It would seem for overwintering chilies, pruning is the way to go.

Chili plants – plant which was pruned on right

In an earlier post, I described how I wanted to check whether pruning my chili plants was a good or bad idea. I pruned one and left the other unattended. I wasn’t able to find any conclusive advice online or otherwise for how to overwinter my chili plants (or indeed if overwintering was a good idea at all) but on looking at them now it seems quite clear that pruning is the correct course of action. This is for two main reasons:

1. The plant grows better. Shortly after pruning, the plant had many new vivacious green shoots and was producing fruit in no time. In the unpruned corner, the plant seemed to decay gradually as it tried to support it’s outstretched branches.  The growth on the pruned plant is also much lower and dense, give a much more efficient plant.

2. The plant looks better. If you have a live-in female life-partner like myself, you will realise how important aesthetics are. There were a lot of folks on the net saying that chili plants required minimum maintenance, just leave the leaves fall off and to they will right themselves of their own devices. I can assure you this leads to discolouration, a needlessly big plant, witheredness and a fairly severe case of plantugliness.

I have now pruned both plants, and am growing some others from seed this year. Either way, I would say that the chili plants have been a very rewarding exercise: easy to grow (indoors in Ireland), good space / yield ratio and long harvest season (almost ’til Christmas last year). So if anyone is thinking of making a foray into home food growing, I can comfortably recommend chilis as a gateway plant!

Close-up of previously pruned chili plant – the winner!

Close-up of newly-pruned loser chili plant

After returning from work in Toulouse for a week (it’s a hard life I know!), I was delighted to see the potatoes had grown to 15 cm in height and were ready for more compost.

As you can see, the charlotte potatoes (top) have shown much more growth than the pentland javelins (bottom). 

Just over a month ago, I posted about building  a trough and planting potatoes. As I mentioned then, keeping the potatoes topped up with compost encourages maximum underground growth and hence potato yield, similar to the way farmers mound around potato plants.

Here they are after topping them up a bit:

We put together a diagram which simplifies and sums up the whole process:

Efficiency

 I have been actively keeping an eye on costs and efficiency as these are very important to urban gardening. My early suspicions are that potatoes will prove best in both departments. The potatoes are cheap to buy, seem to do well in limited light, make good use of vertical space and will hopefully provide a good yield. I guess only time will tell!

What do you think is the most space and cost efficient crop for growing in tight urban spaces?

We are now into April so it’s time to stop worrying about cold nights and ground frost as we pass “Last Frost Day”.  Things are looking a lot greener on the balcony already.

To celebrate, I tranplanted out some of the lettuce and broccoli seedlings and direct-sowed the dwarf borlotti beans and the climbing beans. The main issue I faced was to figure out what the requirements of the plants were and how I could best accomodate them in the containers we had.

Researching root lengths and plant spacings on the Internet, you often get ideal estimates derived from planting in the ground. As I’m obviously restricted spacewise, I tried to order the plants in terms of their requirements and then accomodate as best I could in an attempt to find the balance between space per plant and number of plants.

Plant Roots Spacing Decision:

Beans: 30cm deep troughs, climbing beans with trellis

Kale: 15cm deep window box

Lettuce: 40cm deep container (plus some in a 15cm deep window box as an experiment)

Sprouting Broccoli: 40cm deep containers (one plant sharing with the lettuce, another sharing with carrots)

Due to the lack of general information on growing green sprouting broccoli in containers, I am beginning to instinctively feel that this may be a bad idea. We have purple sprouting broccoli seeds also, but I’m going to plant them in late summer after the potatoes come up. The deep potato trough should suit these plants better. It will be good to make use of the space over winter and hopefully we’ll be able to harvest them next Spring.

Perhaps the most significant benefit I have reaped from this episode is the ability to spell “broccoli”. Let’s hope I remember!