Peppers & Eggplants
May 6th, 2010 · 1 Comment · Posted in garden
You're on your own now, eggplant
This week has been hot here in the District of Columbia, plenty hot enough to move the eggplant and pepper seedlings I started in flats out into their new beds in the garden.
This is more peppers and eggplants than we’ve ever planted before. But there’s still plenty of room in these beds. Should I start some more? Peppers last until October around here. I don’t see anything wrong with succession plantings of peppers and eggplants. I’ve just never tried it before.
Maybe some of our readers have experience with that. Please jump in any time.
I hadn’t planned to do succession planting this year but that’s how it’s ended up.
Three years ago (my first summer gardening in Silver Spring) I picked up an Oriental Express eggplant from the Waterpenny Farm stand at the Takoma Farmer’s Market. That thing produced so well, through August and September, that I saved its seeds and used them to grow 4-5 plants last year. Again – great yield. This year, I’ve branched out into four kinds of eggplants – some started in March, some just a few weeks ago – and plan to get at least 6-8 plants out there – maybe more. Yum!
Peppers – I swore I was not going to plant sweet peppers because they always seem to have such low yields, but of course that resolution went by the wayside as soon as the catalogs arrived, and I now have four yum yum golds in the garden with four more seedlings just coming up inside (Ancho and Dolcetto – both from Park Seeds). All three are purported to have higher yields than the usual bells – we’ll see. I’ve also planted four hot pepper plants (some combination of jalapeño, Anaheim and tepin – don’t know which is which because the identifying dye rubbed off all the seeds in the mixed packet). I had great hot pepper yields last year and look forward to the same this summer, I hope!