indoor container gardening - please help!!

[karhu]

Hi,

we live in Helsinki-Finland, and have been trying to grow plants in containers inside our apartment since summer last year (june 2005)

we bought 6 plastic containers (made a few holes at the bottom of each of them), soil, fertilizer, and use fluorescent lights from 4pm- 10pm

so far, we've had poor results.

these are two pictures of our plants: (few cherry tomatoes and chilies)




http://i68.photobucket.com/albums/i16/karhu_iii/plantas.jpg


http://i68.photobucket.com/albums/i16/karhu_iii/plantas_zoom.jpg


we grew the plants from seeds and varied the height of the fluorescent ligths trying to always keep them only a few centimeters over the tallest plant. (nevertheless, we couldn't avoid that the plants get 'leggy' and twisted!)



what can we do to improve our small indoor garden??


thanks in advance




ps. Is there a not too 'tall' variety of chili ? (We got tired of prunning so often, as plants kept reaching the fluorescent lights.  


if chilies are not the right type of plants for our containers, what kind of plants do you recommend ?


ps2.  the size of each container is: 90 (length) x 25 (width) x 22 (height) cms.

[Nuthead]

There's allways  the possibility to just cut them down a little bit. By doing that there's a good chance you make them produce new branches that will make them more bushy!?!?
Then about your pots. The ones you use are ment for balcony groving and are quite small. Especially for 4-5 chiles. So change the pots to bigger ones, try to cut them down a little bit and tell us how it goes!  

[karhu]

Hi,

thanks for the reply.


we realized we made many mistakes with the plants,  so we decided to start again...

- we modified the shelf so now there are only two divisions
- put 3 fluorescent lights in each division
- bought 4 bigger pots and put a few seeds of chili in each of them.
- set the timer to give the plants 12 hours of light every day.
- bought fertilizer with higher P and K

I will post the new pictures of our container garden in a few weeks more...  hopefully we will have healthier plants


regards,

[Makee]

Otherwise those changes sound nice, but not this:

- bought 4 bigger pots and put a few seeds of chili in each of them.

Bigger pots are great, but are you really going to germinate seeds in them? that aint good idea. It would be better that you germinate those seed for example in a plastic mug. When they grow a little bit bigger then you could move them  example to a milkcan. When the roots are occupying whole milkcan then you should move them to that bigger pot

[Nuthead]

One possibility is also to just cut down the old ones and repot them into bigger ones. Should work just fine!!  :!:  :?: