Container Gardening: Thinking Outside the Pot

I gave him a face lift, too.

As a mother of young children back in Utah, I was seized with the inspiration one day to put a sandbox in the backyard. I envisioned parenting bliss, perhaps relaxing and reading a book in the shade while the kids happily whiled away the hours in creative play.  It sort of turned out like that, except for the relaxing part, the bliss, and the book.  I found one of those ubiquitous backyard plastic turtle sandboxes on Craigslist for five bucks, filled it with a few bags of sand from the box store, and set them loose at it.
No doubt, the sandbox kept the kids entertained for hours and hours.  They ate sand, buried my gardening tools in the sand, shampooed with sand, threw sand out of the box and imported all manner of yard things into the box (rocks, water, grass, you name it).  My daughter actually pooped sand into her diaper on a few occasions.  Sand found its way into parts of my home I could never have imagined.
The kids were not the only ones who adored their sandbox.  The neighborhood cats did, too, despite my constant harping about leaving the lid on when we went inside.
So you would think when we moved to Hawaii, getting rid of the sandbox would have been a no-brainer.  If the kids wanted to play in the sand, they could go to the dang beach.  Except Mommy doesn’t always want to go to the beach; sometimes Mommy wants to stay home and get things done.  The value of backyard entertainment is not to be underestimated, so I freecycled the sand and packed the turtle for a trip for a trans-Pacific journey.
We didn’t see him again for four months, when we finally had a yard once more.  He was decidedly worse for the wear – missing an eye and his green fading after years in the sun.  He did not immediately get pressed into service as a sandbox again – I remember my husband washing rocks (don’t ask) in it at one point, and we stored all kinds of random things in it off and on while doing various projects, but mostly it took up space.  I finally determined that we needed to get some sand or send Mr. Turtle along to a new life. 

Here he is enjoying his new habitat.

A few more bags of play sand and we were back in business, but while the local cats no longer bothered it, as Stitch seems to have discouraged them from entering the back yard, all the sand somehow made its way out of the box and into the lawn.  Every last bit.
Thus, one day while I was mixing potting medium in Mr. Turtle, I recalled seeing his doppelganger at the elementary school growing some herbs, and an idea was born.  I lugged him out to the front yard, where I had been thinking of creating a small children’s garden, drilled some holes in the bottom for drainage, and hooked him up to the irrigation system (I coiled 1/4” soaker hose in a spiral around the surface and connected it to the main line).  I let the kids choose what to grow – sunflowers, carrots (“half-long variety), zinnias, marigolds, cosmos and more marigolds – and after setting some guidelines according to plant height, let them sow the seeds.  Granted, it was a little hard to let go and allow my daughter to stuff delicate marigold and cosmo seeds two inches into the soil, but enough germinated to create a lush little butterfly paradise on Mr. Turtle’s back. 
Some hints:
As this container is shallow and wide, it is extra vulnerable to both drying out and flooding.  Holes in the bottom are essential, as is good watering, but the real secret is in the potting medium.  I make my own blend of compost, sometimes dirt, vermiculite (if I can get it cheap) and coconut coir, a sustainable alternative to peat that is sold in solid bricks, and is delightful to reconstitute.  Generally I try to make the vermiculite and or coir at least half the mix, if not more – I can always top dress with compost later, and the ability of these materials to hold moisture without becoming soggy is invaluable.
For ANY container gardening in the hotter parts of Hawaii, I’m a firm believer in installing a drip irrigation system.  It’s worth the investment of time and money up front, and they really are not difficult to install, even for a novice.  For much of the year, containers dry out incredibly fast here and need to be watered once, if not twice, daily.  No normal person should have the time or desire to be standing there watering plants every day, especially if they are like me and not only have potted plants everywhere, but a job and a life.
I also had to veto some items from the kids’ wish list, such as tomatoes, that would need deeper roots than this container can provide space for. (Tomatoes can compensate by sending roots laterally, but that would have choked out the other plants)
Finally, regular fertilizing will help the plants thrive.  Admittedly I’m lazy about this step and suffer the expected results, but potted plants can’t send their roots deeper into the ground to seek out nutrients – they depend on YOU to sustain them. 
I harbor a grudge against gardening gurus who tout container gardening as low-maintenance.  While they have minimal to no weeds and can bring your garden into areas where it would otherwise not be possible, the above factors really need to be considered.  But with a little creativity and planning, the possibilities for a delightful and whimsical container garden are endless.

Hot Hot Hot

A popular food truck condiment in Hawaii is Hawaiian chili pepper sauce.  It’s sort of the local equivalent of Tabasco,except that it’s not fermented. Or orange. The plant itself isn’t native to Hawaii, but many people have one growing somewhere in their yard.

“Hawaiian” pepper plants are easy to care for and pretty, growing as a perennial that can become a bush, or even a tree, producing an abundance of slender, bright red peppers just an inch or so in length.  I have mine planted prominently in the front garden just because the peppers are so beautiful when the plant is covered with them. 

When I first installed my 6 inch tall pepper plant, I thought I was going to lose it to white flies, but after correcting the watering situation I was able to fight them off with neem oil and they haven’t been back to bother it.  Soon it had grown into a hardy little bush.  Then, about the time it began setting fruit, the leaves started to curl and show signs of what my husband thinks is probably tobacco mosaic virus (our sweet peppers and tomatoes have been afflicted in the past).  Despite this, it still produced ample little green chilies.  Some time passed before I began to realize that while we had plenty of peppers, none of them seemed to ever ripen.  The mystery was solved when I discovered a half eaten red pepper still on the plant. The local birds, it seems, have a pretty good tolerance for spice.

Bird netting fixed that problem, and before long my bushy green plant (which still looked kind of healthy when viewed from afar) was dotted with red.  Great, I had peppers.  Now what?

A quick internet search revealed that chili pepper water seems to be the only recipe commonly made with these.  I whipped up a tasty batch using this recipe:  http://www.slashfood.com/2006/03/05/chili-pepper-water-popular-hawaiian-condiment/ 

I used some of the ginger that I have stored in my freezer.  It is very good, but the recipe makes two cups, enough to last me into the next decade, and it only calls for 8-10 peppers.  I have like 300.  So now what?

I had been reluctant to use these little guys like I would other chilies, as they are exceptionally HOT.  My dad tried to make salsa with a few last year and the result was beyond even his heat tolerance.  After more reading, I finally settled on making my own dried chile powder.

I picked about 60 or 70 ripe peppers, some of them already drying on the plant.  I remembered, thankfully, to put on latex gloves before seeding them. They have very little flesh so peeling is not possible or necessary.  I pulled off the stems and used kitchen scissors to slice up one side, then my thumbnail to scrape out the seeds.  Despite the use of gloves, my fingers were still burning a little several hours later. 

It would be no problem to dry the little peppers out in the sun or even on the counter, but I have a food dehydrator so I popped them in overnight.  By morning, they had transformed into a wispy pile of brittle, papery little skins.  Now, I am well aware of how hot these are based on past experiences.  Still, when a piece got caught in the breeze and drifted over to the counter, I impulsively decided to taste it straight.  After all, I had removed the seeds, which contains like 90% of the heat, right?

Perhaps a rational person would have gingerly placed a little flake on their tongue as a test.  Not me.  I just stuck the whole thing in my mouth – it was tiny, after all– and chewed. After maybe three seconds I was thinking they were,indeed, very spicy.  After seven or so seconds I began to realize that I was in for some discomfort, and by the ten second mark I was looking frantically around the kitchen for a knife to cut off my tongue.  Sweating, I quickly downed two glasses of water, but as any connoisseur of spice knows, the relief was fleeting.  It was eight in the morning and I wasn’t quite desperate enough to crack open a beer as first aid, not yet anyway, so I settled on carbohydrate therapy and stuffed some pita bread in my mouth, then sniffled and wiped my eyes and chewed until the pain began to abate.

After regaining some capacity to function, I forged ahead to grind my dried peppers.  I had come so far, there was no backing out now.  We have an old inexpensive coffee grinder that we use to grind spices. I ground the peppers to fine powder and lifted the lid to check my work.  I immediately began coughing uncontrollably as I backed out of the kitchen.  My son walked in from inside at that moment and started coughing, too.  As I retreated to the far corner of the living room, I imagined a S.W.A.T. team throwing Hawaiian chile powder into a room instead of tear gas, or crazed scientists sending envelopes of the orange powder to public figures, and thought maybe this feature was marketable.  Maybe I could develop my own line of pepper spray.  “Self defense, the all natural and organic way.” 

When the hot zone had become habitable again, I was able to transfer the powder to a spice jar and even get a whiff of the fruity, complex aroma without incident.  The yield was about a tablespoon, which sounds like a lot of effort for very little product, but I think a little will go a long way, and my plant doesn’t even look like I harvested from it.

Oh, and remember the seeds?  I had about half a cup of seeds and stems left after cleaning the peppers.  I threw them to the chickens, who gobbled them up like they were nothing.  If the terrorists ever engage in chemical warfare using hot peppers, the last ones standing will undoubtedly be the birds.

Aloha.