Saving My Container Garden

If you've been reading my blog the last few weeks you are probably already aware of the struggles I've been facing with my container garden. But for those of you that haven't (or can't remember) I was recently fighting a battle with aphids. A battle so tough, that I thought my garden was done for.

And I bought new pepper plants to replace the ones badly wounded.

But then my bf and I decided to take pictures and sample leaves to the "plant wizard" over at the Merrifield Garden Center in VA before calling it quits. We call him the plant wizard because he knows anything and everything about plants, and you can usually find him reading massive botanical books or looking under his microscope at what plants people have brought to him for advice. And I am so glad we visited him. The wizard told us that the plants not only were dealing with aphids, but also with some sort of fungal disease. So he directed us to some sprays we could use to try and save the plants. So for the last 3 weeks, I've been spraying my plants with Bonide spray. And my plants have come back to life.

Slowly but surely the plants are now growing new leaves and blooms. They look 10xs healthier than they did 3 weeks ago, and bigger too! Unfortunately the disease spread to the entire balcony garden, so I've had to spray my entire garden once a week and wait for the disease to be completely gone. I had some casualties with flowers that were overtaken by the disease and the tomato plants have struggled a little bit, but overall the garden is looking healthier and I am sure it will fully recover in another week or 2. The lemon tree was also affected by it, but it is pretty resilient, so other than not dropping fruit yet, it has managed fairly well.

Here are some pictures of the habanero plant and the tomatoes. You can see the damage the disease and aphids caused as well as the healthy new leaves growing in each plant. The San Marzano tomato plant dropped some fruit, but one of them has some sort of fungus growing on it. So I have to continue to spray all of the plants until I know they're good to go.

This is the Bonide spray I have been using. It works on fighting disease on the plants as well as aphids and other harmful insects. I was hoping to stay organic all season, but the organic sprays I was buying weren't working against the disease. So I had to give in and buy this. In the future though, I will be sure to spray all of my plants at the beginning of the season with organic spray if I can, as I now believe one of my plants had the disease prior to arrival at my garden and spread it to the rest.

On a happy note, that giant stick growing out of my pot that was supposed to be a blackberry, looks a lot more like a blackberry plant nowadays.

OOHH YEEAAAA!!

Call me the blackberry wizard.. haha jk.

But to end this post, I now have even more pepper plants than I know what to do with. 15 pepper plants total. I see a lot of pepper recipes in this blog's future. Just take a look at the pepper my banana pepper plant managed to drop despite the disease and aphids.. and it is still growing.

I am a happy gardener now =)