In collaboration with Soaring Heights, the on-base community housing, and other community program leaders a trial of an above ground garden is underway. The galleries and projects on this page show the fruits and vegetables of the labor completed by Health Promotion and community leaders on the above ground garden.
This garden was created for Health Promotion to use for cooking classes, and a trial run to see if above ground gardening would be viable and sustainable on base in hopes to expand the garden into other areas for access.
Slideshow above will show the finished above ground gardens. The first photo is the peppers in the first garden. The second photo shows the vegetable garden. The last photo shows the third garden full of herbs.
What is in the garden?
Pepper Garden: Jalapeno, Serrano, Habanero
Vegetable Garden: Husky cherry red tomatoes, Celery, Golden Griller Squash, Collard Greens, Broccolini
Herb Garden: Rosemary, Cilantro, Sweet mint, Purple Basil (unfortunately did not survive the 2022 winter and will soon be possibly replaced with another herb)
Garden Updates and garden freinds
The slide show Garden Updates and Garden Friends contain updates from Jan 2023 (Photos 1-6).
Garden Harvests
Update 14 March 2023: Safety first when visiting your garden, to prepare for the first harvest of the Health Promotion Garden, I used gardening gloves, a basket, and a clean pair of kitchen shears.
The peppers do not look presentable like the ones you can buy at the grocery store. We theorize that there are many reasons to what happened.
Further research into the peppers grown in our garden we found many facts.
Serrano peppers come in yellow, orange, red, or green where they change colors depending on their state of ripeness (MasterClass, 2021). The ideal ripe color indicator was green, which our peppers were at this stage in late January 2023, then matured further into the final red color stage. Serrano peppers are mostly grown in Mexico and have a Scoville heat unit of between 10,000 and 23,000 (MasterClass, 2021). We can tell you that one of the overripe red serrano peppers are much sweeter and tasted to me similar to a bell pepper, I will note I did grow up eating spicy foods so I may not have the best unbiased opinion on the pepper I tried. Now with the first harvest of Serrano peppers we know what to look out for when checking our garden next time.
Jalapeno peppers come in light green, to dark green, to an almost black color then turn bright red (2023). Just like our Serrano plant the Jalapenos ideal ripeness color indicator was green but then matured into the red color they were harvested in. Jalapenos have a Scoville heat units of 2,000 to 8,000, which are less spicier than the Serrano peppers (How Hot Is a Jalapeño?, n.d.-b). Fun fact learned is the white lines on the jalapeno peppers are cold “corking” which is a sign the jalapeno is maturing well and is almost or is ready to be picked (2023). This harvest of jalapenos was an interesting and colorful one, due to the slower growth of the jalapeno peppers (2023) we did harvest a few that still had significant green coloration to them compared to the red serrano peppers. This was the first harvest of jalapeno peppers, we can not wait to see what goes on in the garden again.
After the first harvest of Serrano and Jalapeno peppers, we look forward to see if the other peppers and vegetables grow in the future.
Sources
How Hot Is A Jalapeño? (n.d.-a). Mason Dixie Foods. https://masondixiefoods.com/blogs/faqs/how-hot-is-a-jalapeno#:~:text=So%2C%20where%20do%20jalape%C3%B1os%20fall,to%201%2C000%2C000%20SHU%2C%20muy%20caliente!
MasterClass. (2021, November 10). Serrano Pepper Plant Care: How to Grow and Harvest Serranos – 2023 – MasterClass. https://www.masterclass.com/articles/serrano-pepper-plant
P. (2023, February 2). Harvesting Jalapeños – When and How To Pick. Pepper Geek. https://peppergeek.com/harvesting-jalapenos/
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