One thing I love about living in Otaki is that the town has a unique micro climate that is very conducive to growing a range of slightly unusual plants. This is part of the code behind the slightly ridiculous slogan ‘Welcome to Sunny Otaki’: the promise never seems to hold up when you’re actually physically present, but the region is nonetheless overall very conducive to gardening and growth.
The effect of this is that even a bare window sill can be transformed into a growing region for a battalion of pot plants. Once they’ve emerged from the seeds, these little Frankensteins can be brought out and replanted into the garden where they can be hardened off and will hopefully thrive further.
Because I’m in the process of building a number of square foot gardens on some local arable land, I’m going to start getting into the habit of planting more pot plants on a weekly basis and just seeing how they develop. After all, why let a spare window sill go to waste?
The plant that I’ve chosen this week is chili. I have to admit that I chose this plant without thinking it through clearly – I was lured in by the apparent scarcity of the chili along with my boundless desire to infuse them in my cooking. Basically I was sick of paying $5 for a pack of 3 at the markets.
I now realise that they are not the ideal plant for cultivating at this time of year. They have an incredibly long germination period, followed by a lengthy growing period prior to harvesting, and they take up a lot of room, needing to be spaced at a minimum of 30cm apart – not ideal for square foot gardening. They also require ridiculously high temperatures in order to germinate (18-25 degrees Celsius), an amount that even the overpowered Otaki micro climate may not be able to generate. Still, let’s give them a go.
The setup costs
The potting mix cost me $9. I used about $1 worth of it and saved the rest.
The seed trays costed $0.25 each, so $3 in total for 12.
The seeds cost me $3.75 per packet from Otaki Hydroponics. I bought 2 packets for variety and used about half of each.
I also used a little bit of the diluted worm wee to help fertilise them. Worm farms, when do they stop giving, bless.
Total cost $7.75
I am hoping that the seeds will sprout into little chili plants, and within a few weeks I’ll have some transplants to take to the garden or sell at the markets.
Even if I get just one usable chili plant from it, that should give me at least a dozen chilis a season, which would save me around $6 for 5 at the supermarket, thus “saving” me $12-14 per season.
Anyway, the plant could hopefully last a few seasons. Anything it produces beyond the first dozen chilis is paying for itself, until I get sick of chili.
The real reason for this little exercise was simply trying to put some spare space to good use. There’s no reason why a simple window sill should not be perfectly arable.
If you don’t like chilis you can obviously grow whatever you like on your sill.
The method (for chilis only)
1. Fill the seed trays with new seed potting mix just below the brim. The small square trays are ideal for window sill growing because they are very manoeuvrable.
2. Water each of the trays. (Make sure to dilute your worm wee if you are using it.) Watering should be done before the seeds are introduced because chilis don’t like to be over watered, especially early on.
3. Drop the tiny seeds into the trays at around 5-6 seeds per tray. Chilis have a high attrition rate, particularly if the climate is not ideal, so expect to get around one plant per 5-6 seeds.
4. Press the chilis down into the pitting mix about 6 millimetres below the surface.
5. Find the warmest, sunniest window sill you can and place the trays there one by one.
If you can afford it – buy a propagator to maintain the correct temperature. You may not be based on the Kapiti Coast, and even if you are, you may have more desire for optimal results from your meddling experiments than I do.
I started these little puppies in late Spring, way too late, and just before two weeks of solid bad weather, which just about guaranteed me a poor outcome. Indeed, the chilis took much longer than usual to germinate, and at the end of two weeks I was just about bawling my eyes out at the failed experiment and lamenting my wasted capital (under $8) while the lilt of some archetypal teacher from my youth reverberated in my head that I would ‘never amount to much’. Then one day I stumbled across a passage in a book that set it all on course – many seeds don’t germinate according to plan, and farmers in their haste to grow a profitable crop and write off their failures, often throw out seeds that would have sprouted. So I resolved to wait another week.
This proved to be a sound decision, as we now see. Virtually all the the seeds I planted germinated, so much so that I ended up having to ‘thin’ (ie kill the little buggers with scissors) just about 3 plants per pot. All this without even the use of an $18 propagator from Trademe. The moral of this is that it taught me an important lesson that is so self-evident I don’t even need to repeat it here. It also has something to say about the proper use of Otaki window sills.
The next step is to plant them out in my garden, which as I am feeling that this presents a natural punctuation point, I will cover in another article. Adieu.
