Remember That Volunteer?

A month or so ago I posted about a volunteer pepper plant that appeared in the soil/compost mix that I repotted my chive in. The extraction was initially successful and the plant has continued to thrive in its new home.

It even has two babies!

I think this is going to be a white bell pepper, but I'm not sure because it was a mixed seed pack.

My chives and the other 2 winter bell pepper plants.

Within the next few days I'll be pulling the last of my outdoor pepper plants in an attempt to overwinter them. We'll see how it goes!

Winter Planting Complete!

Despite my great dislike for Miracle Grow products, this was the only organic potting mix I could find that was outrageously expensive. So alas.... I broke down and bought it. I figure organic Miracle Grow is better than nothing.

The empty, but very soon to be filled, seed pods.


I finally got some nice wide popscicle sticks to mark my plants with. I had previously been taping the name of the plant to the side of the pods, but this has proven to be rather ineffective... The biggest problem being the humidity in the greenhouse. Most of time the ink would either run until its no longer legible or the adhesive would cease to work and I was faced with a bunch of tags on the floor and no clue which plants were which.


Success! I planted Organic Broccoli Deccicio (Park), Squash Medley (mix of four squash types, Park), Celery Tango (Park), Organic Black Beauty Eggplant (Park), Sweet Basil (Burpee) and a Hybrid Container Tomato (Park).


I grew broccoli all winter on my porch last year and did tomatoes on south facing window sills, so I'm pretty confident about success with those plants. However, I will be booting the tomatoes onto the porch to make way for pepper plants inside. The tomatoes will be going into my mini greenhouse though, so hopefully that will keep them warm enough. The basil will stay in my kitchen under a small plant lamp. The real experiment this year is the squash and eggplant. I've been going back and forth trying to decide if it's a good idea to throw these in containers in the porch greenhouse. I'm not sure that it's even worth bothering with, but I figured I could at least try and worst comes to worst, I can just chop em down and compost them.

Winter Container Gardening

There's still about 2 months until my anticipated first fall frost on October 10th, but I'm just way too excited about my winter garden to hold off any longer.

This winter I'm planning on utilizing an herb growing kit reclaimed from my grandmother's garage (complete with lights!) to grow fresh herbs in my kitchen all winter. On top of that, I'm thinking about attempting to grow some bell peppers on the south-facing windowsill that I used last winter for my tomato plants. The tomatoes did quite well and I will be growing more this winter, but I think I'm going to move them onto my enclosed porch (south-facing of course). Last year I would never have dreamed of this, but I now have a mini greenhouse out there with heavy duty insulating plastic. Hopefully, I'm also going to grow broccoli, cauliflower, lettuce and spinach on the porch, but probably not in the greenhouse. I'm thinking the unused bookshelves I've been storing out there just may have found a new use....

We'll see how it all plays out! Tomorrow I'm starting seeds!