Last month I blogged about giving up on plants. This month, I’m encouraging you to give some of them a second chance.
Specifically, I’m talking about plants (vegetables or other) that you tried and failed with, and suspect that the failure may have been due to planting them in the wrong place, caring for them poorly, or maybe the happenstance of getting a bad seed or seedling. Sometimes our best-laid plans just don’t work out for, you know, reasons.
About five years ago I got some seed for Giant Aconcagua peppers and grew them in two subsequent years. Here’s what I said in this blog at the time, in an early October post:
I tried again with the Aconcagua sweet peppers, and had the same problems as before: a) the seedlings are slow-growing and weak; b) the peppers take forever to turn. I did get a couple of red ones, and the pale green ones are quite tasty and nice and big. I may try one more time, getting the seeds going at the end of January or the beginning of February, to see if I can produce seedlings rugged enough to go into the ground in May.
I didn’t try again, though, because I thought these peppers were fussy and not worth the effort. This year, for whatever reason, I decided to give it another go. Wow, what a difference. I didn’t bother to start them super-early, and I’m glad I didn’t, because the seedlings started in mid-March grew as fast as all the other peppers, though they still began life with slightly paler leaves and a floppier structure. But they took off, getting to three feet high far earlier than they’d done before, and this time producing heavily with ripening in August rather than September or October.
And these are BIG peppers.
They are not all 9 inches long, but most are close. They are more similar to a stretched-out bell pepper than a thin-walled Italian frying type, so great for all kinds of dishes.
I recommend these if you want a big pepper in your life. They absolutely must be supported, which you can do with the kind of medium-sized wire tomato cage that isn’t big enough for most tomatoes. And keep up with pruning or tying up branches! I lost a whole branch of green peppers in a thunderstorm because the weight got to be too much for the plant.
Why didn’t they work for me as well before? It could have been a set of weak seeds that didn’t have the best genetics for quick growth. Or I put the plants in spots that didn’t get enough sun or water, or had too much weed competition. Or a combination of those factors.
Seed catalogs use language that’s designed to make you jump at a particular plant variety, and we all know that, so given a poor performance, we say it was all hype, and we should never have believed the glowing description. But sometimes there’s truth behind the sales pitch, and we just need a second chance to find it.
Now, if I’d bought another seed packet and had the same poor results? Likely I’d have given up. Some plants just don’t work in a particular climate or setting, and enough trial and error lets us discover that. But one failure is not enough to declare the experiment over.
By Erica Smith, Montgomery County Master Gardener. Read more posts by Erica.