Green Bell Peppers

By Ananya Bhargava

My mother loves gardening and I never really took the time out to garden with her. At the beginning of spring, my mother was planning to make a little home garden to grow vegetables. Since I had more free time, I decided to help her. We did not want to go outside to get supplies because of the pandemic, so we started with whatever we had: took seeds from store-bought green bell peppers, and planted them. In 2 weeks, a few seedlings started growing. We gave the plant: 6 to 8 hours of sunlight, water after the sun went down (twice on more sunny days), and organic plant food once every 15 days. I googled and found out that peppers do well if you use Epsom salt solution once a month. It's prepared by mixing 1 tablespoon of Epsom salt in 1 gallon of water. This quantity was good enough for our 10 plants. Eventually, the first bell pepper started to appear and grew to be a healthy one. After the first one was harvested the plant started producing more. This was my first time gardening and I loved every bit of it: seeing the plants grow and then enjoying the taste of our homegrown green bell peppers.