Family, Food, gardening, History, Kids, Mysteries, Uncategorized

The Great Pepper Mystery

50 Comments

Husband and I started six varieties of peppers from seed this year.  We started two sweet red peppers (Spanish Giants and Ajvarskis) and two hot chilis (Joe Parker, a New Mexico Hatch type red chili, and Chimayo, a smaller, hotter, New Mexico red Chili). We also started some Habaneros and Thai chilis for our son

We labeled them and were careful to not mix them up.  When we planted, I was certain that all the Joe Parkers were given to my secretary,  as we decided at the last minute we didn’t want them. The Thai chilis and one Habanero went to our son, and all the rest, (17 in total) went into our garden. Or so we thought. Imagine my surprise  when son sent photos of the alleged Habanero that looked long and slender like a Joe Parker. Two of what I thought were Chimayos also turned out to be Joe Parkers, and now we can’t tell the difference between the Spanish Giants and the Ajvarskis, as their tags got all mixed up when we planted. The header photo shows what I think are, from left to right a Spanish Giant, an Ajvarski, and  Chimayo. (The latter are quite easy to discern.)

Husband tried to do a taste test between two big peppers,  but they tasted similar. I decided the only way to solve this mystery is to not start any Joe Parkers next year. I should add that the peppers I gave my secretary were doing well until we had a wind storm and a big tree crashed on top of her garden.

What mystery, ancient or modern, would you like to solve?

50 thoughts on “The Great Pepper Mystery”

  1. what is the true meaning of life?
    when asked if i have any questions i often ask this one. most people are a bit taken aback but some get a thoughtful look and give me an answer.
    it never has anything to do with peppers

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    1. Erich Fromm said, “Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve and from which he cannot escape.”

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  3. I think I have figured out a significant contributor to my increasing lower back pain over the past years–my bifocals!
    I hae always had poor posture, but now I noticed I walk with my head down so I can see where I am walking so I don’t trip. That had thrown everything out of alignment, with the lower back bearing weight the upper back should. I have made a point of walking with my head up. I haven’t tripped yet.

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    1. I discovered with mine that I needed a certain size of lens or I tripped on simple things that I could not see because the bifocal distortion actually obscured things—fell badly a few times due to this, then found larger lenses which has solved that. Those falls were not the only contributor to needing the new right knee, but they sure helped it along.

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  4. Rise and Shines, Baboons,

    Jimmy Hoffa, Amelia Earhart, Atlantis, the Bermuda Triangle? All mysteries, although it does not take much thinking to solve Jimmy Hoffa.

    Renee, some of our Anaheim peppers started producing mild peppers, the peppers have heated up as the summer has proceeded. And they are prolific. I have been making salsa and pepper jelly, just trying to keep them used. Soon I will be dumping them off on the neighbors’ front steps.

    I have some family tree mysteries that I am still working on:

    Where did the Cook family which shows up near Lake Erie in 1810 come from before that?
    How did the barkeeper, Jacob Klein from DesMoines, hook up with my family of tea-totalers and Puritans back in 1850? And how many Jacob Kleins were there in the world In 1850? There are two in my family tree during those years, from different branches.
    What was the real surname of Mark and Emmanuel Stratton? Unknow to date.

    I awoke to little pain from my surgery yesterday—just a bruised feeling that is not worse than what the gallbladder was causing. I am spacey from the anesthesia and tired, but that’s it so far. I will be napping, sipping soup, and listening to MPR programming this morning, lounging around my my comfy bed. PJ, I saw your comment yesterday. Once they started laparoscopic procedures for gallbladder removal, the recovery time and procedures were drastically reduced. They used to have to go through the diaphragm muscle which was painful. With that no longer in play, apparently the recovery is easy. The surgeon told me 2-3 weeks at most.

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  5. PS, Renee, the pictures of your peppers are beautiful. They look like one I grew several years ago called “Portuguese Pepper.” I did not grow them again because the skin was thick and tough.

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    1. Thanks. The Spanish Giants are such nice peppers. The Ajvarskis are supposed to have wonderful flavor. I hope we can make a positive identification to try them out.

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  7. Many believe Amelia Earhart’s fate is no longer a mystery. Major questions remain about the battle at the Little Big Horn, which is surprising only because so much intense research has been done. Although millions of people think they know why the Japanese surrendered in 1945, the decision was considerably more complex than has been thought. There are sound reasons to question the accepted story of Butch Cassidy’s demise. Finally, scholars will continue to debate what happened in the 2016 presidential election for many years to come.

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    1. Yes, to 2016. I am no scholar, but from the standpoint of an average citizen, this did not appear to be a secure election, either from Russia and Putin or internally, from #45. Given what is happening with the USPS, I think suspicions are well-founded. I saw one report stating that #45 did not know anyone used the post office anymore. What do you even say to that?

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      1. We don’t want to turn this blog into a full political discussion, but maybe I can make a small point safely. I have heard about sixteen different explanations for what happened. If you have sixteen explanations, you don’t know why things happened as they did. That’s why I included it on the short list of unsolved mysteries. Some time in the future historians will be able to analyze that election accurately and with confidence. For me, in spite of the immense effort I’ve invested, that event remains odd and too complicated to really understand.

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    2. Yes, I think it’s getting pretty conclusive that Amelia Earhart went down on Nikumaroro Island (I’ve been following TIGHAR for years).

      But I’d like to know about the Mary Celeste and the Voynich Manuscript.

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      1. Did they find human remains there? I remember reading about that, but I don’t remember the conclusions. As a kid, Amelia was one of my hero’s, and I loved reading about her.

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        1. Yes they found remains and they collected them and cataloged them decades ago (and then lost them)and somebody said they look like male remains. But then they did more analysis about 15 years ago and in looking at how long Amelia’s arms were in other photos, they have concluded that those bones are most likely hers.

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        3. It also looks like they have identified the metal piece they found about 20 years back as the window patch added to the plane.

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  8. The greatest mystery to me remains how #45 bamboozled as many people as he did and still does, though I know the ability to take in only the news sites you want to believe play a large part. I heard a discussion recently of this book which looks intriguing: The Righteous Mind: why good people are divided by politics and religion. Maybe some clues exist therein.

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  9. Maybe this is just a summer for pepper mysteries. I had three pepper plants this year one jalapeño, one mixed sweet peppers and one habanero. None of the peppers did exceedingly well this year for some reason. But the middle plant (the supposedly mixed pepper) is clearly not mixed pepper. We’ve only had one pepper off of it so far but I’m pretty sure when we cut that open and take a bite it’s gonna be another form of jalapeño

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    1. I is difficult to miss that heat.

      I had this happen with tomatoes. My tomatoes (I did not start these, rather I purchased them at the Birch Island Woods sale) were lableled incorrectly and clearly are not what I ordered. One plant, which produces well, has tomatoes that are about an inch in diameter. This is labeled Rutgers—a nice heritage variety for canning—but is far more like a large cherry tomato.

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  10. Morning-
    When I came back to the college, I couldn’t get any audio out of my computer. I looked like it should have audio; in the settings the indicator in there showed audio, but it wasn’t coming out. I know they had moved things around in here over the summer; working on networks or something. I kept messing around with it and by day 3 I had sound again. But it was too quiet. All the settings turned up, and it’s a little bit quiet. I don’t know. It’s a mystery.

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  11. It is fun when you do solve a mystery. BiR once handed me her digital camera. She said it was a fine camera but that it consistently underexposed images by a stop and a half. I discovered that someone had set exposure compensation to underexpose by a stop and a half! Easily fixed. Sweet triumphs like that are rare.

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  12. Well, here is a spooky sort of mystery. In the past couple of months I have had some pretty odd experiences in our home in the middle of the night. About a month ago I was walking down the hall about 2:00 am . There were no lights on. I saw a human figure at the end of the hall. I thought it was husband so I said hello, but no one was there. Weird. On two other occasions I have awakend to feel the light pressure of a comforting hand on my lower back. Husband was asleep facing the other direction, so it wasn’t him. None of the experiences were frightening or alarming.

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  13. I had a similar type of mystery about 10 years ago. One night a week I had church choir practice until 9P followed by an early morning choir rehearsal at a middle school – both locations very close to my sister’s house. So I would sleep there instead of driving 20 miles home. She had two cats at the time, one of which would occasionally sleep with me. There were several times when I felt something jump up onto the bed or felt a presence by my feet. When I looked, nothing was there. We decided there must have been a ghost cat living at their house. It was never frightening – just really weird.

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  14. Pets can desensitize you to weird stuff. If you hear a strange noise in the night you can go back to sleep because, “That’s just the cat doing something.” If a shoe goes missing, “One of the dogs probably took it.”

    Now that I live without pets, odd stuff is spookier. When I hear or smell or see or step in something peculiar, I cannot explain it so easily.

    In Oregon, I saw something the size of a bread loaf moving in the shadows along my apartment wall. I wasn’t scared. “Oh, that’s just the cat.” Then I remembered, “I don’t have a cat.” But I did, a volunteer gray and white tabby just walked in my open patio door. Came back several times before disappearing for good.

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      1. My uncle misplaces glasses persistently. He was a history teacher. When he retired 20 years ago and the packed up his classroom which he had inhabited for many, many years, they found a dozen pairs of glasses tucked away in boxes of books and papers.

        Solved that one.

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