Mama bird gave me the evil eye

This bird is terrifying.  She was so mad at me for trying to take her picture.  I felt like she was staring into my soul... and I was scared.  I don't want to disturb her, but I want to see her babies!  How long will I have to wait before they hatch?!

I dare you to look into these eyes and not be scared too.

First banana peppers!

I resisted as long as I could, but I went ahead and cut my first two banana peppers off the plant today.  I wanted to see if they would get any larger, but I think they're making it hard for my other banana pepper buds to grow.  Here are all my peppers before:

And here are my banana peppers after:

It took about a month for them to grow to 4" and 5" long (or 5" and 6" if you measure along the outside curve).  My bell pepper is not quite 3" yet, so I'm going to let that one keep growing a bit longer.  Some of my tomatoes don't have that much longer to grow - I'm going to be able to pick 2 or 3 of them in the next day or so!  There are a lot more that size, so I'm sure a bunch will start ripening up soon.

Who's garden is this anyway?

For the past couple weeks, I've been keeping an eye out for my little lizard friend to return.  He was the best garden tenant!  But I found a different tenant living in my garden today.

First of all, let me remind you of my fabric hanging planter that I made earlier this summer:

This morning, I went to water the flowers in this fabric planter and a bird flew out!  I thought it was going to fly right into my face, but instead, it landed on one of the fence posts and proceeded to CHIRP CHIRP CHIRP at me.  I was about to go on and continue my mission of watering the flowers, but then I realized that this furious bird must be a mama bird, and I was right.  That crazy mama made a nest out of my flowers!  Even though she was chirping and yelling and throwing a fit, I had to peak into the fabric planter just long enough to make sure there were some eggs in there (and get a picture, of course).  This is what I saw:

She had 4 speckled eggs in there!  Good thing I heard her chirping at me before I went ahead and watered the flowers.  That would have been a sad, soggy nest.  I might have to sacrifice these flowers since this bird family has obviously settled in good.  That's fine as long as that mama bird stops flying at my face and yelling at me!  I never had these problems with my lizard friend...

I didn't mean to grow a snowman

My tomato plant is getting huge!  Look at how tall it is now:

And it's covered in tomatoes from top to bottom:

This is the oldest bunch, the largest of which is about 1 and a half inches long:

Look at that tomato on the left.  It's a snowman!  Or maybe a tomato-man.  Either way, it's weird.

The tomato-man isn't the problem, though.  The problem is that a couple of the tomatoes in this bunch had blossom-end rot.  Lame!  I need to start giving them tomato food and make sure I water them on a more regular basis.  I blame grad school.

I grew my first banana pepper!

I went away for the weekend and my two largest banana peppers blew up!

This is the oldest banana pepper.  It's hard to tell the difference between the bell pepper buds and banana pepper buds in my older pictures, but I believe this banana pepper first opened its flower and started growing about 3 weeks ago.  Now it's about 3 and a half or 4 inches long.

 Since I've never grown banana peppers before, I'm not sure how long I should wait before I pick them.  Anyone know?

And here are my bell peppers!  They're still only about 2 inches long and the bottom one is growing crazy shaped.