Report from the home potting garden.
I harvested 3 pots of potatoes. Some were nicely sized, others were still really small babies. My plants had collapsed sideways, maybe because of the draught during my summer vacation. One pot still has green leaves, although the stem hangs sideways. I will leaves that longer. My potatoes are nice, without deep pits. I harvested about 5 x what I planted. I bought virus free planting potatoes that cost about 5 x the price of shop potatoes. So these are expensive potatoes. But next year I may use my own potatoes for planting.
I also harvested my garlics. They have been standing with 2 garlics in one medium sized pot. That is pretty small. The ones with the biggest buld look medium size, the smallest one are pretty small. They have only 4 cloves each, so if I want 8 garlics next year, I will have to use 2 whole garlics for that. During the summer I cut off the flower stilk early, so save energy for the plant. But that means I didn't get seeds that I could have used. Maybe I can get some seeds for free/cheap from other people. From seed it takes 2 years to grow garlic. During early summer, I put some normal garlic cloves in the pepper pots in the hope it would keep away whatever could harm my peppers. They have grow a thin, green stilk. Maybe I should just harvest the stilk at the end of season.
My brazilian starfish peppers have developed flowers and fresh leaves, very high up. I have decided to pull out all my tagetes flowers, as I suspect that such an enormous bunch of flowers takes away a lot of nutritions meant for the peppers and tomatoes. The Tagetes were pretty beautiful, but maybe planting them together with 1 flower per pepper in 1 pot is too much. I guess the season is very short for the starfish to finish making red peppers this summer, but I'll take it inside to finish. It needs to overwinter inside anyway. My cayenne peppers (from seed last year) just continue to produce new peppers all the time, even though the leaves are hanging.
My sweet bell peppers have lot of fruits per plant and also the size that you buy in the shop, just still green. I used seed from a pepper from the shop. My normal bell peppers also have fruits, but quite small. They had been standing in small pots for a long time. After I harvested the potatoes, I had some large pots left and repotted the pepper plants, so that they all have an 8 liter pot now. I also collected some additional free pots from the grocery store. These are the pot that they receive their flowers in and it is garbage for them.
I sowed new lettuce, the same 2 types that I had this summer, Attractie and Blushed butter oak. My earlier Attractie lettuce had become very high and got leathery leaves. It was about to flower. I also sowed radish and spinach. This should all produce before it starts freezing. This is all at home where I have Norwegian sone 3, which is very mild. At out cabin where I grow other stuff, it has occasionally been freezing at nigh every month this summer.
Our red currants are almost ripe. But these are only 6 young plants. We picked wild raspberries and blueberries to have some volume to make wine with the 3 different berries. In Swedish, the currants are called "wine berry" (vinbær).
My micro tomatoes are having lots of green tomatoes and a few turning orange. It is weird that not everything is ripe after a summer vacation, but maybe birds ate the ripe ones? Or there just wasn't enough sun. There definitely wasn't enough water, altough the neighbour watered once. My beef tomato developed some cases of slate rot (griffelråte), which is gets when it doesn't get enough calcium. I didn't give it additional calcium other than a bit of egg shell. Now I still have a bunch of green tomatoes left that don't have rot. So I hope they will ripen without getting it. If they don't turn red this season, I can lay them in fromt of the window until ripe.
My kaffir limes are doing well. They were standing indoors and have been without water for longer times. And they managed it well. They have grown bigger with more leaves, but are still pretty small plants. I repotted them from their tiny rescue pots to bigger pots. The leaves are a bit thicker than other plants, but not succulent. Maybe maybe therefore they tolerate draught.
I have 22 pots with either 1 or 3 basil plants, standing indoors in front of a window. They are producing so much basil, and they also tolerate draught for weeks. But the one right in front of the window was a bit damaged, leaves hanging. It recovered from it. I harvest them in a way that they split often and become a bit bushy.
Before the summer vacation I sowed 2 new micro tomato plants, called Tartufo. The idea was to let it finish the season indoors. I planted one in a pot of soil, the other in a homemade hydroponics system. I cut off a soda bottle, filled it with water and plant nutrition and found a small potting pot that fit just inside the bottle. Filled it with leca and planted the other tomato seedling in it. It was like this for a while, so I thought it had developed good roots. I even gave that hydroponics plant higher chances of survival without additional water. But it really died, maybe just dried out in the sun. The tomato in soil had grown to a healthy plant with thick stem.
