Giving up the pot

While we're on the subject of addictions...

Just kidding. I'm tired and it seemed funny at the time. This is about plant pots, more particularly their absence.

Some of those little capsicum plants which we grew from fresh seed as a random experiment have really flourished in the recent wet and warming weather. Many of the others were starting to show signs of stress, presumably from overcrowding. Today I decided it was time to try our first bit of in-ground planting.

There's an existing garden bed very near to where the capsicum seedlings have been growing. The previous owner of this house put some effort into improving the soil but over the past two years that bed has been totally taken over by something that might be aloe vera. This afternoon I removed a pile of them and cleared about two square meters of the bed.

On top of that I put a layer of compost - my first significant use of the stuff which I've been brewing up in the back of the yard. Michelle and I transplanted about six really strong-looking seedlings and four more which were the best of the rest from the pot into the compost. Then all around them went a layer of the mulch which I made two weekends ago.

It's pretty simple stuff, really, but apart from some really naive poking about when I was a kid this is the first time I've done anything like this: growing seedlings in a pot, making compost, making mulch, planting out a garden bed. To be honest I'm half expecting the plants to die but that's all fine in the spirit of an experiment.

Thankfully our lives don't (yet?) depend on a good capsicum harvest in the back garden. But with a bit of luck we'll have some of our favourite salad fruits from our own crop on the table and the BBQ this summer.