Playing the hand you are dealt

My overarching feeling about the greenhouse season so far is that aphids make your life miserable if you insist on growing certain plants in certain locations. I was spraying the greenhouse pepper plants every day with soap, which I'm sure wasn't good for them as they don't seem to be growing. The past week or so the spraying seems to have shifted to the marigold buds next to the pepper plants. A bud gets covered with them, I spray them down, and an hour later they are making a comeback. But MAYBE they are going after the marigold buds now instead of the peppers so MAYBE companion planting for pest control isn't total garbage. I don't believe that yet.

Other marigolds less than five feet away do not get aphids at all. They are outside in the window boxes. The tomato plants that are a few feet in the other direction, inside, have not had aphids since I wiped out a few that were going after the young stems. There are different types of aphids, and right now I have the ones that like marigold buds, but only inside.

In my designated flower bed (southeast), the marigolds also have aphids and have not grown as much as the others across the room. The sunflowers are growing, slowly. The sunflower plants in the big pot six feet to the north are 20 times larger. I have one scraggly zinnia in the flower bed where there should be at least five. What is prospering in that bed is the nasturtiums, to the extent that I took out two of the plants to allow the alyssum to thrive, which it has since then. Instead of zinnias filling the front windows, I have coleus plants in 6" pots sitting on the sills. Ya'know what, if zinnias don't prosper there but coleus do, I should plant more coleus. I have five more that need to be potted up, maybe I should just stick them in the bed next to the window. I've also considered planting the harvested allium bulbs in that front strip, but it might be too damp to plant them now. In any event the allium wouldn't flower until next spring. The zinnias, alyssum and nasturtiums in the outside window boxes look healthy but are still small because they were direct seeded after it got somewhat warm. (But it never really gets warm here. Maybe on August 15.)

Half of the strawberry plants died. Some of the ones that survived are sending out runners, two of them in the east bed but also the two in the smaller (14") greenhouse baskets. I'm going to try to get the runners to root in 4" pots, which takes a bit of effort with the hanging baskets. There is one 4" pot perched inside a basket, and I also hung a new 10" basket between the two strawberry baskets and will put three 4" pots inside that basket. So far I have harvested two Albion strawberries, one from a greenhouse basket and the other from a house basket. Both were a bit tart, but not bad. I guess I should leave them for a few more days after they are 100% red.

I did get two new 10" baskets today, identical except for color to the green ones that I'm using for the sedums. One will be trying to capture strawberry runners, and I potted up the other one with a thriving Supertunia Vista Bubblegum:

Bottom line: If something doesn't want to grow in a particular location, try something else or try somewhere else. I'm not going to keep trying to grow peppers in the greenhouse if it doesn't work.