The green house is up and running although most of the tomatoe plants are sitting on inverted pails to lift them from the floor--shelves are our next purchase. Despite the recent cold spell, and with the help of the smallest and cheapest ceramic heater we could find, all the plants seem to be surviving, (though we put the tropicals in the house since most of them want not just above 40 but more like 70).
We discovered that what we thought might be spinach might instead be tobasco peppers. Does anyone know what a spinach seed pod looks like? The leaves are huge and spinach-like if more bland in flavor than we expected (we didn't eat many, thinking they were peppers at first but later changing our mind, but they made a decent addition to fresh salad greens) and very unlike the smallish, struggling leaves on the half-dead tobasco pepper plant we got last year). We only kept the plants because right before we had to bring them in or let them die they got flowers and we figured some spinach seeds would be useful for next year and to try in the green house over the winter. Then one of them got a tiny little seed pod and lo-and-behold, it now looks just like the little (1 inch long, upright, red) tobasco peppers whose seeds we had planted. We used a cotton swab to polinate (since one pepper this late in the season wasn't a good sign for fruit/seed production) and are waiting to see what happens. Guesses anyone?
No comments:
Post a Comment