Category: Garden

To further beautify the house, we got some expensive edging.  I’m kind of ashamed to say how much the edging costed, so I won’t.

But we needed something, and as was evidenced by the fact that I pulled ancient plastic edging out to install the new–cheap plastic edging is ineffective (and ugly).

So after much digging, behold!

Fancy-ass edging.  That is all (I mean, I’d talk about it more, but it’s edging.  And I’m not paid by the word here).

–Simon

More on the indoor growing front.  Well, nothing really new, just more photos.

My attempts at growing basil inside have been technically successful, but basil really doesn’t appreciate the scanty light provided by fluorescents, lending me to believe, as I had suspected, that the photos of those green and busy basil plants on the boxes of grow kits to be bullshit.  Even so, they managed to flower (which means they’re not happily making lots of leaves as they should):

One of the plants that’s historically been really easy to grow inside is sage.  We have no need for more sage plants, but I started this one because it’s from the seed that my first sage plant produced–the one in the pot that I started from seed years ago that finally went to flower.  I’ll probably gift this one:

After the aphids ravaged my pepper plants, I had been struggling to get a new one to germinate.  Last year I learned that starting them around December/January gave them the time they needed to produce.  But pepper seeds are lazy, and I had been becoming dismayed.  Thankfully, I finally saw a sprout:

This is an attempt to grow an aloe plant from part of a leaf from a grocery store.  I’m curious, though not terribly hopeful:

And lastly, here’s an assortment of things.  There’s the rhubarb plant I’ve overwintering until I get it in the ground, as assortment of beans I was forced to plant as they were starting to mold, the poinsettia–awaiting next year’s festivities, an annual whose name I can never remember that we call “The Vegas Plant” (overwintering), and another potato–grown from salvaged kitchen scraps:

We’re fully in the winter slump now, but I still have my little patch of green.

–Simon

When I brought my pepper plants inside to overwinter, I did not anticipate an aphid scourge.  In fact, I’ve never experienced an aphid problem before, so the threat didn’t register.  In the past, I once had a colony attack some bindweed, but as they left everything else alone, I wasn’t concerned, and in fact left the bindweed there as a sort of companion gardening plant.

The trouble is, bringing plants inside and into a controlled environment seems to have eliminated all natural predators.  So while I may have always had aphids, their populations were controlled to the point that I never noticed them.

But a few weeks ago, I noticed the colony on my peppers.  This particular strain was bright red, so I noticed fairly quickly.  But it’s hard to treat big bushy plants inside, and while repeated sprayings lessened the population, I never eradicated it.  And the aphids, being amazing specialists, transferred to the other plants.  So finally, I had to take extreme measures.  I took every infected plant outside to die in the freeze, along with their unwelcome guests.

It’s very annoying to lose plants that I really wanted to keep.  From now on, I’ll start new peppers inside in the winter and just let them die at the end of fall.  It’s not like I had a shortage of peppers this year.  Lesson learned.

–Simon

P.S.  Before I wrote this, I was lazily browsing the internet at work.  Seeking apparently forbidden knowledge on aphid eradication, my query was blocked: