'Topsy Turvy Pepper Planter'
Ugh. I hate things with cutesy names like 'topsy turvy', though at least it doesn't have a cute spelling. I don't know what got into me. (Doesn't this sound familiar?). There I was at the nursery, harmlessly looking around inside a warm greenhouse on a cold, windy day, eating the free hot dogs and munching the non health snack Cheetos. Suddenly I was accosted by my friend Alyce, who works there. We had our usual lively and enjoyable conversation, and half an hour later, without realizing it, I found myself driving home with only the Spring Open House free plant, some biiiiiig black pots for growing potatoes (more on this later) and .......... the topsy turvy.
Honestly. I don't even LIKE peppers. My body doesn't like them, anyway. I do, however, grow paprika peppers, and apparently the topsy turvy (should I be putting in the little 'c' in a circle for copyright?) is going to make this job not only efficient but very, very fun.
Look, it has 8 cunning little planting 'ports'. A cool twirly thing on top to make it easy to rotate. And it's bright (very bright) red, in order to .... I don't know, encourage the peppers to ripen faster? How could I have resisted?
I brought the thing home and selected 4 hapless victi---- I mean, 4 brave volunteer pepper plants to jam through the ports into the t.t. Ack. My homegrown seedlings did not have the usual nursery 6-pack, compact root balls. In fact the root balls basically disintegrated as I shoved them through the holes. I apologized, watered them with lots of extra ETS+, and put them in the shaded sunporch to (maybe) recover.
The following day I went to see how they were faring, fully expecting to see 4 shriveled corpse peppers ...............and: whoah. Not only were they not expired, they all had their little heads up and I swear, had already grown 2 inches. Maybe there's something in this topsy turviness after all.
Not that I'm totally trusting in it. I just couldn't believe that 8 pepper plants, no matter how accommodating and happy, could grow in that one bucket's worth of soil. So I planted 4 peppers and put nasturtium seeds in the other 3 ports.
Stay tuned
LOL --- great post, Cathy! The Topsy Turvey is absolutely stunning in red and green! The pepper plants look happy!! Is the TT a relative of the upside down tomato grower thingy advertised everyhwere I look? I admire your gardening skills! Garden on!
ReplyDeleteYes, it's first cousin to the upside down tomato grower thingy (UDTGT?), which I don't see the point of. Tomatoes are perfectly easy to grow 'upside down' in a regular hanging basket. They grow up, flop down and presto: tomatoes. Anyway, the peppers are growing fairly happily in the TT. I'll take more photos when they are more impressive. The nasturtiums have sprouted too. Yay.
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