Cucumber Plants

Cuke #2


Cuke #2 starts to die. Don't know why.










Cuke #1 - A Slightly Happier Story


Cuke #1


Cuke #1, pre-transplant. Should it be flowering this soon?? It's still so small.


Cuke #1. June 22. I'm curious about that spiky thing. Is that what's going to turn into a cucumber?

Cuke #1, late July--leaves start turning brown and drying out. No idea what is wrong with plant. Plant dies.

I wonder if I should have pinched off the flowers to help the plant get bigger before it started trying to produce cukes. Or maybe this was a hopeless case no matter what.

Dill Plants

Dill #2-barely growing. Seeds from store.


Dill #2, another view


Dill #1-started off okay, then started turning brown and growth slowed. Grown with saved seeds from G.


After taking one of the above dill plants to my friend's house, it's started looking a lot better. It still seems to be growing pretty slowly though. I thought dill was weed-like and that weeds were supposed to grow quickly.

8/2/06: Currently have one dill plant at my friend's house. It still doesn't look very good--it's turned brown and isn't really growing. I thought dill was supposed to be an easy-to-grow weed, but I guess it doesn't have the right growing conditions.

10/06: Dill plants are not growing. I give up. Most likely culprits: not enough sun; bad seeds.

Thai Hot Chile Pepper Plants

Two Thai hot chile pepper seedlings. Not sure why one has purplish leaves. It looks kind of cool but I think it might be a bad thing.


8/2/06: A while ago I transplanted one plant to the alien tomato pot and the other plant to another cherry tomato pot. The pepper plant in the alien pot has grown slightly (and I do mean slightly)--I wonder if it likes the shade provided by the tomato plant. However, overall, it still doesn't seem interested in growing. The pepper plant in the other cherry tomato pot hasn't grown at all. It's been quite hot lately, but maybe it overall hasn't been hot enough for this plant to grow.

End of Story: These plants never got larger than what you see here. No thai chile peppers for me. It probably doesn't get hot enough where I live or sunny enough on my balcony for them to thrive.

Lincoln Pea Plants

First, the good news. I got 9 peas.

Now, the rest of the story.



















Sadly, my Lincoln peas have been visited by powdery mildew.
As far as plant problems go, I originally thought that this is probably not one of the worst problems (an infestation seemed worse) but this disease ended up killing all of my plants. It's very easily spread by contact and by wind.

This is a before shot. On May 16 I picked or cut off all of the infected leaves in the hopes of preventing the problem from spreading. I also moved my lincoln peas away from my sugar snap peas. I found only a couple of infected leaves on the sugar snaps and I got rid of those as well.



Powedery mildew arrives in the form of powderly white spots on the leaves. The leaves slowly (over about two weeks) turn yellow and die. Powdery mildew feels sticky and when you rub the white spots, they reveal yellow spots underneath.



Both my Lincoln peas and my sugar snap peas have had problems all along, but despite the powdery mildew they've continued to grow and are now putting out flowers and producing peas. So I am keeping my hopes up.



One thing about peas is that they don't like too much water. Also, the containers they are in tend to stay wet at the bottom even when the soil on top is bone dry. As a result, I'm never sure whether I'm underwatering or overwatering my peas.

May 17-I inspect my peas after the removal of the powdery mildew leaves. More leaves now have powdery mildew, and on top of that, my peas have been visited by pests! Aphids (tiny bright green bugs that blend in quite well with the pea leaves), whiteflies (I think) and something that looks like gnats. What's wierd is that none of them are moving. They are only on the lower leaves of one plant, but when I look more closely, I can see that there are aphids in the soil. Eeeew. I'm going to have to get over my insect squeamishness. Yesterday I also noticed one of two of the gnat-like insects in the dirt of my sugar snap peas. So I went to OSH and got these sticky aphid, whitefly, etc traps. I attached one to the center post of my sugar snap peas and I tied one to the center post of my lincoln peas. I hope they work. When I was at the store, looking at all the different insecticides and fungicides was overwhelming. I'm gardening organically, and I was under the impression that I could use insecticidal soaps, but when I look at the bottles they all look like poison to me. Poison can be organic, sure, but I don't think we should be putting it on our food. Also, I was hoping to be able to eat the pea leaves too, but with the mildew problems that now seems at worst, unlikely, and at best, unappetizing.

Giving My Container Garden More Sunlight

On May 7, I took all the small containers and put them on TV trays to allow them to get more sunlight. The balcony bars create areas of shade on the balcony floor that I thought might have a negative effect on plant growth. Raising the plants hasn't helped so far. Of course, it's also been totally gray and overcast for all or almost all of the last ten days, with the exception of a mere two days.

Conclusion: In the end, I don't think this strategy helped, but I think it failed because of a very overcast spring more than anything else. Except for one thing: the tables underneath the plants became extremely moldy because of my genius idea to put towels between the plants and the mold. That can't have been good for my plants. I wonder if this could have been the cause of the infections that ultimately destroyed my tomato plants.