Hy all.

I’m new to this forum and windowfarming and just beginning to research, so I might come back to you with some other questions.

My first question is about the fruits: If I grow fruits indoors, I imagine I will have to come up with a way to pollinate the flowers, right? So I would need to have at least two plants from each type flowering at the same time? Then I would invite some bees and bugs or pass an entertaining afternoon with some Barry White and cotton swabs.

I know something my Dad told me about birds and bees, but that’s about all.

I’d be much obliged If you could help me understand this bit about what you do.

thanks,

Marc Parchow

Of the three original plants, two are still alive.  The one plant I had in the yogart container, I had taken out to put in the new born that I highlighted in the last post.  However, it since has died.  I have had an ongoing problem with spidermites and it did not make it.  That time, I had gotten real busy at work and neglected the plants for a number of weeks and I was not able to save it.

For the spidermites, I take the plants out of the WF and rinse them off under running water to knock as many of as possible.  After that, I spray them with a soap and neem oil mixture.  I repeat this procedure every few days til I see no more signs of them.

The berries have not fruited in many months now and finally have done so ago these last few months.   Here are some pictures to highlight various stages of ripening.  In the picture below is a poorly polinated berry.  Without polination the berries either do not develope at all or are very deformed like this one below.   I did not see them start flowering so this is what happens.  The rest of the berries in the picture I polinated by hand and you will see that they look normal.

Poorly Polinated Berry

Here you will see the newly opened flower.  To the right of it, is a newly polinated flower.  Within a day of a good polination all the white petals fall off.  The picture also shows a good progression from the small berry to the larger berry.

Ripening Stages

The first few berries of the plant are larger with the ones following being progressively smaller.

Berries Ripening

For the cat lovers out there….  Here are two of our four cats sunning themselves in the window with the plants.  In general, they don’t bother the plants at all.  The jalepeno that has some branches that hang down, they will nip at some times, but nothing serious.

Strawberries & Cats

So as they say, here are the fruits of my labor.  The above pictures produced this bowl of berries and a couple of larger ones that had ripened earlier and that I ate.  So overall, it was about a dozen berries of various sizes.

Bowl of Berries

P.S.  As the berries were ripening, I had another ourbreak of spidermites and have been fending them off again.  It had been about 3 months since the last sign of them.

5/26/2012  As an example of strawberries producing multiple harvests a year,  here are a couple more berries a little over a month later on the same little crown.

More berries on a skinny crown

Does anyone have any experience with Squash / Succhini?

I have two of a ‘midnight’(miniature) variety in my WF.
(Picture in this post: http://our.windowfarms.org/2010/10/23/update-on-my-wf/ )

Both have grown to decent size and bloomed many times, but I have been unable to get them pollinated.

Is there a special trick to this?

The cucumbers were a real mystery. Like Marilyn and James Dean, they have thus far all died a tragic death after a short, but full life.

We had about 10 of these georgeous exciting northern cucumbers. It was a little unrealistic to think we could grow such a big fruit in a windowfarm, but we figured we’d try and just find a way of supporting them when they got big. And they did get big. We had them trelliced around some cross-wires made of string.

They all produced a lot of flowers and after we pollinated them with a paintbrush, we had tons of 1″ long baby cucs.  The plants themselves all looked very healthy. 

But then all of the sudden the plants would die when the fruits were cornichon-sized. We think maybe we didn’t have our fruiting/flowering nutrient solution mix right (??). 

Someone else please try cucumbers, get it right, and let us know how to do it! I’m drooling at the thought of some homegrown apartment cornichons!