Peppers, Wrens and Stories for the Age of Coronavirus

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live" is how Joan Didion begins her essay "The White Album." During these months of staying home during the coronavirus pandemic, these are the stories I've told myself.

Someday I'll get a haircut.

Peppers in their protective cage, June 2020 (Margo D. Beller)

Someday I'll be able to go to my favorite restaurant and eat there.

Someday I will walk or buy groceries without a mask.

Someday I'll grow peppers.

The first three are obvious, the last one may be less so to you.

Every year I grow peppers in pots because I don't care to do the backbreaking labor to create a garden in a sunny spot of my backyard (to avoid the disapproval of some neighbors). Most years I buy my plants when MH and I and a couple of friends drive to a place in central NJ. Not this year. The place told us not to come but to order online. My friends did but I did not. Instead, I pulled out some of the many, many seeds I've kept from my peppers over the years. I put a few of my favorite type - a sweet frying pepper called Italia - in a pot on a sunny window sill in March. Several sprouted and grew. Then, they died because the weather took a chilly turn for the worse in April.

Apples in June 2020 (Margo D. Beller)

Undeterred, I threw more seeds into the pot and waited. This time as the seedlings grew the weather warmed because the sun was out more often. The seedlings grew bigger. I separated them into two larger pots. The seedlings grew bigger still.

This week, after waiting impatiently for mid-June's steamy weather to move out, I took the three biggest seedlings and put them in their own pots. Then I took the remaining peppers and put them in a very large pot to see what will happen. If the smaller ones die, so it goes. If they all grow, some will be removed to other pots. So-called experts say you thin out seedlings so only the strong survive. But after all the waiting and watching I hate to let those seedlings go. Besides, you never know if the larger, supposedly stronger, seedlings will die anyway.

Life is like that. Seemingly strong plants, like people, suddenly take sick and die. During this coronavirus pandemic the number of people dying has decreased but the dying continues so we can take nothing for granted, which is why I still wear a mask, eat at home and my hair looks as it did in my high school graduation picture.

My garden is growing, too. These are Stargazer
lilies. (Margo D. Beller)

The shock of transplanting and being moved into a sunnier spot than the indoor window sill had the plants wilting and I feared the worse. But they have since revived and I look forward to tending my vegetables along with the other plants growing and blooming in my garden.

Here is another story I told myself: Someday, a house wren and his mate will find the nest box in the apple tree and use it to raise young.

As with the peppers, that finally happened this month.

A house wren had been singing around the yard but not in the apple tree where I hang a nest box every year. At the end of May I was on the porch and saw a house wren investigating the box. A few days after that, I was mowing the lawn and stopped to rest in the back yard. As I sat I saw two wrens. One went inside the box, the other sang. I know the male brings the female over to potential nest sites and she chooses the one she wants, so I was optimistic. My box was picked and they've been hanging around ever since, the male singing every morning to proclaim my yard is his territory. By now the female should be on eggs.

So once again my yard is hosting a house wren pair and once again the fruit is starting to grow in the apple tree, which means the squirrels are once again climbing around and making a mess that will draw deer. But that is another story for this pandemic time. As with the peppers, I am hoping this one about the wrens turns out well.

Towards the center of this photo is this year's house wren. It was as
close as he would allow me to come. (Margo D. Beller)

“It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

Goings-on in My Garden

It was pouring in my part of New Jersey on this Saturday of the Memorial Day weekend. My office allowed us Friday off for a long weekend, and I used the sunny, warm day to go to a few garden centers to look at things I am considering for my property.

Hepatica (white flower) and vinca (purple flower) in front netted garden plot
(Margo D. Beller)

Turns out hundreds of other people had the same idea.

In this time of coronavirus, scared people have been stuck at home for over two months. But now that it is finally feeling less like winter, there is a pent-up urge to get out. But to where? Many are ready to hit the beaches (at approved social distances) or the mountains but the rest of us are still staying close to home. So I should not have been surprised the three places I visited were filled with a lot of people buying vegetables, flowers, mulch and other garden supplies. I would say the ratio of buyers to store employees (everyone masked) was 3:1, all trying to make up for lost time. In the end, I bought nothing,

Even so, I have been doing work in the garden because it allows me to be outside, away from people and work, and do something that creates loveliness.

Azaleas (and growing daisy plants) protected from deer
(Margo D. Beller)

I have been lucky. I have perennials that come back year after year, although sometimes there is winter damage. For instance, the peony buds froze during the unexpected cold snap early in May. But the rest of the flowers and shrubs have done very well with the cooler temperatures and abundant rain. The red azaleas are the best I've seen in years, columbine that have sprouted from seeds thrown in various beds over the year are flowering and the daffodils were glorious while they lasted. I even had a flower bloom I haven't seen in years - hepatica, a woodland flower that got into one bed and I've left alone, waiting for it to flower. I've only seen it bloom one other time before now.

After my first attempt at growing peppers from seed for this year failed, I threw more into a small pot. When warm sunshine started hitting the window sill more frequently, nine seedlings appeared, crowded together. They are now spread (socially distanced?) between two bigger pots on the sunny window sill. They will be staying there until they get big enough to put into bigger pots that will be protected in a chicken-wire cage from chipmunks, which have already dug up rosemary I had in a pot and almost ruined the dahlias I planted.

Pepper seedlings, 2020 (Margo D. Beller)

Unfortunately, when you look at pictures of my flowers you see the deer netting. I've learned to make it disappear in my mind's eye but I can't do that in reality because of the deer, many of which have been passing through the yard in recent days now that there are bushes and other plants to eat.

Chipmunks, however, can easily get behind the netting and in some ways are more deadly to the plants with their digging, looking for nuts they buried last autumn. I surround vulnerable smaller plantings and those like the dahlia not big enough yet to fill their pots with old metal gutter fencing to keep the diggers out. It works, for the most part.

Houseplants on the porch with seed containers (Margo D. Beller)

Only recently has it been warm enough for me to move most of the houseplants to my north-facing enclosed porch. The humidity will do them more good than being inside a house where the air conditioner will be on soon enough.

As for the birds, the other day I heard a male blackpoll warbler singing in one of the backyard trees. This bird, whose spring mating colors makes it look similar to a black-capped chickadee, has a distinctive song that sounds like a braking truck and has one of the longest migration routes of the birds passing through here. It is usually one of the last migrating warblers, so hearing it prompts mixed feelings - it's a warbler but it's also the end.

Empty wren box (Margo D. Beller)

I know there are plenty of other birds still heading north, but my yard has gone quiet as the birds staying here have begun their nests and don't want to draw attention to them. No house wren claimed the nest box this year, although once in a while I've heard a wren singing nearby. My two seed feeders seem to be drawing a lot more jays, house finches and grackles, so when they are empty that will be it for feeders until autumn, save for the hummingbird feeder that usually draws one or two in June into July.

By then it will truly be summer and the flowering plants of this spring will have faded except in my memories.

Growing My Own

Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed. -- Henry David Thoreau

Sitting on my window sill in my sunny front room are two pots filled with pepper seeds. I am being rather adventurous with what I hope to grow -- long cubanelle peppers, some hybrid bell peppers, a couple of mildly hot peppers and a lot of my favorite, a sweet, long frying pepper called Italia. 

Last year I managed to get two Italia seeds to grow and put them outside with the previous year's pot of peppers that I thought I had killed when I brought it inside, not knowing it was infected with white flies. It lived despite my hacking it back and then spending some time in quarantine on my enclosed but not insulated back porch, and provided me with extra peppers. (I tried to keep them inside over this winter but the white flies were fierce and they all had to go.)

So far this year I have had little success with the seeds.

This year's pepper seeds. (Margo D. Beller)

I gave a friend seeds from one of last year's Italia peppers and hers are growing. Of course, she has a nice window sill over her sink facing in a direction that provides bright light. She also planted them in mid-February, which is not the usual planting time in NJ but we had a spate of April-like days. She was lucky. By the time I put a few older seeds in a pot, warm February became a cold March and, despite being on a sunny window sill, nothing came up.

So now I have two pots filled with seeds that are not quite as old, and I am waiting. If any seedlings come I will wait for them to get big enough to be put in larger pots and then put outside, protected from digging chipmunks and hungry deer. 

Why do this? Because it costs me nothing but some time, soil, a pot and water and in return I get some peppers for my cooking. I buy fewer peppers and know exactly what is going into growing them. And like my flower gardening, I find I enjoy growing these vegetables.

Two of last year's Italias. (Margo D. Beller)

My grandfather was a gardener, and while I have an affinity for flowers and house plants I inherited from him, I have never been as successful as he was in growing tomatoes. Peppers have been another matter. Several years ago a friend insisted on us all going to a pepper farm he'd read about in central New Jersey. We bought plants. I potted mine and it grew and produced very well, though I wasn't crazy about the type of pepper I had bought. 

It was several years later that I bought, and grew, an Italia. Its fruits have a lot of seeds and some little voice told me to save some of them. Good thing I did because as this pepper farm got more writeups in the local foodie press, more people ordered peppers online or came to the store, as we did, to buy plants. Italia is usually sold out now. I've grown it from seed ever since. One pepper can create a garden of new plants thanks to all those seeds.

I tried other peppers but the results were mixed - one potted pepper plant grew to the size of a small tree and produced no peppers. I kept it over the winter just to see what would happen and the next year got all of four peppers, none of which were any better than the Italia. 

So that is why I grow my own.

Meanwhile, I know there are ways to induce growth. There are special potting mixes, special lights. I don't bother. My friend has bright daylight and potting soil containing her own compost. So do I. The only thing that might make a difference is the age of the seeds. Usually that is not a factor unless I've been storing them - in little packets made from paper toweling - improperly.

Anyway, I have no room for these grow lights, either in my front room or in my half-basement, where the plants would get too much heat from the furnace. 

As The New Yorker's Katharine S. White says in her 1959 column "Before the Frost" about taking care of house plants in winter without using grow lights, "Though I am willing to be a floor nurse, I have no intention of becoming an electrician."

So I watch and wait and hope April gets warmer and at least one seed sprouts. If it is an Italia, so much the better.