Paprika harvest is starting soon

Sun, 21 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

For the first time, we will have a decent paprika harvest from our balcony garden. We have had success with cucumbers and tomatoes , but our paprika plants were always attacked early on in the growing season by some spider mites, which seem to be indigenous to our balcony. However, the fruits are just now starting to get their red color. Hopefully, all will get red before the first night temperatures fall below zero on our balcony, but that is often only the case in late December, since the balcony is glassed. Of course, green paprika is also edible, but the red ones just contain more vitamins (at least more vitamin C and folic acid/vitamin B9 . Do you want to know which breed we seeded? We used the seeds from the red Ramiro paprika that you can buy from Prisma: https://www.s-kaupat.fi/tuote/coop-makea-suippopaprika-300g/6438574276493 .

50 cucumbers and counting

Sat, 03 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Pandemic + staycation = balcony gardening. While our tomatoes are all still green, the cucumber harvest has started about 2 weeks ago. So far, we have harvested 50 cucumbers, 25 of them today. There is at least the same amount still hanging on the plants. Last year, the cucumbers got infested early in the season with spider mites and we harvested only very few. The only thing I did differently from last year is that I included fertilizer with every watering. I tried two different biological fertilizers, but they did not fly for two reasons: the nettle-based (fermented) fertilizer was so stinky that we could not use the balcony for three days after I had applied it. The second fertilizer I tried was worm tea, a byproduct of our worm farm . It is essentially odor-neutral, but our worm farm is too small to produce enough fertilizer for the cucumbers and tomatoes, which both have high nutrient demands. So I used essentially only the Biolan liquid fertilizer and I am happy with it. It contains apart from the usual NPK (nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium) also a lot of microminerals.

Cucumbers on Michael’s Domain

Paprika harvest is starting soon

50 cucumbers and counting