Peeking at a Peck of Unpicked, Unpickled Peppers - Garden Post

So as last you heard, spider mites were tenaciously taking over JR's and my garden. They had latched onto all of the marigolds and essentially made it their cesspool of a house. Having NO idea what was happening, we had left them there for a while, thinking well... it's spiders, just hanging out building a web, but NOOOOOOO. Effing little spider mites surreptitiously took over my favorite flowers.

So into trash bags they went... then a week later, I noticed the stupid little flecks of vermin crawling on our basil and pineapple sage plants.

Be gone with you! Into a trash bag.

After that I started sniffing out any trace of the red devils I could find, and I found some on our Serrano pepper plant, but you know what else I found on our Serrano? A PEPPER! I FOUND A PEPPER! There was actually a single beautiful Serrano clinging for dear life to the plant. So since we had a beautiful few days this weekend, back out into the garden I climbed, eager to prune and feed all of our little plant-ies!

So FIRST! I put my new beautiful cover onto our Chaise Lounge, because seriously... Never knew how disgusting they got without a cover... and this cover is absolutely perfect, because I can take a shower, throw on a dress and let my hair dry Au'naturale via the gorgeous sunlight. And this cover was made 100% better by the fact it was on clearance at Target! Love Target - Love Clearances!

So now that the furniture was looking good, I watered our plants with some high quality plant food included. Gotta feed those peppers! Here's our Serrano as I first saw it. It's absolutely gorgeous. It was about an inch in this picture, and you can also notice another pepper forming in the upper left hand of the photo.

We've been leaving it to get a bit bigger and as I write this it's now about two inches... yes I've been naughty and haven't written about it in a few weeks, but I wanted to save it for the really exciting news...

Not only is our Serrano kicking ass, growing some tasty peppers, but our CUBANELLE and Banana Peppers are too!!!! The Anaheim is taking it's time, so I've started calling it the Anatime sucker. Soon (aka like 2 months) we'll have beautiful Cubanelles grown straight from our own (HIGHLY pesticided garden)... so... yeah... really concerned about eating them. THEN, I sprayed the ever-loving-hell out of every single plant with a heavy dose of organic pesticide, because, they all needed it.

Banana Pepper!!!! 

Why so in love with all this pesticide-y-ness, do you ask? Well first there was the "fungus," then the clear maggots, THEN spider mites, THEN aphids, THEN whatever pest is on it's way next, because serrrrriously, there's probably a swarm of killer bees coming our way carrying a flock of some bugs I dont even know about yet. Why killer bees you ask? Because they'd block me from going outside to poison the other bugs...

Because why would you even walk outside for a second if there were killer bees on your front porch? Me... I'd call animal control.

But back to the peppers... As you can see in my lovely photos (blurred ever so slightly by my phone case covering the lens... because it's waterproof, because you only drop your phone in a toilet twice, before you realize  it's time to protect your electronics).


 Our Cubanelle is a little behind the rest, but it's actually really exciting to watch the peppers form from the decaying flower buds. Seriously... if all flowers turned into tasty food stuffs, I would hoard flowers like you wouldn't believe... I'd be growing a veritable menagerie of flower-food. But since only a few do, I'll stick to the peppers!

OUR FIRST Cubanelle!!! 

So that's it for this exciting edition of what LoRo kills (hopefully not the pepper plants - though the anatime sucker does look like it has the ugly little flecks that appeared before the spider mites built their web - so we'll see). 

We are having some success with some of our other plants that are KILLING it! Seriously! We'll keep you posted! 

Happy Gardening! 

Stay tuned every Monday and Thursday for more posts!

The Great Memorial Day Plant Project (Part 2 of 2)

WOW so after all that work and trust me... it was a LOT of work, I thought I'd show you the fruits of JR and my labor. Look how well the light purple and turquoise pots go together. The marigolds look gorgeous. We picked out a lot of the ones with buds on them so that we will have blooms for the next month or so. 

That's my lesson number one for this post. When buying plants from the hardware stores or flower shops or nurseries, always make sure you have an even amount of disbursement of blooms and buds so that you'll be able to experience the beautiful flowers for months to come. 

Bought a new chive plant since the ones I'm growing from seeds are taking a while, and it came with an awesome bonus of oregano!! How cool. Hopefully it's not cutting off the root supply. 

We also cut apart the jiffy cups with the most growth and planted them! The empty cups closest to us had no growth in them at all, so JR planted some Cosmo seeds... We should have a steady rotation of plants as everything is growing (and dying, because hello, have you met me?)

More of the replanted jiffy cups, you can see the cup shape in the larger pot... clearly, we were really concerned about hiding them. 

So the rest of the post is just a lot of pics of the garden in all it's new glory. 

SO MANY SEEDLINGS!!!! Let's see if I can grow them into adults!

Another pot of low-light plants. 

Here's our low/no light plants, hidden behind the chaise lounge. I love the big green/pink plants.
We used to have some when I was growing up in Beaumont. 

I AM SO EXCITED FOR THESE PEPPERS! I LOVE CUBANELLE PEPPERS! 

The upper pot is a 8 in pot from Home Depot and then the plate is a STEAL from Ikea at 69cents.
They were in the As Is section of the store, so we bought two to put under the part light plants to give them a bit more interest in contrasting colors. 

Look I have a Thriller, a Filler and Spiller. Just call me Betty Container-Gardener

JR had to clean up all the dirt I dumped off the patio...

He was a great sport about it though. 

This is definitely a great cross section of what's going on on the porch. You can see the pepper pot (Haha! Pepper Pots!), which are up on the stool we built. And underneath you can see the corner of our part-light plants. In the large purple pot you can see marigolds and verbena and a firework plant that I've had now for 3 years... there used to be more of them... but like I said earlier, we're rotating plants that die...

Lesson number two I learned - PLANT FOOD.

PLANTS LOVE PLANT FOOD.

This might seem a bit like common sense, but here's the lesson. Follow the instructions on the label, but also on top of regular watering according to instructions, buy a spray-water bottle and fill it with a mixture of the plant food and water. Spray it on your plants in the morning and watch how happy they look by mid afternoon. Seriously.

The Great Memorial Day Plant Project (Part 1 of 2)

So I had quite a grand plan for all of the plants after the craptastic roofers destroyed all of my poor little babies. So JR P.I. and I went to the Home Depot first thing after work on Friday and replaced all the plants and bought quite a few new ones. 

You see on Friday I had this brilliant idea to really tie all the random pots on the patio together. I was going to PAINT THEM ALL. As you can see in the above picture we had already bought a turquoise patio table from Target about 2 months ago when we first got on the plant kick (by we - I mean I). So I thought OMG, WE NEED TO PAINT ALL THE POTS THAT COLOR. 

Then I was like that's a lot of turquoise... so... what goes with turquoise? Light purple of course! 

We literally spent all weekend spray-painting pots and replanting. There is a very unsightly spray-painted-turquoise-box right at JR's front door, because I'm just not the best spray painter. seriously. I once spray painted with two of my sisters in college in an enclosed basement, because ventilation just didn't dawn on us. We spent the next 30 minutes eating everything in my apartment and laughing uncontrollably (I'll let you surmise why). 

Miracle Grow - It's everywhere you want to grow!

Totally worth it though, because that ugly green color was not cutting it. I also really thought that it would just make our patio the best patio on the "block."

P.I. picked a peck of peppery pepper plants

And remember how I was talking about starting to grow peppers? Yep... We picked up pepper plants too! A cubanelle (totes excited about that one), a serrano, an anaheim, and a sweet banana pepper!

THEN on top of all of our plant buying we drove down to the Woodbridge Ikea and picked up a few of these bad boys. 

Oh? You're not intimately acquainted with the Ikea catalogue like myself? Well it's one of these!

Still confused? It's a stool!!! We literally drove 30 miles away to pick up 3 cheap-o (yet sturdy) stools, because everything was so expensive around town. 

JR and I put together two of these little stools so that the pepper plants were up off the porch and getting more light, because pepper plants need a heck of a lot of light. So these just got them right up off the porch, and I highly recommend them. They were only $6.99 at the Ikea. 

The two plants in the giant purple pot are what remains of my "Lisa" plant and the
destroyed marigolds courtesy of the roofers

See the pepper pot stays up on the top and the part-sun/no-sun plants go underneath. Some people might think it hides the Gerbers but I really think that when you're sitting down on the chaise lounge that you really can see everything. 

I'll show you more updates in the next post!