The Office Pepper

I really like gardening. It's pretty satisfying to grow something from a small seed (or in my case... seedlings; let someone else do the really hard work) all the way up to a REAL plant, with vegetables and stuff. I also like bell peppers. Preferably green, but red, yellow, orange, or any other variety is also acceptable.

Last year, I bought three pepper seedlings from Home Depot - two that would produce green peppers, and one that would produce red peppers. One seedling died in my car, because it fell over. I carried the remaining two up the stairs to our apartment, and then placed the second green one on the steps while I fished out my keys. It was only after a week that I realized that my second green pepper was missing. I had never picked it up from the stairs, and apparently the upstairs neighbors decided it wasn't the perfect adornment for the center of their second to last step and disposed of it. I secretly hope that they felt bad for the poor pepper, took it in, and fed and watered it, but I don't know that for sure. Nevertheless, I use that scenario to comfort myself when I start feeling bad for abandoning it to the wilds of a second-floor landing.

The third pepper survived. Red must be heartier than green. Or you could conclude that I just started taking better care of my plants. Whatever floats you boat. I brought it into my office, and I put it in a pot, and I watered it every day. It grew big and tall, though it was plagued with horrible gnats for awhile. Eventually, it grew its first pepper.

The first pepper got to be about two inches long. Then, one day, I went to squish one of those godforsaken gnats, knocked the pepper's stalk, and broke off the pepper's stem. Alas.

Over time, it grew another pepper. This one grew to be about an inch before it just gave up on life, and stayed as a one-inch pepper until it loosed itself from its stem and fell to the abyss of the pot beneath it.

Finally, we moved offices. The pepper plant LOVED its newly discovered exposure to sunlight, and it happily grew a third pepper. It was a hardy pepper, and it outlasted all its other brethren, until one day it was ripe. I picked it, brought it home, and turned it into part of a fajita. It was delicious.

And that is the story of the office pepper. It has also become about 4.5 feet tall and has more buds, so stay tuned for more riveting updates as the plant becomes bountiful once again.