Talk about garden to table
No Garden? No Problem. Buy. Eat. Repeat. Those are the taglines for some of the cutest plants I’ve seen in a while. Last summer at Ball Horticulture’s open house in West Chicago, Illinois, I was introduced to Kitchen Minis, plants that produce edible tomatoes and peppers, right on a sunny kitchen counter or windowsill. They also can be grown outdoors on a patio, porch, balcony, or deck. They are not meant to be planted.
Kitchen Minis’ Tomatoes and Peppers
There are four tomatoes, nine hot peppers and three sweet peppers in the Kitchen Minis series. The tomatoes look cherry or grape size and most of the peppers are full-sized.
These plants are bred for the job. The idea is you buy a Kitchen Mini, eat the fresh fruit, toss when finished and get another one. From PanAmerican Seed under the Ball Horticulture umbrella, they are available at Trader Joe’s, Costco, Menard’s, and some plant companies. Ideally, they are sold with some tomatoes and peppers ready-to-eat and some still to mature. Each plant lasts four to six weeks.
