Spicy!

It seems an age since I put a post up relating to the Earth of this blog's title; I'd been rather focussed on underwater subjects and recently I've hit a bit of a rich streak with birds so its been and looks like being mostly Wind & Water for a while (I sense an Earth photo project coming on). Anyway I mentioned I'd update on my project to grow some of my own produce on my balcony and thought this was a good time to do it.

A surprising number of people don't appreciate that there is no real difference between chilli/chile peppers and sweet/bell peppers. Most of both are simply varieties of the species, Capsicum annum*.

I'm sure this will be familiar to a lot of readers; its C. annum "jalapeno", a fairly hot variety and its destiny is my pickle jar but its still the same species as the plant below (Note the beginning of the jalapeno corking effect incidentally. very nice). By contrast C. annum "Sweet Banana" is a sweet pepper but shows the same long and thin form of a lot of hot varieties.

The success of these fine little fellows has rather pleased me and there are a lot of pepper varieties so I sense some experimentation in my future or at the very least some extensive searching of the Chileman's database of 3,500 varieties.

* There are however actually cultivated forms of at least 4 other species of Capsicum, the most famous of which are the scotch bonnet type forms of C. chinense.