I don’t want to repeat last year’s mistakes.

Last summer’s garden was disappointing for so many reasons, but the one I’m thinking about most is that the plants did not grow to the size I expected, and yields were low. My first thought was that lack of regular fertilization when I was in LA was the culprit. As I’ve been cleaning up the skeletons of last year’s chiles I’ve continued to wonder if that’s the whole reason. Many of the plants had small root balls and I’m now wondering if there was not something fundamentally out of whack with the soil mix I was using. Could there be a pH imbalance? It’s time to test and find out.

As I’ve been prepping the soil and containers I’ve found a bunch more volunteers. So far I’ve got 18 volunteers that I hope are all chiles, as well as a couple of trays of seedlings grown from Hatch and de Arbol seeds. Last year’s seedlings seemed week and spindly and I wonder if that’s because I left them inside for too long. This year I won’t repeat that mistake. We’ve had a warm snap lately and I’ve moved all the seedlings outdoors. The volunteers have already started sleeping outside in the cold frame, and the baby babies will go outside in the sun during the day and come in at night for a while longer. Hopefully exposure to real wind and sun will toughen this crop up compared to last year.

Hydroponic mojito

Harvested the first snip of spearmint from the windowfarm last night. Very tasty pounded up with lime and sugar and rum and ginger beer. First fruits of this winter’s indoor gardening project which has been a bit more successful and a lot less crazy than last winter’s project. I was inspired by the excellent work of the windowfarm project. Last spring I participated in the pioneer workshop and had fun starting to design a windowfarm but didn’t actually build it until it got cold. This has been my first hydroponic project and has been quite successful. There are two reservoirs made from 4″ PVC tubes, and the bottom one has a strong aquarium pump inside it. Every couple hours a timer kicks the pump on and it pumps a couple gallons of water up to the top reservoir. Adjustable valves limit the flow back down to around a drop per second to two columns of 1.5L water bottles. Each column has four planters which consist of seedlings in 4″ net cups filled with clay pellets. After a few weeks the mint and thyme plants are thriving. May branch out to other things soon.
All in all it’s a strange but fun way to garden. It’s gotten me excited about building things. And about the intersections of growing and technology. I’m eager to try to use a microcontroller and sensors to control the pump as a next step in the evolution of the project. So even if hydroponics are a bit of a hassle, windowfarming has gotten me fired up about technology again and that’s an exciting development.

Lucky eight volunteers

Garden prep continues. Pulling out the sad dead plants yesterday afternoon, but happy to find eight little babies had volunteered in one seven gallon container. Probably either an amarillo or texas chiltepin. All seemed to transplant successfully and have big little root structures. I wonder what I’ll find in the containers up on the roof when I start prepping those.

Water is expensive

For more than three years after moving into our current home I didn’t pay a water bill. Really seemed like an ignorance is bliss situation. I didn’t think we had a water meter because I had never really looked closely enough. Our basement has a low ceiling, is a bit scary, and I’m happy to stay out of it’s remotest corners. Contractors and the like told me our building still has the original lead water main from the 1920’s and I didn’t look closely because I wasn’t ready to deal with upgrading. We have a good water filter in the kitchen and hope the kids don’t drink too much elsewhere. Anyway, the no bill situation lasted until I got a dire letter from our mortgage company. Turns out the bills have been going to the wrong side of our house, which is located on a corner. USPS knows us by one street, but water company has it’s service port on the cross street side and that (to us non-existent) address is in their database. What a fiasco. So now I know the dollar cost of all my gardening plus all the hot showers and cool baths of the family and it is a big number. Which sucks. And I am researching rainwater harvesting systems starting today!

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?

Every season a new beginning.

I think I’m finally getting over the trauma of last year’s garden. Yesterday I went out into the backyard and uprooted the ghostly leafless stems of the frozen chiltepins. Made sure to shake out all the soil from the roots but they seemed too woody to even compost. I felt bad that I couldn’t keep the plants alive over the winter, but I also felt a bit liberated emptying out a bunch of containers and making room for this season’s new growth. By the end of the afternoon I felt elated and optimistic about growing this year. Instead of making the garden bigger this year I’m going to focus on really understanding the plants and what makes them happy.

Freeze after all.

This year I thought I’d be less crazy and not over-winter the best chile plants inside the house. Instead I bought a lightweight PVC tube and plastic sheeting greenhouse-like thing called a Grow Dome. It’s awesome but I didn’t get around to ordering it until late November, didn’t assemble it until early December and what do you know the ground had frozen by then. I pounded in some plastic stakes and installed about 20 of the biggest and best chiltepins from 2009. Then very late on the night of 12/29 we had a really wicked windstorm. The radio said gusts of 45 mph. The sound of the wind woke me at 4 or 5 am and when I looked out the back and the Grow Dome was gone. In the morning I found it in a neighbor’s yard but temps stayed below 20F for many days afterwards and the PVC tubes were too brittle to re-assemble the dome. So the plants froze. Very sad. Really the final straw in a gut punch of a garden year.

Garden neglect

Despite my inattentions the plants on the roof survived and are still bearing fruit at the end of November. It’s been a strange growing season. Our sudden departure for LA at the beginning of the summer. Being away for almost all of July and August meant that the plants had water on an automated drip system but I gave them no regular fertilizer. When I returned my first impression was the plants were smaller than they should have been. They bore nice fruit but I’m sure there would have been a lot more if they had a weekly diet of seaweed fertilizer. Not to forget the weird meteorologic conditions this year so much rain in the spring and generally not enough sun for peppers to be at their strongest. I feel bad for the plants when I go up there, and I really only go up to harvest. The descendents of the tarahumara chiltepin produced pretty well and the fruits are absolutely beautiful and tasty. The best producers were the mature plants which had been overwintered from 2008 and potted up to 15 gallon containers, especially chiltepin amarillo and tarahumara. Hatch plants seemed to grow well produce many fruit but they didn’t grow to the really large size I had expected.

So on to the next season. I’m hoping to over-winter the best of this year’s plants. I ordered a lightweight greenhouse dome and hopefully it will arrive before frost does. Maybe I can make amends to the garden by improving our compost setup in the backyard over the winter.

Rain Rain Rain

I’m so tired of this rainy June. All the chile plants are small, though pulling through all the storms admirably. I guess all the rain proves that my new container layering strategy is draining well. I am so ready for some heat up on the roof to get me motivated to install the drip system.

Stalks tender but trying.

All four gardens well in process with over 80 plants planted out in Staten Island, East Village Manhattan, Fort Greene and Boerum Hill Brooklyn. Yeah! Hopefully up to another 50 to add if things go well. I think I took some of the plants too quickly from indoors to out. I overestimated the importance of temperature and didn’t think enough about stem strength and wind. Many plants look teeny and spindly when planted outdoors but thankfully they seem to mostly be surviving and thriving.

Bought a batch of seedlings from chileplants.com at the last minute. Now that I see how full and healthy their plants look I really feel like my indoor babies are starting out weak. But hopefully they will toughen up. A week of coolish temperatures and massive thunderstorms may cull a bunch of the weakest transplants. Very exciting to see these gardens coming together.