My window garden, post 9 - growth, flowers, death to aphids

Its been more than a month since I updated everyone on my window garden, and I thought you might want to see how things are progressing. First, there's the mint. Now, the mint had some serious problems; it had a seemingly incurable aphid infestation, and it was losing lots of leaves and generally not doing very well, so back in April I decided to move it outside, to prevent the aphids from attacking my other plants. Turns out that they were California aphids (the plant came from sunny CA), and were totally unprepared for Wisconsin late frosts.

It's ALIVE! IT'S ALIVE!!! (Yeah, I know this quote is overused, but, I'm so happy that it's alive!)

In not so happy news, the garlic bit the dust. I'm pretty sure the potting soil I got for the first batch of plantings just held too much water for it. I'll try again for next year.

As for everything else, it seems to all be doing well.

Remember, those are more than 4 foot windows... I'm 5'7" and I can stand on the level of the plants and the top of my head *just* touches the ceiling.

The things with the giant leaves are eggplant. I'm hoping they'll help with the summer cooling bill... they're certainly trapping the light well enough! The plant hitting the ceiling is a tomatillo.

In this shot there's tomatillo, poblano, lavender, rosemary, and I've moved the cantaloupe over to this window as well. Everything (except the cantaloupe) is starting to get flowers...


These are flowers on one of the poblanos. Most sites say that you can't grow poblanos in containers. I'm glad I tried!

The rocoto pepper, which we have now dubbed Mumm-ra the Ever-living, continues to produce flowers and fruit. I processed some of its peppers into powder the other day; its very difficult because they are so crazy hot that even just grinding them will make your eyes and nostrils burn and cause lots of sneezing and discomfort. Still, its a great way to add heat and flavor to a dish.

Then there's the okra, which I've read and seen have beautiful, cream colored flowers. My okra decided to sort of forgo the whole flower thing. The flower never opened, it was there, then it sort of just dried up, and now I've got this little okra pod. Looks like some of the other flowers are doing the same. I'd say it was a rip, but I'm getting food out of the deal, so I'll live without beautiful flowers.

Most of the peas are doing very well; one pot isn't. I don't know exactly what happened, but one of the pots of peas just died. Still, there's flowers on most of the plants, so there should be peas soon enough. Of course, once they produce they die not too long after, so I'll be bidding farewell to these guys soon.

In the living room window, the marconi peppers, which I started after the poblanos, are growing nicely. There's signs that flowers will show up soon. I hope!

And the beans keep producing. Couldn't be happier with how many beans we've gotten... they've been producing for almost 2 months now. So flavorful and wonderful, even just as a snack (we've only ever gotten a handful of beans at a time, so they're pretty much been eaten as raw snacks).

Then there's the newest addition - an aloe plant given to me by Robbin! Its bloody huge and I'll probably have to break it into separate plants soon. One small problem is that its cat accessible; fortunately they don't seem to really enjoy chewing on it. Still, I'm thinking of getting the bitter spray and seeing if that deters them.