It's early February and winter is covering the northern hemisphere. As I started an evening job in August, my motivation to write went into negative territory, which resulted in no late-summer gardening post from me. As I'm about to start the first seedlings again, I shall wrap up the passing year real quick. Screw procrastination and et ready for some beautiful plants!

Amongst hobby gardeners there are a lot of myths that divide the community like the big splintering devided Praetoria and a very popular one revolves around the pepper.

To pluck or not to pluck

I'm talking about the first flower that appears on a pepper plant at the first node where the plant starts to branch. This goes so far, there is a dedicated name for this flower, that translates to something like 'kings-flower'.

Most plant-lovers are happy about the first flowers on their plants, so why would anybody remove them? The reason is pretty simple. If the flower get's pollenized, the plant has to put effort into developing the fruit, so by removing the first flower the plant rerouts all resources into growing instead.
Let's have a look at the peppers from my recent growlight experiment. We were able to see quite a difference with a much healthier growth in the supplemented plants that were growing in a more exposed location. Before they were transplanted into the garden in early May, they already had developed the first pepper berries. But then everything changed.
A few months later we can see how the former prodigies are struggeling to stay alive in the ongoing drought, while the ugly ducklings are packed with delicious peppers. The fruits prevented the plant from growing strong and only after they were fully developed the plant started to grow again. If it wasn't for the growlight experiment, I would have removed the flowers and the plants would have grown much better.

_{Top plants are older but much smaller because they flowered early and put all their energy into the peppers instead of growth.}

So, should we remove the first flowers on our pepper plants? The answer is not that simple, but here are my thoughts:

I pluck the first flowers if:

The plant is still small or not even planted outside or in a big pot.
The plant is in a difficult situation. Buggers, burnt leaves, as long as the plant is under stress, it's a bad idea to flower.
I need large quantities of peppers at once.
There's no reason to harvest single Pimientos de Padrón. Some peppers you need in large quantities at once and naturally the first harvestable fruits come in singles before going exponentially.

I don't pluck the first flowers if:

The plant is big and healthy.
It's a super spicy or fancy pepper that I don't need a lot of, or I just can't wait to try them.

Aquaponics

I've not been doing the aquaponics intentionally last year, but some of my baby fish were still in one of those big buckets and needed a little filtration, so I placed a pepper on top and let the water run trough the pot. Initially the water started to go dirty really quick, so I replaced most of it earlier this summer. Since then the system entered a steady state with the water beeing really clean and only the walls of the container beeing populated by algae of some sort. I'd love to know why the water stayed so clean with all the fishfood that was added into the system, but I still don't own measuring instruments to check the water quality. The pepper itself produced a nice fruit but didn't look too happy overall. My guess is the lack of some trace elements, which are used up by the fish.

The hydroponic system has been popluated with various diffent plants, the most prominent beeing a tomato that was grown from a cutting. For everyone wondering: Hydroponic tomatoes do taste less flavourfull compared to the ones in regular soil and they are quite watery, which is a bit of a shame considering how well they grow in hydroponics. As you can see there's quite a few red tomatoes.
Most of the space in the bucket was taken by storebought basil that I transplanted into a large pot of expanded clay. I've never seen basil from the store regrow as crazy as it did in the hydroponics. It was clearly missing some nutrients but the concept worked really well and with a proper pruning we had quite an abundance of basil throughout the summer.

^{Tomato from a cutting.}

^{Basil from a storebought pot, transplanted into hydroponic = Infinite supply.}

^{The rocoto chili was the only plant growing very slowly and not producing any fruit in the hydroponics. Lack of nutrients can be ruled out, given how well the potato was growing.}

^{Turmeric also works well in hydroponic.}

As always, cuttings work exceptionally well. Here I have a little African Basil that I ~~stole~~ found in a community pot along the street. I'm not the biggest fan of the flavor and texture, but it's a perennial type compared to the regular basil most of us know and therefore quite handy to have.

The biggest downside of this system is the need of a pump and the excessive water consumption that requires regular refilling, both making it a little too maintenance-heavy. For the next season this thing needs an automatic water supply!

^{Likely 'african blue' basil that is now sitting at the window, producing fresh basil all year long.}

^{First successfull rose cutting. Perfect gift for garden lovers.}

_{Seramis has proofen to be a very successfull rooting substrate so far.}

Bonsai

_{Little habanero bonsai. Still looks great even in winter...}

_{...until I forgot to water it before leaving for the weekend. Let's hope it will look like this again next summer!}

_{Small bay laurel bonsai. Unfortunately the plant was sitting under the roof and did not get any water. I do have plenty seedlings to start another one, though.}

^{Disinfecting loppers and scissors before every use to avoid the spreading of desease.}

We have a peach tree in our garden that unfortunately is not doing very well. Our climate is a little too rainy in winter, so it keeps getting sick and rarely produces good quality fruit. Some of the seeds have popped up in the garden and are now growing in pots so I can keep them under the roof during winter and avoid curly leave desease. Not sure if those trees will be any good, but why not make a little peach bonsai?

^{Sacrificial branches promote the thickening of the trunk...}

^{...but need to be removed before they grow too big.}

^{Looks like this peach tree is developing a nice nebari.}

New Seeds Rating

If you like the taste of chili but you're not interested in torturing your digestive tract, this one is for you! For the past year I've been using the 'NuMex Suave Orange', but this year I tried the 'Habanada' which turned out to be one hell of a mild chili. Not only is the plant a lot more productive, but it also tastes 10x better. 10/10

_{Nice color, crunchy and an incredible taste: the Habanada, my new favorite pepper.}

Other garden bloggers were recommending the 'Suyo Long' cucumber, so I gave it a try. The first one was incredibly sweet for some reason and more like a melon. Generally a good cucumber but I'm not a big fan of those spikey thingies. The cucumber I planned for seed harvesting broke off for some reason. 7/10

_{'Suyo Long' cucumber. Not a big fan of the spikes and sometimes a bit sweet for a cucumber. Not sure about this one.}

I've been trying to grow two different varieties of lettuce over the past years. One of them called 'Wonder of Voorburg' and the other one 'Wonder of Stuttgart'. Voorburg did quite well once, but Stuttgart failed every single time. I just saw a video on growlights where red/blue spectrum caused shooting while daycycle had no influence at all. Another reason might be temperature, but those were planted quite late in the year and still failed like this. Any ideas on how to fix this issue?

_{Lettuce has been a nightmare last year, as it kept shooting. No idea what to do about it.}

Happy gardening year 2023!!!

Now it's time to start preparing for a new garden year. I already ordererd the seeds that I want to t try this season, which I shall present in the next blogpost. But for now I leave you with this little excitement that I found while flipping the compost last fall. Do you guys grow mushrooms? I would love to inoculate my garden with a mycelium that is able to stay productive for multiple years without the hassle of traditional mushroom growing. One try was to put champignon spores next to the composts and I think it worked at least to some extend...

_{One of my secret dreams is a permaculture of edible shrooms in the garden. While flipping the compost I found this little white ball. There has been some mushrooms growing on the compost before, but this finally looks like an edible champignon! Unfortunately only one of them popped up.}

See you soon for another episode of my garden-journal, which usually does not take longer than half a year or so...Ooopsie.

To pluck or not to pluck, that is the question. Summer 22 Gardening Recap.