Thanks for the clouds Tlaloc.

Cloudy all day today with a chance of showers. Perfect weather for transplanting. Have given the drip system a quick setup and test over the last couple days, prepped containers in a rushed way, and am now ready to plant out the babies. This year I didn’t want to re-mix the soil in all the containers so after removing the dead plants from last year I topped every container off with a mix of compost and potting mix. I’m thinking a lot about the soil science class I took at BBG in March where the instructor said that if soil pH is correct then no added fertilizer is really needed. Hope that’s my situation. Rushing to get everything in the ground this week. Soaking plant roots, wetting soil in containers, then putting them in. Mostly re-using mulch from last year. Lots of dry soil and even some dry chiles mixed in. Probably lots of weeds in the future but nothing much to be done about it. Here’s to hoping all the plants like it up here.

Chile arrival.

Thirty-six plants came in the mail from Cross Country Nurseries today. Feels like Christmas. Plants are in good shape, lots of flowers, even a couple of earliest fruits. It’s hot this week so I’m giving them a good soak of seaweed fertilizer water, then a few hours of sun followed by late afternoon in the shade. The plants I’ve grown from seed look wimpy in comparison.

Windfall compost

One of my garden priorities this season is to reboot the family compost piles. I’d really like to have a 3-bin system in the backyard, but Mrs Chile insists that anything back there be neat and animal-proof. This is sensible, but goes against my instinct of leaning a bunch of palates together and wrapping them in chicken wire. So I haven’t built anything yet but this week I did tackle the old compost piles. There were nests of dried out tomato stalks, a piney wreath, various avocado rinds and mango pits – why did I ever think these things would compost without turning the pile. So I put all of that stuff into a garbage bag but underneath, lo and behold, were good piles of real compost. I had expected the two enclosed bins to be a total wash so imagine my joy to find a few cubic feet of black gold in there.

Beyond the backyard I made a compost score too. In years past I’ve gathered many many large plastic containers of hopefully clean compost from the vicinity of a large community garden on public land. I believe there is a department of sanitation training facility nearby and a few years ago when the city was making compost practice happened here. Even though the citywide program stopped each spring I’ve sniffed out truckload-sized piles of compost every year. At first I felt really sneaky about it when I pulled my van up next to a pile, jumped out with my huge rubbermaid bins and white plastic buckets, and left with a minivan load of mostly organic materials. The stuff is always a bit chunky, and needs to be sifted through a sieve, but what’s better than free compost?

Chunky chile oil public preview.

Thanks to Hali Lee for inviting me to the annual benefit for the Asian American Women’s Giving Circle. Brooklyn Chiles was part of the “bazaar” and it was my first experience giving the oil to strangers. It was more of a cocktail party than a farmer’s market, so most people didn’t seem in a buying mood, but it was still a good opportunity to develop a rap and see how people responded to the product. My feeling at the end of the night is that people continue to really like the product, but it’s time to raise the level of my game to more professional production.