So, let’s talk about another one of our screw ups this year. We say it quite a bit, but we believe that it’s important to demonstrate that even experienced gardeners have their issues and that we are all learning. We say it over and over, but gardening can be hard!
This one was rooted in a good idea! For those that were with us in the early spring, you might recall that we had a super early infestation of aphids on our indoor pepper plants. Before we’d even introduced them to the outdoors! We fought against them hard, but by spring, we knew that we had a season-long issue with aphids on our hands.
So, we reached into our pocket book of gardening tricks and decided to co-plant marigold flowers with our peppers!
Marigold are a super useful and versatile flower for the vegetable gardener. Not only are they attractive flowers that bring in pollinators, but they also act as a natural deterrent against a lot of garden pests. Aphids are top among those deterred by the marigold, but even the formidable moose can be frightened by the mighty flower called a marigold! It seemed like the perfect companion plant for us. At the time, at least!
What we underestimated, clearly, was the effectiveness our gardening techniques. You see, we use “ultra efficient” container gardens to eek every bit of performance that we can possibly achieve out of our warm loving peppers. We are “growing against the grain” by trying to get peppers to thrive in a cool place like the subarctic. It’s definitely not easy growing! But, to us, a garden without peppers is hardly worth growing at all!
When you add in any “regular plant” into this “ultra efficient” growing environment, where soil temperatures and nutrition is meticulously maintained, it grows. And it grows like crazy! We are getting lower-48 like growth on our marigold, like we plopped the plant down in the fertile fields of Iowa. Our flowers, intended as an aphid deterrent, are now overtaking our peppers and creating way more competition than we had ever envisioned when we hatched this idea! We thought the marigold might sort of act as ground cover, with the peppers rising above and reaching for the sky. Yeah, it didn’t quite happen the way it did in our head!
So, we have a major problem where our intervention is creating problems for our desired crop. Yet, that intervention is a desired part of our strategy to maximize that crop! It’s a literal catch-22.
We aren’t quite sure what to do. The logical thing is to whack the marigolds and reduce competition for our pepper plants. But, then we’re still facing our aphid infestation and the scale of our garden is well past regular treatment at this point. Our pepper crop has been at risk since April and we’re fighting for any harvest we can get this season!
We wish we had a magical solution to tell you how you can easily solve these kinds of problems. But, this does go to show that no matter how long you’ve been growing, everyone is still learning!
