A Sea of Peppers

Powisset Peppers!

We grow eighteen different varieties of peppers.  We grow green bell peppers, red, orange and yellow bell peppers, frying peppers, and sweet bite-size peppers that I like to pull from the plants by the handfuls and snack on while I walk the fields at the end of a long day.  There are new varieties that promise to glow like a sunrise or taste like sweet chocolate.  There are old favorites that have filled thousands of bins over many seasons of picking. And there is the variety whose name I can never remember, but whose taste reminds me of late summer and I know when I pull it from the plant and toss it into the harvest bin that it will stand out from the rest up in the barn.

Today we crawled up and down row upon row of our soon-to-be pepper field.  Carefully we organized our pepper varieties, labeled each row and began planting our eighteen different kinds of peppers.  A few farmers walked ahead of the rest of us, laying the plants in their proper space, while the rest of us followed behind, settling the peppers in their new home in the soft soil.  With my left hand I held the pepper like a flower, gently resting it across my palm.  My right hand plunged into the soil, moving a soft scoop of earth aside to make room for the roots of the pepper. Then my two hands worked together to press the pepper into the ground firmly, encouraging it's roots to begin growing here.

our sea of peppers

We grow eighteen varieties of peppers, and twenty varieties of lettuce and nine varieties of cucumber and six types of beets and fifteen varieties of potatoes and they all blend together over a season.  So many peppers, shining in bins, and beets tumbling in a root washer, and cucumbers hiding in a sea of vines, will make it out of the field and onto your tables.  Which pepper will become your favorite this year?

From a field now filled with peppers,

Meryl & the Powisset Crew

our farm

What’s in the share this week:

At the barn: Lettuce, spinach, arugula, scallions, broccoli, kale or kohlrabi, beets, hakurei turnips 

Pick-your-own: maybe strawberries!