Gardening Progress

[eien_herrison]

Haven't been around much, I've been too busy with regular life to really post here, but I have been working on my garden.

Temperatures have skyrocketed here over the past couple of weeks; good news for my tomatoes and peppers, not so good news for my lettuces. We were still digging out last year's potatoes when they started growing again, so we lost a ton of seedlings due to needing to dig them up ( :( ).

However, what's been the real success has been our indoor pepper plants:





These are the third and fourth peppers from four plants we have, with a fifth growing. They don't seem to want to ripen on the vine, so we take them off and ripen them next to a banana. These have a little bit of history -- about 18 months ago I bought some peppers from a market stall (nothing exceptional, just ordinary mini peppers) and decided on a whim to scrape the seeds out and grow them. Last year failed thanks to a sudden cool spell, but this year keeping them indoors has done wonders for them.

We've tried one so far (a second given to a friend for her to try & seed save if she wants) and the sweetness when roasted is incredible; I'll have to try the next one raw to see how that tastes, and also make sure I save seed from this batch to sow next year.

Who knows, maybe in a couple of years I'll have excess seed to spare :P

Comments

[kake]

How are your raspberries doing this year? I think mine were a bit water-starved during the earlier part of the season, as there were loads of flowers but very few became berries :(

[eien_herrison]

Hi Kake (sorry, I keep on meaning to chat with you but other things push that to the back of my priorities). My raspberries seem to be doing well so far, we've got a fair few berries -- nowhere near the size of the ones in the supermarket, but still large enough (the strawberries are the ones that have really done well this year with masses of fruit).

[kake]

I suspect then that my lack of berries is due to my lack of watering, since we got our canes from the same place at the same time. Still, next year's canes are starting to pop up now, so I'll try to be better at watering next spring.

(No problem, I've been really busy too! I've been doing a lot of travelling around London recently but not been at your end — will let you know when I am, in case you're free to meet up,)

[carolyn_claire]

Indoors is a good idea. What's the variety? How are you growing them?

[eien_herrison]

Variety? No idea -- I saved the seeds from peppers I bought from a market stall. At a guess I'd say they're likely to be a variation of Capsicum annuum var. annuum as that's the name which pops up on the gardening sites of peppers which are very similar to these (this is a UK site but I said to myself that if they failed this year I'd just go and buy these seeds as they're almost exactly the same).

I'm not doing anything special with them -- they're in reasonable-sized pots on a south-facing window (to my left as I type this, actually; they're in the room my computer is in). Good amounts of water and they've been left to their own devices pretty much. The middle plant is getting pretty tall -- the ones I'd have fruit from so far are about a foot tall, while the middle one is double their size.