Poor little peppers...

The good news is, I'm now pretty positive that blossom end rot is NOT the thing nabbing my baby peppers.  (Have just looked up lifecycle of a pepper plant to confirm this; there's a great picture on this ehow link shows a new flower, old flower, and burgeoning fruit.)  Being my first season to watch food grow, it makes sense that I wouldn't know the difference between a blossom doing its job and a blossom meeting an untimely end on the vine.  The bad news, it is STILL those freaking cutworms.  This is what I picked up out of the dirt this morning.

Beautiful baby peppers.  GRR.  For every five cutworms I kill on an average outdoor smooshing escapade, I'm clearly missing twice as many.  These tiny peppers actually smelled like bell peppers, too.  What did I expect, right?  But I couldn't stop sticking my nose against the little things and inhaling the smell of food.  I never do that with food I buy at the grocery store.  But having nurtured these from a little plant, I was amazed by them. 

Eve and I have been reading the Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books together for several weeks now.  It was a perfect day for us to get to the "The Glittering Cloud" chapter of "On the Banks of Plum Creek."  I still remembered reading this chapter as a little girl and the devastation Pa felt at seeing his entire wheat croup devoured by grasshoppers with NOTHING he could do about it.  Today it provided a dramatic adjustment for my perspective about my garden on which our lives do NOT depend.  Having a (fledgling container) garden is a luxury for me, a hobby even.  I want it to thrive, and I would love to decrease our need for grocery story trips, even a little bit.  But we're a long way from that happening, and we're not going to starve or struggle in the meantime.  Here's to not taking food for granted!