and even teenager, I didn't really like them. These days, I do grow them myself, with varying success though unwavering fun. I find it especially fun to have a variety of different breeds, and I do take seeds myself to grow them again the following year (though admittedly I don't take too much care to prevent cross-pollination, so things may deteriorate over time...)

Here's some of the current crop, most of them still working on getting ripe:

[caption id="attachment_5480" align="alignnone" width="640"] This one's a Tigerella - with fancy tiger stripes. Not completely ripe yet, but definitely working on it!


I got the Tigerella seeds a few years back as a present from a friend who's mostly out of touch now - so having these tomatoes also holds some pleasant memories for me.

The next one is a "Sibirische Fleischtomate", literally "Siberian beef tomato". At least that is the name it was sold under when I took one of these from our grocery box, also a few years ago. The plants make just few, but rather large fruits:

[caption id="attachment_5482" align="alignnone" width="902"] Sibirische Fleischtomate!


And finally, a souvenir tomato - I brought back a few packets of different seeds from our last summer holidays, among them one kind of tomato called "Indigo Rose". They are blue on top and ripen to a red-blue mix; tasty both raw and cooked:



Depending on the plant and on how much sun they are getting, the blue part is smaller or larger, and might even go towards a black colour. Definitely also a fun tomato, and looking at them brings back fond memories of hot summer days spent paddling...

While discussing things about tea and coffee (and their availability, in specific types, in both Germany and England), a friend sent me a link to a company making real British tea. As in... tea grown in Britain.

Tregothnan grows tea bushes in Cornwall and sells tea (different kinds) as well as tea bushes (in case someone wants to grow their own tea). The prices for the "homegrown" tea might be a tad higher than the price for tea in your common supermarket, though.

Now if I didn't have all available spaces filled up with the current experiments growing chili peppers (most being surprise seeds from a random crossing, so nobody knows what kind of peppers they will grow), the Coffee Plantation (down to a more manageable ten or so plants now, as I've gifted a bunch to other people) and the Passionfruit Plethora (because flowers! and passionfruit!), I'd be tempted to get a tea bush...

Here's some more from the Not-Lawn-Photosafari... including some scenes of life and death. Literally.

[caption id="attachment_5454" align="alignnone" width="508"] Some kind of Hylaeus bees, in German Maskenbienen, mating. Why there are three of them? I don't know, and they didn't tell.


So much for the life - there were other dramatic things happening, too:

[caption id="attachment_5451" align="alignnone" width="428"] A wasp in a fight with a bee of some kind, probably trying to get some food for her young. (Both of them, in fact, were probably trying to get some food, but only one will go home successfully...)


And now for some calmer scenes:

[caption id="attachment_5453" align="alignnone" width="428"] Some kind of wasp, as yet unidentified. There's lots of wasp-like insects with a red and black abdomen, as I've learned! It was about 3 cm in length, so fairly huge.


There's not just the humming sound of bees and other flying insects outside, too. There's also the lovely sound of grasshoppers making their "music", and I managed to get one of them banned onto digital "film":



I didn't even try to find out what genus or species that one is, but I absolutely adore the patterning on the legs and body. A very beautiful guy (or girl?)!