Project Updates: March 2020

Greetings,

We hope you are all staying well and are looking forward to the coming Spring garden season. I just wanted to check in and see how things are going with your seeds and give an update on the project.

First off, we were delighted by the amount of enthusiasm and support we received for the project this year. We sent out over 700 envelopes of seeds to participants in 43 states (including Alaska and Hawaii!). We are really excited to expand the range of our project and see such a large interest in growing these Physalis species. As a reminder we recommend that you start the Colombia goldenberry as soon as possible and groundcherry and tomatillo around April 1st. If you have any questions please feel free to reach out to us.

While you all have been prepping to grow your own Physalis, we too have been prepping for our own crop here in Ithaca. At the beginning of March we started our goldenberry (Physalis peruviana) seeds in preparation for our upcoming field season. On the heat mat they took just over two weeks to germinate and they have just started to become large enough to transplant into 4-inch pots. We did our first round of transplanting yesterday (pictured below), and will transplant one more time before moving to the field at the end of May. We plan to start our groundcherry seeds for our field season next week, with a target start date of April 1st.

Please keep us posted as you progress through the growing season. You can tweet at us at @PhysalisProject on Twitter or email us. We love to see photos of your progress.

Best wishes,

The Physalis Improvement Project