Patio Garden 2010 Week 23: Tomatoes, Peppers, & Basil
I know, I know. I haven’t done a patio garden update in a couple weeks. Honestly there just hasn’t been much going on to report.
We’re down now to tomatoes, peppers, and basil. The tomatoes and peppers are still suffering from the red spider mites, but the plants are still trucking along. They’re producing, flowering, and growing new leaves.

The tomatoes have been hit the hardest by the little mites. I picked 33 cherry tomatoes yesterday. The plants would probably be producing a lot more if they weren’t infested, but still this is not bad at all.

Our peppers still haven’t gotten big enough to pick, but they’re still growing. I have no clue what we’ll do with them once we have them. I’ll figure out something…

And the basil just goes on and on and on.

I don’t know if I’ll do updates every week now, since there isn’t much to report. I will do these posts periodically. No video this week. Maybe this weekend we’ll get one up. I can’t make any promises since I’m not really the one who is in charge of all that.
For those who are new, this year the boyfriend and I are doing a little container gardening experiment where we are trying to grow various herbs and vegetables on our patio. We live in the city of Chicago, so traditional gardening is out of the question. You can subscribe to the RSS feed to instantly receive the posts each week and also check out our previous posts. Feel free to subscribe to our Youtube channel as well.
A great way to keep peppers if you intend to cook them is to chop them and freeze them. They stay great and a quick seond and they fry up nicely.
I have a question about your basil. As we know I am attempting basil, did it take long for your basil to get past the I have a stem and four little leaves stage? I seem to be stuck there and not sure what to do!!
I super enjoy your blog, thanks again!
Great suggestion for the peppers. Do they need to be blanched before they’re frozen?
I don’t remember how long it took for our basil to get past that stage, but from looking at my photos, it seems like we were harvesting basil by week 9, so it does take a little while. My main recommendations is to make sure they’re getting plenty of light and also fertilizer, since they’ll drain the nutrients from the soil.
I have never grown peppers, I just do it with ones that I have purchased. If you have to blanch them before you eat them then I would. If you would just chop and eat then I would chop and freeze.
Thanks for the suggestions 🙂