Provide your chili plants a kick start before spring time arrives!
So, this year I have decided to take better care of my plants, specially my chili plants! I wanted these plants to have a strong start before spring time arrives so I could get better chillies.
It has been a cold and windy month of February with temperatures ranking low temperatures here in Los Angeles County in California.
After some thinking I know I needed to provide some extra protection to my chili plants, I had trimmed them in the late fall so my plant consists of the main stem and cut branches. This is the method of winterize plants, this will work with other plants as good as it works for chilly plants.
Probably the best thing to your plants in winter time is to protect them by providing them ideal growing conditions, I’ve trimmed my chili plants enough for me to place recycled plastic bottles on them as a temporarily greenhouse, this way the temperature inside these containers is higher than the temperatures outside of it.
I have recorded the temperatures inside these containers vs the temperatures outside, have in mind that temperatures were taken when the sun was out, clouds, humidity or other weather conditions might affect the results.
As you can see on this temperatures graphic I made, the green house provided extra heat to my chilli plants. Here are my results I took at a day we reached 70 ºF max.:
Checking on temperatures inside a greenhouse is crutial in order to keep track how much heat plants are receiving, you also don’t want to toast your plants in the middle of the summer blast!
My chili plants is already showing signs of flowering, it is already growing buds just after 3 weeks of them being in their individual bottle greenhouses.
What I really liked from this method is that I am not expending a cent by using recyclables bottles and anybody can do it. When these plants reach a larger size then I’ll put them inside a greenhouse for spring time.
What I really liked from this method is that I am not expending a cent by using recyclables bottles and anybody can do it. When these plants reach a larger size then I’ll put them inside a greenhouse for spring time.
I am confident that the help from this improvised greenhouse will give a kick start for my plants this year. I invite you to go ahead and save your plastic bottles and provide a little help for your plants this season.
What plants eat
Let’s start by figuring out what a plant eats in the first place. Most people think back to high school botany and something about photosynthesis. This is really a very important process in which plants synthesize organic matter from carbon dioxide. A photon flies into the chloroplast and provides enough energy to make a molecule of glucose from carbon dioxide and water. In parallel, we get oxygen as a waste product. Everyone is fine, except the anaerobes who died out from oxygen pollution during the oxygen disaster.
But here most people begin to suspect that photosynthesis alone is not enough to fully grow a plant. After all, it needs soil, all sorts of ash, cattle poo and other farming joys. This is only partially true. If we look at the composition of typical soil, it is a very complex system of inorganic particles, heaps of various organic matter and microbiome. That is, we have a lot of pebbles, grains of sand, some lumps of clay and a worm eating a piece of last year’s leaf.
Macronutrients
You need a lot of them. Just a lot more than the other components.
- Nitrogen in the form of nitrate NO3- or ammonium NH4+.
- Phosphorous in the form of phosphate
- Potassium also in the form of K+ ion.
- Calcium
- Magnesium
- Sulfur in the form of sulfate. In fact, it needs quite a lot of it for some plants, often it should be more than the same phosphorus, but traditionally no one counts it.
Micronutrients
- Iron in the form of the Fe2+ ion.
- Manganese
- Boron
- Zinc
- Copper
- Molybdenum
Plants also need very small amounts of chlorine, a little sodium and other elements, the content of which in any roadside dust with a reserve covers its needs.
The problem is that we cannot predict what kind of grass a particular cow ate before giving out a wheelbarrow of excrement. In addition to the unpredictable composition of this unappetizing mixture, it also has an incomprehensible level of acidity, which will unpredictably overlap with the unknown level of acidity of the soil. As a result, traditional farming within the confines of a single dacha or a window sill with flowers turns into a game of “Guess what the obscure soil is and what will happen to it after the next batch of life-giving compost.” That’s why, even without hydroponics, it is much more correct to apply fertilizer in the form of ready-made salts and complexes without this idiocy with steaming nettles on someone else’s manure.