Careful about planting to early without artificial light, the seedings grow too tall and leggy
. As soon as they germinate and I can turn on the lights, I'll see how many we may have and start touting their advantages to the neighbors!
I have already planted my seeds except for the herbs which I am doing as we speak. This year I am planting 14 different tomatoes and 7 different peppers. The peppers I planted are two hot varieties and five sweet. I'm not much of a hot pepper person but I do eat quite a few hot pickled peppers. The two hot varieties are Tobasco and Hot Red Cherry. For some reason I fail to get a good crop with the bells so instead I plant the elongated varieties. This year I planted Giant Marconi, Cubanelle, Aconcaqua, Corno Di Toro and Sweet Banana. For the hot peppers last year I planted Serranos which did really well, Hungarian Yellow Wax which did OK, Cayenne which did super good and Hot Portugal which also did OK but not spectular. I don't plant Jalapenos either. They are too cheap at the store. Hot peppers here do better than the sweets. They produce longer and can take the heat a lot better then the sweets do. I have grown in the past a lot of varieties of hot peppers and very few did poorly. If I had to pick one hot pepper for eating and pickling it think I would go with the Serrano and for drying CayenneI started my tomato plants yesterday. I have a full tray of 9-cell blocks which equals 72 plants if they all germinate. I may have overdone it a bit
The herbs will get started next week, and I just got a bag of Yukon Gold seed potatoes at the feed store. I've never tried Yukons, but our garden is a bit of an experiment each year anyway. I'll get 10 lbs. of Red LaSoda potatoes from the feed store later.
Chuck, what variety of peppers do you plant? We stick to California Wonder sweet bells, with a couple of colored bells thrown in. Folks at the food pantry keep asking for hot peppers, but I'm not familiar with anything except jalapenos, and those I get at the grocery.
I our climate they are easy to grow. They aren't hot like a habanero but for most of us plenty hot enough. There is also a tiny hot pepper that you don't grow in the garden, you plant them as perennials on the south side of your house. There are two varieties and they are slightly different. One is called the chilli petin and the other is called the chilli pequin. The petin is round and about 1/8' in diameter while the pequin is football shaped and about 1/4" inches long. They are tiny but potent and make excellent pickled and fresh eating peppers. They also dry very well but it takes a jillion of them. If you protect them from freezing, and they are fairly cold hardy, they will live for years and become very attractive bushes or small trees. You can often find them growing wild along fence rows but most nurserys will also have them.
If you can, harvest some of the red ripe pequins for seed. The deer ate most of mine and the armadillos dug up the rest.
When it comes to gardening, we all are. There's more to learn than any individual has time to learn. If we are lucky, we are given maybe 80 or even 90 years on this planet. Sounds like a lot. Knock of maybe 20 of those years for our childhood and youth, because often kids aren't that interested in gardening. Knock off maybe 10 of those years at the end, because often the very old can't manage to keep it going, and knock off maybe 10 more years for various normal life things taking priority. That means if we're lucky, we get maybe 40 years for gardening. Still sounds like a lot, until you consider that we work to nature's calendar, which means those 40 years are really more like 40 attempts to get it right
Or maybe another way to look at it is that non of us are beginners. If there is a beginning, there must surely also be an end. The garden is never done. The garden doesn't stop growing if we stop tending it. We're just temporary keepers, just passing through, pausing to do our bit along the way.
