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Growing Chiles in HEL - 2019

Today I took 27 pellets off the heat mats and transplanted them into their first small pots. Then I moved them into my temporary grow room (sauna) under the lights where they will spend the next 60 days or so until it's warm enough to move outside for the summer.
 
I've still got another 75 pellets on the heat mats and will move them to the lamps as they pop.
 
On the tray in the photo, there are two separate LED lamp rigs.
 
The lamp specs: 
 
Strip Length: 61 cm
Watts: 15 watts per strip (45 watts per rig)
Kelvin: 6400K
Lumens: 1500 per strip
PPFD (at 100mm distance): 399 µmol/s/m2 per strip
 
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My Jack Russell girl, who normally sleeps on the other side of my wife, hopped out of bed at 5.30am (25 minutes ago) and came around to my side and started rapidly and loudly panting in my ear and woke me up.
 
That usually is caused by one thing: a rapid change in barometric pressure. Sure enough, 5 minutes later a thunderstorm appeared directly over our house. Gave her back to my wife who wrapped her in the ThunderShirt (tm) and restrained her under her arm.
 
Always worried about my precious Rojos, next thing I did was look out the bedroom window to see how they were holding up in the storm. Seems that the current method of spreading out the branches and clipping and staking them to 5 bamboo poles per container is working quite well at least for now. Heavy direct rainfall combined with hard winds do not seem to bother them too much at this stage. It will probably knock all the flowers off of them, though - might hit them with another round of PK 13/14 this evening. They are still growing so fast, though, and setting lots of pods along the new growth that I probably will need to add another 3 bamboo poles per container in order to provide proper support. IF I can still manage to find any at the garden centers at this late stage in the growing season - I nearly wiped out the local inventory when I bought the first round of poles.
 
Growing the Rojos in coir+perlite+vermiculite using 30 litre (7.6 gallon) pots instead of soil in 20 litre (5 gallon) pots has been a total game changer. Also switching from GHE micro/mato to Canna A+B over a month ago has made significant improvements IMO (AND it's cheaper).
 
We are expecting near-perfect weather conditions during the 10 day forecast with daytime highs between 18-21c (65-70f) and either sunny or partially sunny. Keeping my fingers crossed for at least another 4-5 weeks before the frosts come, might even turn out to be 6 weeks if we are really lucky.
 
CaneDog said:
Good looking pods podz. I've noticed in various pics that some of your flowers come through with a rich blue tint to them, which looks very cool.
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Yeah not sure how that happens, but I have been playing with the exposure slider on the iPhone camera here lately.
 
Hah, my defenses are not impermeable due to me being a one-man team. We have had sustained winds of 13 meters per second (29 mph) for over 12 hours now and finally shit flipped over. Nothing broke and I moved them to a more sheltered location, but I am anyway once again reminded that Mother Nature will do whatever the fuck she wants to do.
 
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Ladies and Gentlemen, the verdict is in: hitting your pubes with some PK 13/14, in addition to the normal nute schedule, just makes shit go crazy. Absolutely crazy.
 
Rojos had already been heavily flowering and setting a lot of pods for a few weeks already but one week ago I hit them with the PK 13/14 and the results have been unbelievable. The flower production has about tripled - my deck now resembles a bumblebee colony and on any given pube there are 5-7 bees working it at a time. I tried to move some of them after the windstorm was over and let me tell you the bees were a real safety concern! In addition, prior to the PK the pod set rate was about 10% - after the PK it has jumped to about 80%. I will easily have 100-150 pods on each of the 6 Rojo plants and these pods average 60 grams each when mature. Do the math - this is going to be a ridiculously large sized harvest no matter how you look at it.
 
This is just insane now.
 
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I was out with my wife taking our dogs for the evening walk and this young lady just landed right on my sunglasses. I considered her a good omen and took her home with me, depositing her right onto one of my Rojo plants.
 
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During the evening inspection of the pubes I found a bee that won't make it back home. His thorax is nearly detached, might have been attacked by another bee earlier today. He is still alive, barely and just keeps struggling to try to get inside of that flower but can't get in.
 
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Flowering heavily.
 
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The Manzano Rojos have just been exploding with new flowers now, I would still estimate somewhere around 1000 flower buds and 100 or more open flowers per plant. There are literally swarms of bees buzzing around them from sunup til sundown - I noticed four different types of bees today. Now that there is a good spread between the day and night temps, the pods have started to set in large amounts. Earlier I was hoping that I would maybe get 50 pods per Rojo (last year only had 28), but now it seems that 150 or even 200 might be possible. It seems that the amount of pods will only be limited by 1) my ability to keep the branches supported, and 2) finding time to increase the feeding schedule e.g. bumping it up to twice a week instead of once a week. This would really be the time to have some sort of overhead support system as a few of the Rojos are already taller than me!
 
 
Had a little harvest today - a bunch of padrons, a few star flames, several medinas and one cayenne.
 
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Glad your plants survived their tumble.
Your stakes saved the day!

Looks like you are enjoying the fruits of
your labor, Mika!
 
PaulG said:
Glad your plants survived their tumble.
Your stakes saved the day!

Looks like you are enjoying the fruits of
your labor, Mika!
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The way I have staked them now, Paul, I learned that from your glog. And yes, those three plants would have been toast if they hadn't been staked like that - the tomato cages just would not have protected them much at all. The grand total of the damage was one loose pod and 2 broken growth tips - nothing, really. There were also a couple of fractured branches which have already solidly healed - didn't even notice them until yesterday because it did not affect the growth beyond the fractures in any way. Hard to keep Rojos thoroughly inspected when they are just so damned big plants.
 
Yes, we've been eating Padrons, California Wonders, eggplants and zucchini for quite some time already. The rest of the Annuums are starting to come along slowly. As far as pubes go, it's a minimum of one month still before any of them even start to think about the color break.
 
Podlover said:
Gotta love those rocoto flowers.

I've never eaten one and it's the first year I have a rocoto but I've already fallen in love.
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They are a different experience. They contain a different combination of capsaicinoids than the other capsicum species. The burn comes on slow but then it spreads to your lips and ends up lasting a long time and it is quite pleasant IMO. They are really juicy, and fruity when ripe. To me, they are the most desired hot pepper to use in salsa making (I always make enough salsa in the autumn to last me an entire year).
 
Which variety are you growing?
 
podz said:
 
 
They are a different experience. They contain a different combination of capsaicinoids than the other capsicum species. The burn comes on slow but then it spreads to your lips and ends up lasting a long time and it is quite pleasant IMO. They are really juicy, and fruity when ripe. To me, they are the most desired hot pepper to use in salsa making (I always make enough salsa in the autumn to last me an entire year).
 
Which variety are you growing?
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A yellow rocoto, sown four but just the one popped up. Will get some more variaties for next season. Hope the season lasts long enough to get some pods!
 
No photos today because it would just be more of the same. The Rojos are still flowering like hell: 100-150 open flowers per plant, 800-900 buds waiting to open. Growth like crazy in every direction. Probably no need to use the PK 13/14 anymore, we are gonna run out of warm weather here in 4-6 weeks anyway. These are probably the last warm days of this year.
 
I am damned tempted to order a Bradley smoker but it would so piss off my neighbors. I think I'm gonna order one anyway.
 
It was 24c (75f) outside today and fully sunny, not a cloud in the sky. The Rojos were filled with large numbers of bees. We did the weekly nute feeding today and this time skipped the PK 13/14 - already have a ridiculous amount of flowers.
 
While most of the flowers have 6 petals, there are also quite many with 7 and even a few with 8. Today, I found a few flowers with 9 petals!
 
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There's a ladybug doing it's business.
 
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Bees doing their business.
 
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Bishop's Crown is loaded with pods.
 
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Manzano Rojo also loaded with pods.
 
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We've got 10 days of warmish weather still in the forecast, night lows are still over 10c (50f) but it is possible to get small, short periods of freezing night temps in late September. Those short cold snaps shouldn't hurt mature Pubes, though. Historically, we don't start getting hard freezes until slightly after mid-October. The Pubes are so large now that there is no way to bring them inside or even cover them.
 
The Rojos and Montufars are STILL flowering like crazy and STILL setting lots of pods. We just fed them heavily yesterday but now I am considering if that would be the final feeding of this year and basically also cut down their watering from now on. They should have enough nutes / energy remaining in their veins now to bring all pods up to green-ripe state (pass the hard-squeeze test) and then it's only a question of triggering the color-break in case I don't wanna just make a ton of Salsa Verde. Convincing the Pubes to start the color-break will require some stress, though. Withholding nutes and water is one stress. Another stress is to physically abuse them. Probably, I will let them be for this last 10 days of OK weather and then after that I will go all "Edward Scissorhands" on them. I might even make a video :-)
 
I'll let them grow outside right up until the hard frost comes then lop them off at the base and take them to hang upside down from a clothesline in the garage for a week or so for the final ripening.
 
There is also one experiment that I might try now to see how it works on Pubes: gashing a few pods with a knife. This technique has been used in commercial fig production for thousands of years and still to this date in some areas. Do take 30 minutes or so to read this article if 1) you've never heard of this technique before, and 2) you have a general interest in reading academic research that _might_ possibly improve your hot-pepper-fu.
 
https://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/Hort_306/reading/Reading%2010-2.pdf
 
podz said:
There is also one experiment that I might try now to see how it works on Pubes: gashing a few pods with a knife. This technique has been used in commercial fig production for thousands of years and still to this date in some areas. Do take 30 minutes or so to read this article if 1) you've never heard of this technique before, and 2) you have a general interest in reading academic research that _might_ possibly improve your hot-pepper-fu.
 
https://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/Hort_306/reading/Reading%2010-2.pdf
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Good to know, as I have found a fig tree at the new place and it is heavily laden with 2 figs![emoji15]
 
skullbiker said:
Good to know, as I have found a fig tree at the new place and it is heavily laden with 2 figs![emoji15]
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I'm guessing it's Ficus carica in your yard and not Ficus sycomorus (which the article refers to). Not sure if F. carica benefits from gashing or not.
 
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