How to grow chillies

Here's another entry for the Community Garden "instant garden" and container gardening enthusiasts ~ even for the house bound and indoor gardener. Don't cop an attitude about the advice coming from a UK not an NM grower. Life on the Balcony, a great container gardening site, is about urban gardening but the tips and how to instructions will work here too,

They're a great crop for a busy life. Just follow a few simple rules and you could be harvesting chillies until Christmas.

Joanna Plumb is an expert chilli grower and owner of Edible Ornamentals, growing thousands of chillies every year for everyone from supermarkets to Fortnum & Mason. She's convinced that these hot fruits are a great crop for the style of growing most of us can manage in modern life: chillies are perfectly content in a pot on a sunny windowsill or patio, with fruits that can be picked over a long period and easily stored for the following year.

It's too late to grow chillies from seed this year, but now's the perfect time to buy a couple of plants: if you pick the right variety, you should be harvesting until Christmas. The best ones for growing on windowsills and patios are compact and bushy

How to grow chillies | Life and style | The Guardian

Sat Jun11: garden workday, more potting and planting

Last Saturday the #Mountainair Community Garden had fun plotting and planting ~ and more to come this Saturday - TOMORROW - 8:30 am at the art center lot.


Garden Manager Joan Embree writes,
In our new (probably temporary) location, we are making an "instant" garden using old wash tubs, straw bales, kitty-litter buckets, discarded 3-gallon-or-better nursery pots and other random containers. We even have some old tires we're going to plant flowers in.  We're asking if you can contribute:

• your help
• empty containers
• spoiled feed bales
• top soil
• manure
• unused bags of compost
• landscape fabric
• plant starts 

Last Saturday's garden workers, pictures from Carla Cope

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Joan writes more about tomorrow's workday, 

A gardening related project

I could sit around twiddling my thumbs waiting for a community garden update from the garden manager or details from Kay on the Sonic Follies, a fundraising concert at Off Center Arts, but I won't... not any more than I would hold my breath waiting. Better to find something else to blog about. Serendipity strikes...

Since using Addie's to raise the tomato seedlings, there's been talk of the garden having its own small greenhouse. Blogging information about an Extension workshop on building hoop greenhouses only fed the fancy. Mountainair High School has an geodesic dome greenhouse no longer in use that they would let the Community Garden use if set up there (one of our options). We've wondered if they might let us have just the greenhouse. In any case "greenhouse" is in the air and on our minds.

Not just ours either: recently Straw Mountain Studio (Jude that is, formerly of Mountainair, now Meadsville PA) posted this:

Here is a photo journey of one of several large projects I have been working on. After almost taking out the corner of the garage, Fed Ex did deliver three very large and heavy boxes. We spent a long time opening all of the boxes and laying out the parts of this mystery project!

Of course, by now you know, we are putting together a greenhouse!

Right now we have 4 tomato plants (of three different kinds), a yellow squash, two sweet pepper plants, two different basil plants, a pot planted with Kentucky beans, a lot of onions, some spinach, and two pots of heat-loving flowers to attract those necessary pollinator insects!

from Notes From Straw Mountain Studio.... doesn't this make you want to go out and get a greenhouse of your own while following Jude's greenhouse journey?

Sat June4: Community Garden Workday

~ Community Garden Manager, Joan Embree, housemaven@comcast.net, writes, 

Community Garden Members and Friends,
   

We will bring shovels, large containers, potting mix, random hay bales and energy Saturday at 3 p.m.to the lot next to the Art Center and work to set up an "instant garden."  We need some creative thinking about a watering system for this effort.
   
Our garden "bank" from tomato sales is at $105.  We could use at least part of this for soil amendments for our pots and for our decorative row of sunflowers and pinto beans.  (I have been watering up the front of the lot so we can perhaps get our shovels in the ground to plant these things.)

When we stopped selling plants, we still had many left.  I have kept them alive (mostly), recently transferring them to church congregations that indicated interest.  St. Alice's took a couple of trays to hand out to parishioners.  Church of the Nazarene took some, and the Asamblea de Dios took a few.  The remainder I will deliver to the Senior Center before the week is out.  We'll keep a few for our containers and bales.
   
Thanks to rhose who did the work of starting and raising the seedlings -- Rebecca, Kay, Addie, Deb, and Tomas, and whoever else was involved.  If the Mountainair Farm & Garden Market buys a covering license for seedlings, we can do this again next year.  We can also start other kinds of plants to sell throughout the market season.  If the Market decides not to do this, we can designate one person to be the plant-sales guru and get a license for that person.
   
The Art Center Board [sic?] was to vote this week on whether to invite us to start up this effort in the vacant lot they lease along with their building.  The Board has multiple plans for this large lot, so we will keep the garden "moveable" while they sort out how it will be used.  I went back to the Town Office and explained to the powers that we had changed our minds about the city lot due to its compaction and the lateness of the scheduled vote on whether we could start.  We will not, therefore, be on the agenda for approval at next week's council meeting.

     Hope to see many of you and your friends on Saturday.
     Don't forget your containers!
                                                                                                                       Joan Embree

Community Garden Notes

~ update on and wish list for the community garden and more. An iCreate post is past due, but I'm hoping waiting more of a report on the recent fundraising concert at Off-Center Arts, so I can give the performers their due after the fact.

In the meantime, however, there are community garden updates and resources to share: a neat video (embedded below) on "How To Recycle Household Items In The Garden"; next Torrance County Extension workshop; KGI (Kitchen Garden International) and Peak Moment TV ("locally reliant living for challenging times") newsletters; links to a few YouTube gardening and horticulture video channels. There are so many of them, that with a large screen monitor, we could run a regular gardening and permaculture film night - bring your own popcorn.

More videos on NMSU Extension's YouTube ACES channel and iTunes U, as well as The Dirt Doctor's channel


Community Garden Wish List

• growing containers. 
• good top soil
• compost or manure
• help setting up new garden
• source for bales of straw or oat hay for straw bale gardening

straw bale garden rows image from MRCOG

 Backyard Growers and Community Gardens page 

Bring donations and help to Mountainair Arts, East Broadway & South Ross on next garden workday ~ the last one was Saturday May 13 at 3pm, Time is subject to change with summer temperatures. Contact: Joan Embree, housemaven@comcast.net, 847-2324

Newsletters

• Peak Moment, May 2011
• Kitchen Garden May 2011

The next Claunch-Pinto SWCD sponsored Extension Workshop ~ eagerly anticipated ~ will be June 25,  on water harvesting, time and location TBA. More details when available, perhaps accompanied by links to relevant handouts and even a video or so on rain barrels and harvesting rain water.