Peppers ~ Southern Summer Favorites to Plant This Week

The following tips are courtesy of Home Depot's Garden Club.  Click on the source link at the end of the post to join.

Peppers are easy to grow in the garden and containers and thrive in long, hot summers with a weekly watering of 1-2”.

Huge, sweet red bells, mildly hot Anaheims, petite purple sweets, and wildly hot yellow habaneros – take your choice or plant them all in the garden or containers.

Peppers love hot weather, so pepper transplants, seeds and seedlings should be set out only after soil temperatures are above 65 degrees. Once the plants have flowered, give them a dose of Epsom salts (magnesium) to produce bigger peppers and more of them.

A note about hot peppers. Be mean to them, especially as they approach maturity. Quit watering as much, and don’t worry if leaves go limp in the afternoon sun. Lack of moisture concentrates the capsicum in the pepper, raising the heat level.

1. To speed germination, place the seeds between a few damp paper towels and put in a zippered plastic bag in a warm place. The top of the refrigerator works fine.
2. Add a 1” layer of compost over the planting bed, or scratch an organic vegetable fertilizer into containers before planting. 
3. As soon as the pepper seeds sprout, carefully plant them in individual containers or directly into the ground spaced 12-18” apart.
4. Water deeply, 1-2” every 5-7 days, unless plants are in containers, which require more frequent watering.
5. When flowers appear, scratch a tablespoon of Epsom salts around the base of each pepper plant. Or spray the tops and bottoms of leaves with 1 tablespoon of Epsom salts mixed with 1 quart of warm water.
6. Mulch flowering plants with 2” of organic mulch.
7. Cage or stake plants as they grow taller and begin producing peppers.

Another excellent post about growing peppers

 from Mother Earth Living . . . click here.

Source of featured article

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DIY Concrete Containers

Making concrete planters has to be one of the most satisfying and useful crafts ever.  
I love the selection of molds in this video!
Once you make a couple, your imagination will go wild with all kinds of stuff to use to for molds to make not only containers, but pavers and decorative border pavers for your plant beds and excellent for raised beds!  After a couple of years, they become awesome memories of previous seasons.
With so much to do and so little time to devote to the garden, I sincerely hope that I can get my hand in the concrete to make some memories for my garden.
This video is an excellent guide from HGTV . . . check it out!

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It's finally here!

Up until last week, the arrival of Spring was questionable with night time temps dipping into the 40's.  I don't remember a winter lasting so long in my part of the world!

The Captain has been busy taking down the huge tree that fell on our storage shed.  What a mess it is!  Vines have grown all through the branches and over the roof.  I can't bear to go out there, it breaks my heart.  We already had a huge task at hand before the tree catastrophe.

I've finally accepted the fact that I am disabled and can't garden the way I used to.  There was a time not too long ago when I could get as much done out there as any man and sometimes more.  

The path that I set out all those years ago is still there and in great shape, although it is now covered with ground cover and weeds.  The guys told me I could probably pull off doing the path, but it would not last more than a year or so.  Haha . . . I made each paver out of concrete, using meat and fruit trays from the grocery story as a form.  Each was painted with enamel acrylic.  I wanted it to look wild.  Even the paint endured years of wear and weather.

The way it was . . . a photo from 1999.

The plan is for The Captain to clear the paths and we will begin to build raised beds here and there to make it easy for me.  I can still walk, but can't be on my legs very long, so I need to sit a lot.  

It is not fun starting over again with the hindrance of a disability and the wrath of nature.  We still don't have running water . . . another hindrance!  Long story told in some of my other blogs . . . difficult to garden without water.  So, this will mainly be the year of building what we will call the infrastructure of raised beds built around the paths and start on a pond or two.

Having a disability should not stop me completely . . . and I hope to show others with disabilities that they too, can have a garden.

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Make a Backyard Pond from a Tire!

This has got to be the most ingenious trash-to-treasure project for the garden I have seen yet!

The photos were found on Pinterest, unfortunately, they were linked to just a photo since the original blog it was posted to has been removed.  So . . . no instructions or tutorial . . . just awesome inspiration.

When we get around to making this pond, we will take lots of photos and make a tutorial for this project.

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Paper Pulp Seed Starters

It is that time of year when we can't wait to plant our seeds and get a head start on Spring.  

I've been looking for inexpensive ways to start seeds and especially love it is something that can be recycled.

Would you believe these seed starters were made out of junk mail that you would normally toss in the garbage?  How about using newspaper instead of throwing them away? Ingenious idea!

Chris at 365 Days of DIY came up with this awesome idea.  Click here for the tutorial with photos.

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