Peppers from the Aerogarden Update

I ended up with 18 pepper plants which were started from seed in the Aerogarden. There's definitely different rates of germination, especially with the older seeds taking more time to germinate. The taller peppers are actually starting to form blooms, which I find odd since they're not that tall. The eggplants didn't come up, but they were especially old seed which I'd been putting off throwing out.

I've had a couple seed starting disasters. It started with purchasing what I thought were peat pellets, but were probably coconut coir pellets. There was no information on the tray in regards to the growing medium. The trays got replanted twice, but seedlings kept dying right after germinating.

My husband thought we should try monocropping something that could just be direct seeded. I was thinking Pink Eye Purple Hull peas and some melons. A big patch of sunflowers would be fun, but that would bring out all the squirrels in the neighborhood. Or maybe, just include one row of sunflowers with long beans grown up them. My gardening plans are in a bit of disarray at this point.

We're still getting lots of rain so it'll be awhile before the garden can be tilled. There might be still time to start a few things.

Edited to add 4/30: I spoke to a friend about my seed starting problems and he thought I might've burned them with fertilizer, which is entirely possible. I used the little bottle of nutrients included with the Aerogarden, but they don't have you add any until the plants are two weeks old. I think that's probably what I did, burned their little roots.

Seed Starting Using an Aerogarden

Aerogarden planted Friday, March 1st, with peppers and eggplants.

Sounds like madness? Maybe a little.

Peppers take forever to germinate for me. Our house doesn't have any of the things peppers need, like consistent warmth and bright light. So I wondered about using the Aerogarden to start seedlings. And what do you know? They make a seed starting system.

I actually got an Aerogarden Harvest model last year from my mother in-law. It's a little hydroponic system that grows plants in soilless pods. The LCD light on this thing is powerful. Like staring into the noonday sun. I had to purchase the little seed starting tray which fits on top of the little water bowl, and can start 31 plants at a time. Soilless pods and a tiny bottle of nutrient broth came with the seed starting system.

To start out I put it on a 24 hour vegetative light cycle to keep the seeds warm enough to, hopefully, germinate. With the strong constant light cycle the seedlings should grow fast. It's probably a good idea, to pot them up after just a week or two of growth because you don't want the roots to get too tangled together.

This thing is actually tiny. Less than a foot long, so it hardly takes up any counter space. The system circulates water and tells you when to add water or nutrients.

The first thing I did was wet the soilless pods with water and then microwaved them for four minutes, to kill any mold spores that might be lingering in the sphagnum peat. Then one or two seeds are placed in the premade divots in each pod. Then I covered the top of the tray with plastic wrap to help trap heat and moisture. I then set the instrument, so it knew the system was newly planted and it informed me that it'll be two weeks before the seedlings will need to be fed.

It's probably a little late to be starting peppers and eggplants. I usually start them in February to give them a few extra weeks to germinate and get a little bigger before I start tomatoes. Once the peppers are potted up, lettuces will have a go in the system. I'm hoping it'll be a good way to start lettuces regularly since we are way into salads lately.

Crazy Times and 2019 Planting Lists

We've gotten 9 inches of rain in February, which is close to our record of 12 inches. Maybe this means we'll get all the rain out of the way, and things will dry out enough to plant early. Now, that would be amazing.

The plan is to have a smaller garden with less plants to give individual varieties more room to grow. Diseases were terrible last year with the wet weather, hopefully giving plants ample room will help with that.

Cherry Tomato List
Black Cherry
Fat Cherry
Indigo Blueberry
Red Grape (F1)
Sungold (Hybrid)
Sweet Apperitiff

Tomato List
Black Brandywine
Black Zebra
Brandywine
Celebrity (Hybrid)
Cherokee Green
Chocolate Stripes
Chocolate Prince
Croustralee
Dark Brandywine
Delicious
Flame or Hillbilly
Goldie
Granny Cantrell's German Red
Green Zebra
Jaune De Flamme
Marianna's Peace
Peach Blow Sutton
Peron
Pink Berkley Tie-Dye
Super Marmande
Yellow Brandywine


Sweet Pepper List
Ajvarski
Boldog Hungarian
Corno Rosso
Corno di Toro
Corno di Toro Giallo
Figitelli Sicilia
Melrose
Red Marconi
Sweet Happy Yummy (F7)

Hot Pepper List
Aji Angelo
Aji Golden
Guajillo
Kimchi

Harvest Monday, 9/10/18

The only bell pepper I'm growing this year is Carmagnola Rosso which have started ripening, four of them got picked yesterday. They have a great flavor, but they are super late.

If I was able to plant them outside earlier, I could probably get them to set fruit before the heat caused them to abort their blooms or sterilize the pollen. The last 2 years I've had to wait more than a month after the last frost to plant peppers because the ground was too wet to work.

Spicy pablano and jalapeno peppers. Most of the jalapenos have been getting cracks in their surface, likely from the stress of this year's hot dry summer.

I was planning to stuff the poblanos with cheese, coat them with panko, bake them and freeze the extra. The jalapenos will probably get stuffed with cream cheese, wrapped in bacon, baked and frozen as well. I've never made jalapeno poppers before, but that's how a couple of friends prepare them using bacon.

The fall garden is so close to being planted. There's just three beds left to plant with greens, and once the sweet potatoes get pulled, fava beans will go in their place to overwinter. I did end up starting tatsoi, mizuna, mibuna, lettuce, and chicory in tubs, so at least they got an earlier start than usual. But we're supposed to get back into the 90's (32 degrees Celsius) at the end of the week. Ugh.

I hope everyone is having a glorious fall with lots of sunshine and cooler weather. Please join us for Harvest Monday hosted by Dave at Our Acres.

Harvest Monday, 9/3/18

I accidently picked a couple green Melrose peppers. They're thin walled frying peppers that are very tasty cooked.

The peppers really need to be watered so they can keep setting fruit, but I've been putting it off in favor of hand watering the newly planted beds. It's been a dry hot August, hopefully September will bring us some rain.

That's definitely a typo written in the picture, these are actually Boldog Hungarian peppers. They're another thin walled sweet pepper. Melrose was earlier to ripen, but they're both prolific.

Ajavarski sweet peppers are thick walled and juicy, and they're good sautéed with onions.

A mixture of Corno Rosso, Marconi, Corno di Toro, Feher Ozon, Shishito, and maybe an Odessa pepper. I keep picking the green Shishito peppers even though they tend to be too spicy to eat, maybe eventually the weather and their innate heat will start to come down.

The only bell pepper I'm growing are Carmagna Rosso and they're taking forever to ripen. We still have close to 2 months before our first heavy frost, so they still have time.

I got the rest of the garden dug by hand and then raked over on Sunday, and then spent the rest of the day in bed.We've all been sick this weekend. Since kids are back in school they're probably sharing all their illnesses. If I'm up to it, I'm going to spend a few hours this morning planting the rest of the beds.

All the fall greens, lettuces, and peas still need to be planted. I might plant some more turnips and radishes, in case earlier plantings end up too spicy from the heat.

Please join us for Harvest Monday hosted by Dave at Our Acres.

The Weedy Garden in June

We planted the garden about a month ago, so I wanted to give a little tour of what's been going on.

It's been a fairly hot summer already with temperatures in the 90's since the end of May. Certain varieties are adversely affected by the unrelenting heat. A few tomato plants that did really well last year are half the size this year, and they're setting less fruit. Namely Cosmonaut Volkov, Peron, Coustralee, Black Krim, and Black Brandywine.

Caged tomato plants. The front row are all cherry tomatoes.

Sweet potato bed. The Purple on the left are spaced maybe 3 feet apart, whereas the unknown orange type (likely Beauregard) are spaced about 1.5 feet apart. Some of the slips I grew of the orange are ultra tiny so I figure they probably won't make it.

The kale are doing surprisingly well. They're in the shadiest part of the garden so that is likely helping. There's a Portuguese kale and a Nero de Toscana kale.

The Asian chives are still alive, although one accidently got weeded. But the shallots are all dead. It was during the time we got 4 inches of rain and then it immediately went to 98 degrees for a few days (36.7 Celsius). I think they actually got steamed to death.

The lemon basil is loving the heat. To the left of them is a row of ground cherries, being next to the lawn is probably hard on them. The ground cherries planted in the tomato beds are easily 2-3 times bigger.

Siam Queen basil is doing really well. They're surprisingly bushy without having to pinch off the main growing tip.

It's really nice to have parsley around to use, but at the bottom of the pic are a couple of leaf celery plants which I expected to get a lot taller. It would be a bummer if they stayed this small with tiny stringy stems.

I'm experimenting with caging Aunt Molly's and the unnamed ground cherry. They really want to flop on the ground, but I keep forcing them into the cage as the stems get long enough. 

Most of the cucumbers have reached the top of their cages and they're just starting to set fruit. There are few bees out and about, so I hand pollinate these along with melons.

And a very weedy patch of Morado corn, it's about waist high. A few of the plants were knocked down by heavy rain, hilling up soil around the stems seems to be helping with that.

Mostly sweet pepper patch with melons planted in the center. They've just started to bloom but peppers have a hard time setting fruit when nighttime temperatures are high.

I actually weeded the Buhl corn today and I managed not to pull or step on any of them. They seem to be forming quite a bit of tillers even when the plants are small.

Can you see the leeks amongst the weedy grass? I weeded half the onion patch a couple of weeks ago and half the onion plants died. It's made me nervous about weeding the leeks and the rest of the onions.

The bush beans are blooming. Hooray! Snap beans, here we come!

The potatoes in pots had yellowing leaves, so I trimmed them up and fed them. But something is still going on with this pot. They haven't bloomed or anything so I don't think they're close to being harvestable. This was just from a mix of red and yellow seed potatoes.

The Adirondack Blue potatoes are doing much better after being fed. No more yellowing leaves or anything.

The Blues are even blooming, hopefully they're actually making potatoes.

The plan is to weed the Morado corn tomorrow after work, and then weed the leeks and onions this weekend. I'll have to spend a lot of time with the leek patch so they don't get accidently get pulled along with the weeds.

I'm having a really hard time getting New Zealand spinach to germinate indoors. I might try using the area that used to house shallots as a seedling bed.

Thank goodness it rained a few days ago. I was hand watering sections of the garden in the morning before work and other parts after work. Which is part of the reason I'm so behind in weeding.

I'll be sharing pics of fruiting vegetables soon. I won't be getting big tomatoes at the end of June like last year, mid July more like.

Harvest Monday, 8/21/17

Monday is the day of the eclipse and we should have a good view of it here in Western Kentucky. I have to work today, but our supervisor has scoped out a good place to see it and we should be able to take a peak during lunch. People have been buying up all the eclipse glasses, I figure quite a few of them are planning to sell these items for exorbitant prices. Bottled water and bread has been bought out at stores, it's like Y2K all over again. Not sure how the eclipse is supposed to effect water service...

In other news, we have cut down all the tomato plants and cleared out their cages on Saturday. The plan is to till the garden in preparation for fall planting in the next week or two. It took less than an hour to cut down the plants and clear out the cages. There were lots of green tomatoes and ripe tomatoes still left in the garden, but I was ready to move on.

Everything listed below was picked on Saturday.

With my husband's penchant for speed during the big tomato cleanup, I did not get a chance to pick any of their fruit. I managed to get a handful gleaned from the ground afterward.

Some green ground tomatoes.

And lots of hot peppers were picked. This is a mixture of Anaheim, jalapeno, Hungarian Hot Wax, Lemon Drop, and Santa Fe Grande. None of the peppers were especially hot this year, probably because of a mild and extra long spring.

The peppers were under-performers this year. Numex Joe E. Parker an Anaheim type has consistently been unproductive the last 2 years with only a few peppers per plant, although the peppers can get huge. Numex Big Jim is much more productive for me.

The hot peppers will probably get made into pickles, and maybe I'll try freezing a bunch in the form of poppers.

Queensland Blue has massive leaves for a winter squash. We had lots of squash vine borers this year plus the ever present squash bugs. Actually there were lots of new and unusual stink bugs with the majority of whom I've never seen before. Queensland showed signs of vine borer troubles early on.

 And here's that telltale sign of a vine borer, a bit of "sawdust" at the bottom of the stem.

Yokohama was the most productive having produced 6 pumpkins. They're all in various stages of ripeness with even a tiny green one on the upper left.

Thai Rai Kaw Tok also only produced three pumpkins. I think all of the varieties grown this year were susceptible to vine borer damage.

Black Futsu only produced one pumpkin from 3 plants. Next year I'll mainly grow cushaws and butternuts which are supposed to be more resistant to borers. 

And the two tiniest Delicata squashes ever. They were definitely overrun by the other winter squashes, but I've grown them before and only ever get a couple of fruit.

I ended up canning about 500 pounds of tomatoes and giving away close to 500 pounds this year. This last week I've been playing the avoidance game with the garden. I just couldn't deal anymore. I canned enough quarts of salsa to last us years, then there's tomato juice, quartered tomatoes in their own juice, and green tomato pickles.

We ended up with 38 quarts of green tomato pickles. It was actually fun experimenting with different flavorings for the pickles and making vinegary syrups. I was going to wait a month or two before opening them up and giving our opinions on them.

Some thoughts on this year's varieties. All the tomatoes were early this year by a month and with lots of consistent rain and cooler weather the flavors weren't the most intense, but they were still wonderfully delicious. We were picking large varieties like Pink Brandywine and Black Brandywine by the last week of June. Smaller varieties like Taxi and Black Prince ripened the same week as Sun Gold.

The two latest varieties to ripen were Yellow Brandywine and Aunt Ruby's German Green. Yellow Brandywine is delicious and very productive, Aunt Ruby's is less productive but the flavor is outstanding a mixture of citrus, melon and good tomato flavor. But keep in mind, they set fruit late and ripen late.

Cherokee Purple and Pilcer Vesy are the least productive tomato varieties for us. I probably won't grow either varieties again after trying these last few years. A couple years we didn't even get a single Cherokee Purple tomato from their plants.

There were lots of scary giant spiders in the garden during the dry part of August. A couple female Black Widows with their round distended bellies and I even saw a smaller male black widow in one of the female's web. The male and female were actually found on the bottom of a winter squash, which is why I always check what's going on underneath those ground dwelling squashes.

But the most interesting spider is pictured down below. So be warned, it is a close-up of a gigantic spider. I was crawling between the tomato beds when I looked up and saw a massive web and this hanging from the middle of it.

Giant spider picture below...



Wait for it....



And here's the spider.

You can even see the tiny hairs on its bottom leg segments.

Please join us at Dave's Our Happy Acres to join in on Harvest Monday. A fun and exciting place where gardeners share their experiences in vegetable gardening.

Harvest Monday, 7/3/17

On June 26th we harvested tomatoes with Black Brandywine as the biggest one weighing 1.418 pounds. Also pictured is Granny Cantrell's German Red, Paul Robeson, Cosmonaut Volkov, Black Prince, and Taxi.

Black Brandywine continues to produce early heavy tomatoes. Cosmonaut Volkov and Paul Robeson are producing the biggest tomatoes I have ever seen from them, which tells me they don't like our normally hot spring weather. But there are some gigantic Pink Brandywines starting to ripen that should weigh more.

Also harvested June 26th: beans, Butta zucchini, and basil. My husband was elated to see fresh beans coming in from the garden.

I picked the basil thinking it would go well with tomatoes and fresh mozzarella, but with more than 5 pounds of tomatoes harvested a day it looks like salsa canning is scheduled for Friday.

 June 27th: just under a pound of beans and some cherry tomatoes.

June 27th: Butta zucchini and Zephyr squash.

June 27th was a good day for tomatoes with more than eleven pounds shown here.

On the 27th: the never ending parade of squash continues.

 Harvested June 28th: almost seven pounds of tomatoes.

Also harvested June 28th: under three pounds of peppers. The peppers were a disappointment this year. The plants are big and lush and the peppers themselves are huge but the yield is dismal. In 2013 my first harvest of peppers was 12 pounds with almost the same number of plants. We haven't gotten a single pepper from Numex Joe E. Parker yet.

On the June 29th we were running around getting ready to can salsa the next day so I didn't get to photograph 17 pounds of tomatoes, almost 3 pounds of beans, and just under 4 pounds of squash picked that day. I'm trying to process the salsa only when our kiddo is out of the house because the fumes from all the peppers and onions can get pretty bad.

With all the tomatoes coming in we're going to try pressure canning tomato juice and sauces. It'll be great, we can add the tomato juice to our fresh vegetable juice blend. My favorite is carrot, celery, and apple that we run through our juicer. We'll probably can some crushed and whole tomatoes for  soups and chili.

Harvested this week:
41.644 pounds tomatoes
8.918 pounds squash
5.686 pounds beans
2.720 pounds peppers
0.294 pound cherry tomatoes

Total Harvest: 56.542 pounds

Please join us at Harvest Monday hosted by Dave at Our Happy Acres, a happening place full of vegetables and their gardens.

Fruiting Vegetables in June

Butta (F1) zucchini. I've already picked a few un-pollinated fruits but it looks like the first male flowers are starting to show up. I grow lots of hybrids and open pollinated zucchini and summer squashes because of the high insect pressure in my garden. I've already squished a few squash bugs and it's early in the season.

Striata D'Italia zucchini. I can't wait to start eating them. First up will be a curry stir fry with soba noodles and tofu.

Lemon drop hot chili pepper. They didn't produce for me last year, but it was a blazing hot year with the heat hitting us by the end of May. We're only growing hot peppers this year for salsa.

The jalapenos were the first to set fruit and to the left you can see the very pale fruit of Santa Fe Grande. (And now you know I was out taking pictures at 5 am in my pajamas.)

Jalafuego (F1) hybrid doesn't actually seem as prolific as the regular Early jalapeno.

Hungarian Hot Wax is a thin walled pepper, and I think they're great in salsa. I was only able to get one plant to germinate this year.

Big Jim Numex is a Anaheim type pepper. They're already pretty big plants and they are setting fruit earlier than Joe E. Parker Numex.

 Ananas Noire is setting fruit later than previous years, but it's setting lots of them.

Paul Robeson produces purple black tomatoes. They're a lot larger this year with our milder spring, we've had hot springs where their fruit are small but early. In 2013 they were the first to ripen on July 2nd after planting the last week of April.

Brandywine is making some nice trusses of their very large tomatoes. They're still blooming profusely but I've picked off a few yellowing leaves that might be a sign of magnesium deficiency.

This is the first year Granny Cantrell's German Red has done well for us, they start out a pale green almost white with pretty fluted edges.

Celebrity (F1) hybrid is a monster of a plant this year. A semi-determinant they have large trusses of fruit. I've been growing this off and on for almost 20 years and find them dependable.

The first fruit on Cherokee Purple usually end up being a bit deformed, the plants are slow growing and fairly short but they can produce over a long season and do end up being big heavy plants in the end. We've had a drier than usual spring, but one big rain can ruin ripening fruit as they seem pretty sensitive to high water loads.

Pilcer Vesy is a large yellow fruited variety. I remember them being great on BLT sandwiches, if memory serves correctly.

And Pink Berkley Tie-Dye is a gorgeously striped and very tasty tomato. I do think they prefer it a bit hotter since they're not fruiting as prolifically as previous years. For an indeterminate, the plants are smaller but they produce early for a big tomato.

I'm trying to not get my hopes up because the last couple years have been terrible for tomatoes. Just a few bad storms can ruin a crop. And squirrels. But so far, it's looking pretty good.

There's still lingering affects of what I suspect is weed killer carried on the wind, especially on the Dark Brandywine, Black Brandywine, and Yellow Brandywine tomato varieties which are closer to that side of the garden. A coworker told me I might as well pull them up as they won't produce. But the new side-shoots seem to be more normal looking, so I'll leave them be.

I'll be posting a tour of the garden tomorrow. Bite my knuckle, but I haven't weeded as I should. Most of my extra time in the garden is spent trimming leaves that are infected with some kind of disease, perhaps fungal.