Indoor Gardening in Winter
I always have pots of herbs, citrus trees, and a few other greens under grow lights during the long winter months here in Maine. This year, since I grew this ‘Pizza my Heart’ pepper in a container by the front door, I decided to bring it indoors for the winter to experiment with growing perennial vegetables in this method.
A few weeks ago, I read about a guy who brings in a lot of his peppers and simply replants them after risk of frost is past the following summer. He claims that they start producing peppers earlier and produce more peppers when treated in this manner. Instead of trying to bring in all my pepper plants, I figured I’d start with one; the one that was already in a container.
This pepper has flourished in this container all summer, since it was still growing, flowering, and producing well, I figured it was a great candidate for this experiment. This variety (from Renee’s Garden Seeds) is well suited for containers, which should increase my chance of success. I’ll keep you up to date on the progress of this lovely plant. At the moment, I’m not 100% certain where it will reside this winter. I have three lighted growing areas in the house, each with different climates. I’m thinking this pepper will appreciate the upstairs area since it’s very warm and gets lots of morning light.
What are you experimenting with this winter?
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A Whirlwind Weekend
This past weekend, Mr Chiots and I were back in Ohio for a wedding. We happened to be in the Columbus and Dayton areas visiting with friends, eating good food, and learning a bit of history. While in Dayton, we visited the Carillon Historical Park and really enjoyed learning about the history of business in the Dayton area. I knew some of Dayton’s history, but not how much of a role they played in so many aspects of our current lives (air conditioning, cash registers, and bar code scanners were invented there).
We saw the Wright brother’s plane of course, being an Ohioan, we knew all about the Wright brothers. It was a great place to visit, I highly recommend the Carillon Historical Park if you are in the area. The tavern located on the grounds is also a great spot to grab lunch.
Naturally, we visited a few nostalgic spots that we loved, Graeter’s Ice Cream being one of them. I consumed a lot of their ice cream while I was at college in Cincinnati.
Do you have any trips planned? Any great historical sites/museums to recommend?
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Weather Station in the Garden
This Friday Favorite is for Mr Chiots. He’s been dreaming of getting a weather station for year, talking about it, researching, and planning it. Last month his dream came true when he finally got one.
There’s a little monitor indoors which shows us all the pertinent weather information. On Monday morning, it recorded a 50mph gust of wind during the big storm that rolled through. It tracks and stores all kind of information. So far, he’s enjoying it immensely. One of these days we will get around to putting a little widget in the sidebar of the blog that pulls in the information from this system.
Are you interested in the weather?
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Harvesting Seeds
This year I’ve been harvesting more seeds than I ever have. There are paper bags, bowls, plates, and various trays filled with seeds in my office and in the dining room. Most recently, I harvested ‘Scarlett Runner’ beans.
These were one of my mom’s all-time favorite garden plants. Each year she planted them just for the hummingbirds. When she died, my dad gave my sister and I each a packet to grow in our gardens.
They grew and bloomed beautifully, and the hummingbirds loved them all summer long. I’m saving seed to grow them again next year, a few packets will be available for sale here on the blog later this winter. Seed packets have been ordered, stamps are coming soon, and websites are being worked on.
Do you save seed? Any favorite family varieties you’ve been saving for years?
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Back Up and Running
We had a wicked storm move through Maine Sunday night and into Monday. The winds came it at around 60mph, our bed was vibrating while we were trying to sleep, which we didn’t get much of as the winds raged outside. It was quite a wind storm, most of our part of Maine is still in tatters: roads closed, power lines down, electricity off. Our power went out early Monday morning and luckily, it came back on last night. Much of Maine is still without.
We lost one big tree in the front yard, it was dead anyways and needed to come down. Our shingles also took a beating, I found them laying all over the yard.
When I went out to the farm to get milk yesterday, there were still three trees down across the power lines on the short trip. They are saying it’s going to take a while for everything to get cleaned up and for power to be restored. We are lucky to live on a main road and main electric thoroughfare. It seems our power is restored fairly quickly. Being without power for two days isn’t too bad, especially when you have a generator to keep the freezer and the fridge going. For us, it seems that fall/winter are the times when we get bad storms.
What’s your season for bad weather?
