I have an update on the Tower Garden! It has been several months of growing now. We have had many salads, and countless meals with fresh herbs. The tower has been very easy to take care of. All I have done is check the water level and ph once per week. The rest has been planting seeds and enjoying fresh produce in a cold and dark Minnesota winter.
In early winter, I had ordered several peppers form Seed Savers. Seed Savors is a seed bank in Northern Iowa. They have an incredible farm with varieties of plants you have to see to believe.
I bought a cayenne pepper, a jalapeño plant and a heritage pepper of some sort (leave a comment below if you know – I lost the seed pack). You can see the cayenne pepper did very well in the Tower Garden and I can tell you first hand the peppers are HOT. I have four cayenne pepper plants and I will be drying and grinding them into cayenne pepper because there is no way I can eat them all.
The other pepper is doing very well too. It is an old world pepper and the plant grew slowly and never got very big. But it was beautiful to grow. The leaves had a very pretty dark green and the purple flowers and peppers are gorgeous. They are similar to a jalapeño, but have more flavor and less spice. Plus, it is a heritage plant so you can replant the seeds and get the same plant.
Look how gorgeous this flower is!!!
Finally, the jalapeños are starting to bud and produce peppers as well.
The only kind of annoying part of growing flowering plants indoors is that you need to hand pollinate them. But this is easily done with a q-tip. Just rough it up a bit to make the cotton a little softer and then gently touch and agitate the flower spreading the pollen around. I had never done this before and it worked great for me. I bet 80% of the cayenne pepper buds produced, and over 50% of the other peppers did. I don’t know if this is good or not, but the plants produced tons of flowers. I counted 47 new flowers on my cayenne plants one day.
To summarize, the Tower Garden has been a great addition to our basement. It has produced a lot of fresh produce we use on almost a nightly basis. I can’t wait to get the tower outdoors this spring.
