Prodigal Peppers

I stopped down at my cousin's farm market earlier this spring to pick up a few odds and ends when I ran across the most beautiful Tabasco pepper plants and my mind started turning.  We LOVE Tabasco and we LOVE pepper sauce, so Tabasco peppers would be an obvious choice for our garden, yes?  So I picked up 4 of these big, beautiful pepper plants at $3.49 each and lovingly planted them in containers around the pool.

A windstorm and a couple downpours later, my pepper plants were all but devoid of leaves, yellowed and drooping over, bug-eaten, looking altogether miserable in their galvanized planters.  

There went $14 down the drain.

I moved them to the garden proper, tucked them behind the eggplants for protection, hoping they might fight their way back to good health.  And here they are this morning: 

And if you look really closely, really really closely:

We're beginning to see the first of the lovely yellow Tabasco peppers.  A move to the garden with some protection from the wind and sun have done the trick.