Beautiful Peppers, Courtesy of SOIL Compost

Some encouraging (and tasty) news from the SOIL gardens at Penye. We have harvested our latest crop of green peppers, planted in evenly sized, spaced, and watered plots, but with one important difference: one plot was planted with no compost, one was planted with 3 pounds of SOIL compost per foot, and one with 1.5 pounds of compost per foot. The result? The plot without compost yielded far fewer peppers, and they were small and scraggly. The plot with 1.5 pounds of compost per foot yielded strong, healthy, beautiful and bountiful peppers; they got our tummies rumbling! We're not entirely sure why, but the 1.5 pound per foot patch resulted in a better yield than the plot planted with 3 pounds of compost per foot. Although both plots planted with compost looked far heartier and had a much higher yield than the no compost patch, there was a discernible difference between the two with-compost plots.

The photos below show the three pepper patches (can you tell the difference?), the harvested peppers, and Agronomist Jean Marie and me celebrating (or lamenting) the size of the peppers.

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