While preparing to wrap plastic around the tomato cages I was using to hold my sweet peppers I realized the “Wall O Water” tube surrounds that I had taken off after using them to protect the peppers until the weather had warmed up in June, were designed to fit over tomato cages.
Eureka!
They sit perfectly, with a bit of extra that I wrapped around and held together with clothes pegs.
When I was working for an electrician we used to spend a fair amount of time cursing the overly clever engineers, but moments like these are why we put up with them. Next year I will leave the Wall O’ Waters on the peppers all summer, still filled with water while surrounding the tomato cages that hold up the peppers. In late spring, when the tomatoes no longer need protection, I will enlist a passing husband to help lift them over the tomato cages onto the peppers.
Sweet peppers do outgrow tomato cages and I expect they’ll grow even taller with the extra pampering, so perhaps it’s time to invest in taller cages and just wrap plastic around them from the beginning, like individual greenhouses. Since peppers are mostly self-pollinating annuals, it will be easy to pick the best ones for seed saving; the only difficulty I see will be weeding and picking the harvest, because the plastic will have to be removed and replaced afterwards. Perhaps some clever engineer will come up with a zipper or Velcro straps.
Would that make gardening too easy? It would certainly make more time for weeding.
Older gardeners than myself (hard to believe there are any!) have said that to encourage more fruit to grow, one should pick the first few peppers green before allowing the rest to ripen. I followed their advice and have been harvesting a few from the greenhouse for the past few weeks. With this present warm weather, I’m hoping the ones grown outside will give us a few more. Given the way the tomatoes are over producing I should probably be dreading it. Where am I going to find time to process and can all this stuff?
I am a firm believer in organically grown heirloom varieties, but I have to admit I would find a self-canning tomato very, very tempting, especially if it came in an open mouth mason jar.
Please contact mary_lowther@yahoo.ca with questions and suggestions since I need all the help I can get.
