Norcal Pottery Outlet in San Leandro - 2091 Williams Street - mon. - fri., 10:00-4:00 You do have to do some picking over of pots for chips, but you won't find better prices. Often Mexican pots are $15 for a flatbed load. There are also many glazed pots and terra cottas. The selection chages all the time. Last fall I got 12" glazed pots for $2.50 and 24" Italian terra cotta for $24. BettyN

Following up a few months later... The experiment with perennial tomatoes did not work out. They pretty much shut down after the pruning. Still, home-grown tomatoes at Christmas is pretty cool. This year, I cut way back on the number of plants in the greenhouse, from six tomato plants to two, and it's much more manageable. I've also tried to layer the plants in the greenhouse bed: Strawberries on the bottom, peppers in the middle, and tomatoes up high. This does not work well. The tomatoes and peppers have very deep roots. Strawberries are shallow rooted, so you wind up either overwatering the tomatoes or underwatering the strawbs. And even though you get strawberries a month before you'd get them outside, there's no point in having strawberries in the greenhouse when you have perfect strawberry weather outside. Next, maybe carrots and beets for the lower stratum. The peppers I planted are the Spanish Padron, which have become very popular. They have a reputation as having variable degrees of spiciness ("unos pican, otros no"). The deal with these guys is that they're quite hot *once they're mature enough to set seed*. So...if you're going to grow these guys...harvest early. They're best when they're tiny.

I see this is an old thread! I'm in East/Central Oakland. I planted two Frederick plants in late spring of this year. One I got from Berkeley Horticulture in a gallon pot. It was their last one and looked terrible. The leaves were torn and the vine was sparse. They gave me a discount and said it would improve. The other I got at Oakland Ace Hardware on Grand. It was a 5 gal pot and looked great. The 1 gal pot I planted in some terrible looking dirt next to a chain link fence because it was the only pre-made support and full sun I had at the time. The 5 gal I planted in rich soil along a wooden fence on which I had created a trellis. Initially the 1 gal. did nothing. Any new leaves looked deformed and the plant barely grew. Th 5 gal. took right away and flowered shortly after planting. Within the first couple months a fruit appeared. Then nothing. I used fish emulsion on both. It was not until I dug up around the 1 gal, added some planting mix and bit of gypsum to the soil, and then added plant food, that it took off. Within a couple weeks it had grown by at least 30%. Then it started flowering. After helping it with sexy time (I helped pollinate the flowers), the small plant now has 3 fruits growing and several flowers. The 5 gal has produced many flowers, but other than the first fruit, all have fallen off. I don't know why it hasn't self-pollinated. This week I started helping the big plant to pollinate, so hopefully that does the trick. But the vine itself has also grown at least 30% if not more in the 3 months it's been up. Sorry for the long narrative! I just was out there working in my garden today and so it's all in my head.

Howdy, beanco. Maters and basil wuv each other--whup each others bugs and germs, make each other grow bigger and tastier, pair well in a sandwich with mayo, or in a salad with Mozzarella cheese and italian dressing.... Pop 1 or more basils *carefully* at the edge of your maters--they are not fond of wiggly roots when transplanted. My condolences about the mint. You might just consider it a *feature* to be mowed, where it isn't right by your beds. One more nasty mint feature: if the roots or stems of 2 kinds mingle, they exchange oils. BOTH plants change flavors--generally in a negative way, of course--them being mints, and all. Each variety of mint should have its own separate pot. Not close enough for the catmint to throw a stem into, say, the spearmint and root, so both plants now taste like... um, compost.... Not that that happened to me at all. (But it did....)