Re: [CH] container growing question
Doug Irvine (dougandmarie@shaw.ca)
Mon, 17 Oct 2005 09:17:16 -0700
Well, for the "two Johns" ....(and let no one misconstrue that line :-)
) as John T is aware, I have always grown chiles and tomatoes in pots,
for I live in an apartment , with a deck facing south. This year I had
no luck whatsoever germinating John T's seeds, why I do not know. I did
however buy 3 plants started at a nursery locally, one cayenne, one
super chile, and one hot banana. As well as 5 various tomato plants.
Also I have one huge 4 ft in diameter rosemary bush, which is about 15
years old, and has lived all it's life out on a deck, and I wintered
over my oregano and mint for the past few years. Fortunately here on
Vancouver Island we do not get extreme cold so these plants winter well,
as does parsley, but it has only a two year life span. Getting back to
the chiles, they are now inside, in a storeroom, in an east facing
window. and they are loaded. I have found that underwatering, which
stresses the peppers to produce more and hotter fruit, and fertilizing
sparingly every two weeks with a good tomato food, this year we used
Schultz, produces both the tomatoes and the peppers very well indeed. We
had so many tomatoes that they ended up in our poor overloaded freezer,
15 ft chest! I have always had excellent success with my container
gardening, and it was, in the early years, an experiment to see how well
I could do it, as we had half an acre of orchard and fruit and tomatoes
when we lived in the Okanagan Valley for 10 years. I had one apple tree
with 4 different varieties of apples, grafted onto a Red Delicious,
giving 5 types of fruit. This was not done by me, however, but by the
orchardist who owned the land our home was built on prior to our buying
it, but it did give me incentive to learn gardening, about which I knew
next to nothing. So in my experience, underwatering rather than soaking,
will produce more hotter fruit. Also of course, hot weather for part of
the summer helps a lot. So, there you have this old geezer's experience
growing in containers! Cheers, Doug in BC
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