Mar. 1 Column: Pepper-Growing Tips

For my second garden column of the season, I interviewed none other than my husband, Bill. The topic is his pepper-growing tips and I’ll explain why in a moment. Here is a link to my column in today’s edition of The Spokesman-Review: Husband shares secrets behind his beautiful peppers.

A couple of months ago, I told my Facebook followers how I was looking ahead to this year’s writing season and asked if they had any suggestions for topics they’d like to learn more about. Boy did I great a lot of great responses!

However, one of them made me laugh. It said, “How does your husband grow those beautiful peppers?!!” I think I might also have winced a bit because two years ago, I wrote a column complaining about how Bill was trying to take over our veggie season which is really my domain. I mean, sure, I “let” him grow garlic, onions and peppers, but surely that’s enough, right?

And obviously the follower who made the topic suggestion had seen a photo or two of Bill’s wonderful pepper crops. But I was debating whether it was wise to encourage Bill, or even let him know he has fans out there! Joking aside, he is a wonderful husband and a fabulous gardening partner who always has lots of great suggestions and ideas, and he is a wizard when it comes to constructing for the garden. So I hope you’ll enjoy today’s column.

In addition to my column on his pepper-growing tips, I also shot a video which is about how to keep warm-season crops warm. While that might sound odd, it makes all the difference when growing crops like peppers, tomatoes, eggplants, melons, cucumbers, pumpkins and winter squash. And I’ve learned a thing or two about how to keep the plants toasty warm so they’ll produce for us in our zone 5b garden. Having a short growing season (mid-May to mid-September, or thereabouts) forces a gardener to be creative, right? The photo to the left shows peppers growing in the garden with a sheet of red plastic mulch covering the surface of the bed. Note how there are slits cut into the plastic for planting the pepper seedlings. (remember that you can always click on the photos in my blog posts to view larger images)

One last thing before we get to the video, I always get a lot of questions about our little hoop house, so here is the blog post and video showing how we constructed it.

OK, so here is this week’s video: