The view beyond the hummingbirds.

Our amazing Kathy is recovering from accident which occurred years ago. Remarkably she is still healing and becoming more independent as the months pass by. Now her life is dominated by physical, occupational, & vision therapy plus her gym workouts, in other words work, work, work.

As a diversion, and for plain old fun, she designed a garden outside her kitchen window, past the hummingbird feeder with purple dominating the theme.

Along with the usual array of peppers including jalapeño, Big Daddy, Banana, she added this year the Heritage Purple cayenne pepper. This quirky as well as lovely pepper is delicious as well as it makes strings of peppers in her kitchen.

A peculiar garden is not peculiar without a sister contribution, Nancy’s purple tomato, Indigo Cherry Drops. This dark purple-black tomato attempted to take over the garden, while not the most flavorful, we still enjoyed its oddness, and couldn’t help but consider the contributor.

Purple bush green bean, added to the color scheme and the purple beans were so much easier to harvest with the contrast of green leaves. Little subtleties such as easy visual access encourage gardening to visually impaired want to be gardeners.

The backdrop was a beautiful row of Strawberry Blonde sunflowers to complete her landscape, planted in back of the panorama, they towered over the garden as sentinels protecting Kathy’s masterpiece.

The designing and naming the plot was an enjoyable project through the winter while she scoured seed catalogs for the perfect seeds. The alliterative title Peculiar Pepper Patch kept her mind tossing around working to create the perfect name. There were several aspects to creating this garden such as coercing her sister to make a sign for the garden, starting the seeds, then finally planting, getting out in the fresh air to weed.

The anticipation of the first green bean harvest, eating jalapeno peppers with eggs each morning and stringing the beans brought a since of accomplishment and pride for a job well done.

The visual joy of opening the kitchen observinglife in the garden grow and change produced a very satisfying summer for the entire family.