Iris Crossing

Last year I started the spring with two simple Iris’s, that I found on sale at the home and garden store after they had all ready bloomed. A pale white Iris with a purple tinge and a deep orange pistils, with large ruffled petals and a deep cobalt blue Iris that had just the tiniest white and orange spattering of pistils, and even larger petals but this spring they had managed to cross with every Iris in the neighborhood, giving an amazing array of colors and textures. Thin pure white Iris’s with red and orange striping, even thinner white and blue Iris’s growing out of the Indigo clump that were veined with a deep indigo and spotted with red and orange.

Small Scale Indoor Gardening

The indoor closet garden is exploding, with a deep heady fragrance, that smells like a hot-house, coming from the very center of our home. It’s filled with all sort’s of yummy edible vegetables. From the sweet pea’s climbing up the ropes that I hung from the hanging rails that the builders put in, I don’t think when they were designing a hanging closet they ever imagined sweet pea’s growing from them, to the budding tomato’s that are now starting to get the very first of their fruit, basil, and peppers.

Each week I get 5 maybe 10 big pea pods off of the pea plant not a ton, but it’s just getting into its big production period and it’s nice for topping on salads. Plus the wonderful smell of the flower blossoms is a great treat. Next time I think I will pick a variety with a larger crop, even if it takes longer to get to its harvest period. These sweet pea’s had a really quick time to harvest.

The other tip I would recommend is to always keep your lights LED 3-5 inches above your plants. While the plants will still survive with them even a few feet above your plants, they wont have the super growth you’ll see with the plants nice and close to the lights. It’s hard to manage keeping everything this close when you have plants which are big like the tomatoes and peas, and small, like some of my pots of basil, so I have been trying to stack pots together and pot things doubled up.

The weird thing about our garden is that the only light coming from the room is a deep dark fuchsia. It seems alien, or like something you would imagine seeing in the far reaches of space, or on a Sci Fi show. I love it. I think the coolest part of the LED UFO lights that I use, is how they confuse your eyes, while you’re in the room everything is so pink, the leaves are black, blue, or white if they have died back, but once you leave the room everything white turns a strange yellowy green. It’s trippy, until you get used to it.

I’d like to keep expanding our indoor garden, in the next few weeks we’ll be adding some Genovese basil, as well as some cutting flowers. I can’t wait to see how these Tigerella tomatoes develop!