Over the weekend, I asked Tom to build me a sort of shade covering for the peppers. This is what he came up with and I love it. The covering is agribon, the same stuff we use to protect from frost in winter. I didn’t want the peppers to be totally enclosed, I just needed a little light protection from the intense sun in the heat of the day. This is because my peppers are suffering (and suffer every year) from sunburn.
That whitish spot at the top of the fruit is the sunburn. It’s not the worst thing in the world; the rest of the pepper ripens normally and can be used, cutting away the damaged area. But it is a real nuisance when every single one of your peppers has it. It seems to affect the bells worse than the corno di torno types, but even those get it sometimes. And here’s the thing - peppers are sun lovers! Sun worshippers! They need heat and sun to be at their beautiful best. But in our area it’s a little different, and here’s my theory about that. As you can see from the picture up top, our pepper plants never really develop that full, leafy, luscious green look that plants in other parts of the country get. It’s because of how dry it is. I have drip irrigation on these plants as I do all of my garden, and while that keeps them alive and producing, it’s not enough to produce the kind of lush vegetation that would protect the developing fruit from the direct rays of the sun. As far as I know, sunlight on the actual fruit has no affect on ripening or sweetening - it all comes from the effect of the sun on the leaves. But the plant has to protect itself from dryness somehow, and it won’t sacrifice fruit because that’s how it reproduces. So what can it sacrifice? Some of the leaves. Hence, my plants are puny but still produce a good amount of fruit.
This is just a theory. You can help me by letting me know if you live in a rainy part of the country and grow peppers. How do your plants look?
Anyway, I’m hoping the light shade cover will take care of the sunburn issue. I get it on my tomatoes, too, but it’s impossible to provide any kind of shade cover at the moment because the trellises are too big. Maybe that’s a project for next year. Shade cloth every summer over this end of the garden?
Tom has also built me a stand for my dehydrator (in full use in summertime), which keeps it out of the way but convenient. He’s become quite a dab hand at these projects, and I’m so grateful!
A nerdy side note: Do you know what your state rock is? If not, you can look here.
Our state rock is Serpentine (or Serpentinite). You can find this all across the state and is a beautiful greenish color. It is formed from igneous processes, that is, volcanic, and then is metamorphosed. I was hiking in Sunol Regional Wilderness yesterday, and once I got up into the hills, there was lots of this stuff lying around, as well as degraded sheets of it on rock faces, which is basically asbestos. Asbestos is formed as the rock weathers and erodes. The dust, of course, can be quite dangerous, but I think the rock is really lovely. There are whole plant communities that thrive on this sort of substrate, a very specific list, which is helpful to know if you live in a place with a lot of serpentine. How will you know this? You need to look at the geologic map of your property. (I wrote a post about this in the Spring of 2019.) You might enjoy finding out your own state rock and how to identify it while you’re out hiking!