Container vs. Garden-Round 3: Peppers

Left-Mariachi Hybrid, Right-Sweet Pepper

Mariachi Hybrid

Sweet Pepper in bed.

Ta daaa!  Peppers!  This post is going to be pretty boring, but I wanted to update everyone on the pepper progress.  The peppers are the one thing this year that has done amazingly well both in the garden bed AND in the containers.  I've gotten multiple peppers from both, despite any neglect in weeding the garden bed or watering the containers.  All in all, I think the lack of needing to weed gives containers a slight advantage over putting them in a garden but these truly are the EASIEST thing to grow.  I have both hot and sweet peppers in both places.  So the take away from this blog post is...if you want to start a garden and start with something easy, get some peppers.

Also, I tried the Burpee Mariachi Hybrid pepper that is supposed to be "high on color and flavor and low on heat!" and holy moly...sucker is HOT.  I'm not a hot pepper fan but I like a teency bit of kick.  Think...restaurant jalapenos.  Those are perfect.  But ones you grow at home always seem to be hotter so I purposely went for a pepper they labeled as "less" hot than a jalapeno.  So apparently I'm a wuss because these suckers are still too spicy for me.  Great flavor though.  As mentioned above, they grow well despite neglect and indeed are beautiful, but boy was I surprised when I put them on my salad, and then realized I'd cut them without gloves on, and then realized I was going out and had to put contacts in.  Queue twenty minute montage of me attempting to put contacts in with ziploc bags on my hands...one of the more frustrating twenty minutes I've had in a good long while but hey, eventually I was successful. 

And now, pretty pictures of a butterfly

Wouldn't want my last post to be gross bugs.  So here, enjoy some pretty pictures of a butterfly.  You're welcome.

Ewwwww

I was out in the garden on Friday and spotted this little dude.

Ewwwww.  Caterpillar thingy?  What is wrong with you!  What's with all the weird little cotton puffball things coming off your back?!

But I let him be.  Today I went back and caterpillar thingy looks like this:

Ewwwww-er.  What in the?!?  From what I can tell the little white cotton puffballs sucked caterpillar dry.  Gerrrrroooooossssss.

I came inside and was thinking I should probably nicely ask a boy to come over and kill the gross caterpillar parasite things so I didn't have to touch it but I wanted to figure out what those disgusting little vampiric buggers were.  Well, good thing I did!  Turns out the pretty green caterpillar (rest in peace) was a tomato hornworm larva and the vampiric buggers are trichogramma wasps.  "Nooo!  No wasps!! I've already got mosquitoes all over my garden!"  Well, turns out these wasps are listed as a beneficial parasite in my garden book.  They're too small to sting people and apparently are so small we usually don't even see them (1/100 to 1/25 of an inch).  They feed on the eggs of insects that are plant eaters but don't harm the actual plants.

So I guess I shouldn't kill the gross little suckers.  Dern.

Container vs. Garden-Round 2: Carrots

So how did the other half of my giant container o' carrots and onions turn out?  Well, the carrots are thankfully at least appearing to still be a work in progress.  They're still pretty puny BUT the greens look very healthy.  Carrot instructions say to try to water a very small amount every day and to try to till or loosen the soil a bit so the carrots have more room to grow.  I promise from here on out to try to give them all the TLC they can handle and see if I can salvage them after the great onion massacre that occurred right next to my poor carrot babies.

At least so far it appears that the container carrots are doing far better than the garden carrots.  They're either thicker or longer or both (insert penis joke I'm too lazy to come up with here).  And just as a reminder, this year I'm trying a cool purple variety of carrot so their color is normal.

Next round: Peppers!

Container vs. Garden-Round 1: Onions

On Monday I did a HUGE weeding of the raised garden bed.  Filled an entire trash can full of weeds and loved every cathartic minute of it.  Just after an energizing jog in the rain I figured "hey! there won't be any mosquitoes out in this downpour...time to WEED!"  I'd been putting off weeding far too long due to this year's terrible mosquito problems.  I would only make it 5 minutes even with bug spray on before I'd have dozens of bites.  So I kind of just gave up and fantasized about creating a perimeter of citronella torches around the garden so I can weed free from fear some day.  But no longer!

So, it was time to do an assessment of the veggies that are done growing.  The peas, beans, broccoli, lettuce, and chard are full-on failures.  They were all decimated by critters (I've seen both bunnies and deer snacking away) before the weeds took hold.

On to the matchup.  There was a clear winner in the onion category, which you will see from this visual...

And as you can see, that winner is Mother Nature.  That stupid wench better be getting a good laugh out of this poor showing.  I got all excited with how quickly the little suckers sprouted and started shooting up happy green onion grass and this is all I get for all my hard work?!?  The garden onions stopped growing sooner but probably has the larger of the onions whereas you can see the container onions still have some greens on top but they're no longer healthy.  I might try a smaller number next year and work on tilling the soil around the onions once a week to see if that helps their ability to expand, but it was pretty disappointing all around.  Screw you mother nature...screw you.  Not a useable onion in the bunch.

Next round: Carrots!

Container eggplants update

Hi all! I know I've been more than a bit negligent about posting but now that my harvests (or lack thereof) are coming in I'm going to try to start posting more updates on how the veggies are doing.

This picture shows you the lackluster results of my container eggplant. They are so small I can't imagine using them in cooking; the largest of the fairy tale eggplants is only about 4 inches. That lovely dark purple veggie next to the fairy tale eggplants shockingly ISN'T an eggplant. It's one of my sweet peppers from the pepper grow bags. I've eaten a few and they were delicious and I love the fun purple color. 

My eggplants appeared to have some sort of microscopic pest bothering it so I sprayed it down with some pest spray and its bouncing back nicely. Well see if it gives another round of veggies that are a bit more useable but I'm not holding my breathe. Happy Monday everyone!

What?! What?! In The...

Containers.  Get your mind out of the gutter all you Tosh.0 fans.  Alright, I know I've fallen down hard on blogging lately, but I'm back from vacation and caught up on all the life stuff so back to it!  This post is the last round of veggie plantings I did right before going on vacation during the last week of May so I can tell you now how they're doing, and I also did some updates on the other containers I planted earlier in the season.

Fairy Tale Eggplant from Burpee

Fairy Tale Eggplant.  This is an eggplant variety I got from Burpee that is made for containers.  It's a smaller marbled eggplant.  I did a very basic planting on this one with rocks in the bottom layer for proper drainage and potting soil.  I also have a black beauty eggplant (the classic large dark purple variety) growing in the raised garden bed so I'm excited to compare the two throughout the summer.  This week I checked and the container has these beautiful purple and white blooms on it so it's going strong!  Actually doing better than the black beauty plant, which has grown but has no buds yet.

Peppers in a Gardener's grow bag

Peppers.  Alright, next up is my peppers!  As you know, I started these bad boys from seeds, they're the only thing I did from seed this year that wasn't simple "sow in ground" and needed to be started in advance of growing season.  One is a mildly hot pepper, the other is a sweet pepper.  Sadly, due to lack of a proper labeling at the seedling stage, I have no idea which one is which.  The idea was that I'd have the hot pepper in the red grow bag and the sweet pepper in the blue grow bag.  Once they start growing actual peppers I'll find out if my guess was right or not!  Generally the hot pepper plants are smaller so I did my guess based on which set of seedlings looked larger overall.  As you can see, for these guys I tried a Gardener's grow bag.  They're about $10 each, can be reused for 2 seasons, and are supposed to provide the perfect amount of moisture retention and aeration for the roots.  Very easy to use and keep their shape pretty well.  The main difference in these is you're supposed to use pre-moistened dirt while filling it.  I just filled and watered the dirt as I went every couple of inches.  We shall see.  The plants are about a month in so far and to be honest, the peppers in the back yard are doing better.  These are doing fine, but no buds yet and the backyard most are budding.  This weekend I'm going to try adding more dirt to them since I think with the watering they're planted a bit shallow now. 

Sweet Potatoes in a Gardener's grow bag

Sweet Potatoes.  Alas, the piece de resistance, my sweet potatoes!  I have high hopes for these bad boys because a) they were expensive since you have to buy tubers, and b) potatoes store really well so I could feast all year round!  As you can see, I did another grow bag for these, it's much larger than the pepper grow bag and is designed for potatoes.  I planted 7 tubers here, and a few in the backyard as well for comparison.  They look quite withered and dying here, but no worries, the directions ensured me that no matter how gross/stinky they are when you get them, they bounce back very quickly once planted.  They insist that you put one tuber in a soda bottle with water inside to see the pretty foliage grow from it...but alas, I was running behind on packing so I neglected to do that.  So far, about a month out from planting now, it appears that only 3 of the tubers really survived in the grow bag.  They're growing, but not much, so I'm imagining my sweet potato project may be a failure.  I've been told they only grow in hotter climates than mine, but the Baltimore/DC area is pretty darn disgusting in the summer so I disregarded the online naysayers.  It's over 100 degrees here today!  I may attempt to move the bag to my driveway to do some real spud frying heat of the bag, but we'll see.

Carrots and Onions!  Looking Good!

Update on Carrots and Onions.  Looking good right?  I'm fairly certain I need to thin the carrots out, but I have yet to research how.  So they may come up all scary and deformed looking.  I'm going to try to check in on them this weekend. 

Peas-pretty much done for this round

Update on Peas-In-A-Pot.  Well they've been in the pot for a while now and in this picture from the beginning of June they are starting to turn yellow and stop producing.  Truth be told, they produced a decent number of pods for one person for snacking but it's not like you could make a meal out of them.  And according to smart gardener its time to plant another pot full peas, so I guess they only produce for a month or so and you keep replanting like lettuce.  Sadly, I may have/did leave the seeds out in the yard and ruined them.  A week after this picture was taken the pot was totally dead.

Strawberries-a little dry on the bottom row

Update on Strawberries.  Well the lazy strategy isn't working out so well.  The plants on the bottom are drying out a lot no matter how often I water them so I've been reduced to using watering bulbs just to try to get water to them.  It seems to be working okay but is far more of a pain in the arse to refill every couple days than if I'd just created the PVC pipe with holes in the center so that water would easily travel down to them.  So alas, laziness did not pay off in the end.




That's all for today folks!  I'm going to try to start doing side by sides of container plants with their garden bed counterparts to show the comparison in how well they're doing.