Hot and Spiky - Growing All Kinds on the Farm

As we near winter, nature hops into action making sure that we have all the Vitamin C that our body's need in order to sustain good health through the colder months of the year. And other than all of the citrus which is notoriously high in vitamin C coming into fruit - we are also getting a decent harvest of chilly peppers. Not sure if everybody knows this - but just in case you don't...

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When I was younger, I would have never though that I would have developed such a great love for plants. I always enjoyed the presence of plats as a child and would sit around the garden for hours watching butterflies and all kinds of insects come and go, but when it came to planting plants - I had the furthest thing from green fingers.

I guess as my love for plants grew - so did my understanding of how to nurture them from seed to harvest. And now I am at a point where I shudder to think of a time that I did not grow my own food.

But the lovely chilies you see above (cultivar: passion) are not the only chilies that I have been growing. I recently also planted some black pearl chilies from seed, and I am very proud to say that they are doing perfectly well. In fact from the seeds of just a handful of these little chilies, I have managed to propagate hundreds of black pearl seedlings - some of which I will be growing for myself, and others will be sold as plants on the local farmers market as well as from my home based nursery on the farm.

And on the note of seedlings, I wanted to share the progress of the dragon fruit seedlings with you - I find this little seedling exceptionally fascinating in looks (and this is where the 'spiky' in my heading stems from, in case you thought it was a spicy typo LOL) at first this tiny plant didn't look much different than your average seedling, a scrawly stem holding up its first new leaves (also known as seed leaves or cotyledons), but then as it continued growing, in stead of forming its true leaves as most seedlings do, the dragon-fruit started forming its cactus like apparel, complete with miniature thorns.

Just a tiny promise of the enormous plant that this will one day become...