Growing is a Part of Life

There is no better day to make a mess in your house than the same day that you have already vacuumed your living room. And you might ask, "Well, Ashley, why didn't you take the dirt outside?" And I will say "Because it's too flipping cold and moving that many plants from inside to outside to inside again, is too much work." #Lazy

With Josh being out of town for a few days, and me being in charge of the little baby peppers (a job that I've already screwed up more than once), I decided that today, I will do something that Josh has probably been meaning to do for a little while. Now, I don't really know if he has been meaning to, I'm just guessing. That something is upgrading our tiny little peppers from tiny cups to bigger cups so that they can continue to grow into big baby peppers. Don't worry, Allegra was my supervisor. She made sure I didn't make too much of a mess.

Josh is extremely particular in the way that he does things with his plant children so I have tried my absolute best to follow his steps and replicate was he has already done with some of our other pepper plants. His method for growing our pepper babies is the "Double Cup Method." This is where you put a bigger cup into a slightly smaller cup so that when the roots grow to the bottom of the cup and poke out of the cuts made in the bottom of the first cup, then all you have to do to water the plants is put some water in the bottom of the second cup, leaving enough air between the water and the first cup in order for the roots to get enough air.

This sounds kind of complicated but it's really not. Josh has shown me how to do this more than once, so I took it upon myself to go ahead and upgrade some of our plants that were outgrowing their teeny cups and put them into slightly larger cups. I wanted this to be a surprise so Josh has NO idea I've done it, let alone written a post about having upgraded the babies.

He would say that his "children are growing up so fast." And they are, thanks to all of his hard work. I've grown a lot also through this entire growing/gardening process over the past couple of years thanks to all of his hard work. This past season was more successful than we ever could have hoped for it to be. I've learned so much about growing plants. I've learned so much about peppers from Josh. I've also learned a lot about how much I love growing something from seed and getting to benefit from its fruit as it produces. Maybe not the peppers as much as my herbs because they're too hot for me, but I love seeing his excitement and happiness when his peppers produce successfully.

Last year was a tough one, but it's a new year and we've all grown to become different people than what we were at the beginning of last year. I know I have and I'm proud and happy to be the person I am today. I can't wait to see with this upcoming year holds for us, but I can tell you that our garden will be tripling, if not quadrupling in the amount of produce we are planning on having this season, and we are extremely excited.

What's one way that you've grown from last year to this year? Let us know in the comments below and make sure you subscribe to our website, facebook page, and instagram in order to find out what all we will be growing this upcoming season.