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Writer's pictureCCAG

Learning from Braxton 2: growing peppers.

Updated: Oct 21, 2023

Braxton has a big garden growing, and the CCAG thought we could achieve this as well. "But if we had a worm bin, we'd give the worms to our animals, that's for sure." states Rob."

At the CCAG, we started growing plants from the pepper and tomato family, including the Goji berry. Tomatoes and Peppers are perennials, meaning they live for more than one growing season. That means they can live the freezing winters without dying. However, Annuals like cucumbers and corn grow, flower, fruit, and then die. Have you ever seen a Goji berry before? Chances are, you've seen it at Whole foods dried like raisins. But have you ever seen one it's natural state?

Lycium barbarum is in the tomato family!


The Goji berry (Lycium barbarum) is also in the tomato family! The only major difference is that Goji berries are shrubs, but tomatoes are not. Goji berries live longer than Tomatoes and peppers and can be widely invasive if over-controlled.


I've also heard that Goji berries are deciduous and act like trees in the winter. Like apple trees, they lose their leaves in the fall, and grow them back in the spring.


Have you wondered how to grow a goji berry, or if you can grow one from dried ones. The answer is yes: don't spend $20 on a goji berry plant, when you can get real berries to plant from nuts.com for almost $300 🤣 🤣 ! At the CCAG, we soaked one dried berry in water for an hour to resuscitate it from it's dried state. It's also easier to extract the seeds on time. Next, we found a pot that is well-drained. Gojis do live in tropical Asia like other asian fruits, which means they like moist (but not wet) and warm soils. The heat wave today really helped 😎😎. In a surprisingly short time, (2 days to a week) the gojis sprout.The plants look like pepper spouts. This time around, we planted Gojis with a native species: Coyote Brush! Rob earlier got some dandelion like seeds of a female coyote brush plant in hopes to spread it across the barren Atlas Nature preserve and planted it soil. He planted goji berries in the same container not expecting the coyote brushes to grow. But they did sprout and are

doing very well. Come to the CCAG if you want to see it! Above: coyote brush sprouts have small rounded leaves, while gojis berries look looks peppers.



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