My varied plants

After treating the mint plants at work with azadirachtin, I haven't really since any aphids or spider mites. The chocolate mint plant looks a bit ugly after I removed most of the damaged leaves, but I'm giving it plenty of fertilizer and water and it is sending out new growth. If it doesn't recover in the next several weeks I can propagate a new cutting from the plant in my container garden, which is doing pretty well. I decided to set the timer for my work mint plant lighting back to 12 hours because 8 hours didn't seem like it was enough and the plants were growing too tall. Except for the orange mint plant, this thing has been extremely short, full of leaves and is an all around healthy plant. It's the only one of them with a strong enough scent to mostly repel the bugs and I didn't even treat it with the azadirachtin because I didn't think it would be necessary:

The seed starter deck transplants are all doing reasonably well, as is the rest of my container garden:

For next year, I need to give the morning glories a larger pot or some soil cover as they dry out too quickly. The sunflower is reaching the end of its life cycle though, but it seems like it will produce a head full of seeds:

I have an early day of work tomorrow so I went to water the plants before dark and noticed a few things:

1.  The sunflower seems like it's growing another couple flowers.  Do I need to cut off the first flower head soon or will the plant be able to bear the weight?  It already seems a bit droopy.

2.  There are a dozen or so small, green cayenne pepper fruits forming.  They blend in with the leaves so I wasn't able to see them at night.

3.  Both the orange mint and spearmint had begun forming flowers that hadn't bloomed yet.  Supposedly this is the time to harvest them for oil.

I finally got around to killing off my old DWC bucket jalapeno plant.  I set up the new DWC bucket with a 10" net pot lid, which should be enough media for the plant to hold itself upright this time, and moved the jalapeno plant from the AG Harvest.  Before:

After:

I'm not sure if I want to allow this new plant to get as bushy as the old one.  That would probably necessitate me building a tomato cage for it, which would just make reservoir changes that much more complicated.  Unless it would be considered good enough to drain and re-fill the bucket every month instead of fully rinsing it out to clean it.

They're coming along pretty well.  I haven't had enough spare time to build more bucket planters and re-pot stuff.  Hopefully I can set aside time this weekend.  My older tomato plant has one fruit on it, as does my watermelon plant (each are about the size of a ping pong ball).  The habanero plant has some small fruits forming.  The cayenne pepper is still working on its payload, but none of those have started turning red yet.  The blue morning glories are still blooming every morning, the pink/white ones might be blooming later in the day.  The purple ones seem to have stopped for a while now.  I haven't looked into when I'm supposed to remove the head of sunflower seeds.  Is it supposed to stay on the plant until the plant dies or do I cut it off and let it dry out?  The peppermint plant hit a growth spurt, and the scotch spearmint and chocolate mint plants will probably do the same soon.

I need to get a fresh cutting for my indoor scotch spearmint.  The one I have never seemed to recover well from the aphid attack a while ago.  It's blooming frequently, but all the leaves and stems are very thin.  Maybe I could prune it down and give it some fresh potting soil and granular fertilizer.

I bought a drip irrigation system (which I also need to set up) so I can try to keep everything more well-watered.  Summer's not done and I don't want to lose any other plants.

I also bought one of those AG Sprouts from Walmart since they were on sale.  This would probably be much more efficient to use to clone a few cuttings or the odd one-off plant.  I still haven't gotten around to planting my indoor habanero and sweat heat peppers.  Maybe I'll go ahead and start those and a mint clone in the sprout when it arrives.

My replacement DWC bucket jalapeno plant is in kind of rough shape.  The airstone had failed so I think it didn't get good aeration for a day or two, and I probably gave it too strong of a nutrient solution.  I basically gave it the 1.5 times strength amount I'd been using for a fruiting plant instead of the normal strength, in addition to Cal-Mag.  There are burn spots on several of the leaves.  I pruned all the flowers off of it and will see how it does.  I can always grow another one if I have to.

I bought a drip irrigation setup for my mint plants at work, since the soil was drying out too much on weekends (especially on long holiday/vacation weekends).  It's pretty slick, powered by USB and 4 AA batteries as a backup, you just set how long to water and the interval at which to water.  It pumps water from a reservoir (I'm just using a gallon jug of reverse osmosis water) and into standard 1/4 inch plastic tubing, which I've split to accommodate the 4 plants:

I did the math to program it to provide about 1/2 cups of water per day to each plant, which is probably pretty close to how much I've been watering manually. It was reasonably easy to set up, I feel like I'll be pretty successful setting up the drip irrigation for my container garden at home.

I finally got my drip irrigation set up at home.  There was just enough tubing to cover all of my potted plants.  I'll still have to fill my sub irrigation planters manually:

Wasn't too hard, conceptually the same as what I set up at my desk at work (one drip emitter per plant, and programming the controller with a duration and interval).

Now that it will get more water than it can use, I wonder how fast that watermelon will grow (especially after I re-pot it).  It's currently about the size of a small navel orange: