overwintering LaserGuy's Winter 2011 - Dawn of a New Hope

[laserguy]

LaserGuy's Winter 2011 - Dawn of a New Hope
A post-aphipocalyptic grow log

I have been hesitant to start a Grow Thread before now, as up until recently, all I had to report was Death & Destruction. As those of you who have followed my Trade Thread already know, I had been fighting a devastatingly severe aphid infestation, which prevented any harvest all of last year and most of this, and decimated a multi-year pepper plant collection it took me about a decade to build!

Around this time last year, I thought I had 'em on the run - but it turned-out they were just re-grouping! Late this year I finally found a permanent, tactical nuke solution to this problem (thanks again, Beaglestorm!), and after several months of close monitoring, I can confidently say that I have completely eliminated these $#@! aphids!

Having endured such a long no-harvest "dry spell", however, I was not inclined to just patiently wait around until next year to start new peppers again! (One of the advantages of growing indoors is you can set your own growing schedule! ) So I've been furiously trading & planting new seeds the past few months, trying to re-build my old pepper plant collection, along with some of these new superhots!

And while my hopes of seeing some initial poddage by years-end was perhaps a bit overly optimistic (these superhots seem to be taking longer to sprout/grow than my other peppers did!), I now already have a growing collection of new plants, the few remaining survivors of my older plants are recovering nicely, and I finally have some good news to report!

Let's see, where to start, old plants or new?...

While I'm deciding, I'll leave you with a nice piece of pepper pron to drool over...

(and no, that's not a tomato! )

This was from one of my (now deceased) 6-year-old Rocoto plants, this pod was harvested back when the plant was about 3.

 

[Justaguy]

Oh the sweet juicy redness. I will love following this one. Best of luck. Death to all Aphids!!!!!

 

[SuperHot]

No matter how bad it gets there is always next season. As long as you keep your seed bank well stocked and heat reserves plentiful you should be able to absorb a bad season or two. I could hold out for a while if something was to happen, but there's nothing like fresh pods at harvest to enjoy!!

Good luck with your new grow!!

 

[laserguy]

Thanks, Justaguy & SuperHot!

Yea, all that awesome juicy redness was just too big to fit into one pic! (Actually, the original full-sized picture was too big for web viewing) Like this huge pod itself, I had to slice this pic up!

So...here's the other two slices! -

Note the pool of yellowish liquid in that last pic! (Depending on your browser and screen resolution, you may need to click on these pics to see them at full quality).

When my old PC/hard drive died early last year, I lost 10 years' worth of pepper pics. But as detailed in another post, I recently discovered copies of some of my old pepper pron stashed in a keychain photo album gizmo's directory I had moved to a flash drive! The sliced-up pic above is one of those.

The older pics were taken with a nice Nikon I had access to at the time, while the more recent (2007) pic above was taken with an OK Kodak digital cam.

For more details, and to see some more of my old pepper pron, check-out the post here.

Speaking of photography, you may have noticed the so-so quality of some of the pics I have been posting here this past year. This was not due (hopefully) to my lack of photog skillz, but rather the crappy Chinese POS DVR I'm been having to use as a camera lately -

Trying to get a halfway-decent pic involved things like "web cam" mode & PhotoShop, and was an absolute nightmare.

I have been searching for a capable yet affordable digital cam for a while now. This had been hampered somewhat by the camera manufacturers removing features I wanted (like aperture-priority, shutter-priority, full manual exposure mode & manual focus ability) from their more affordable product lines, apparently to entice people towards their pricier DSLR models.

Well, I am happy to report that I just acquired an older model full-featured, name brand digital cam that has ALL the features I was looking for!

Details and some of my first pepper pron with my new camera can be seen in my post here.

So once I get used to all the settings on my new camera, you should start to see some better quality pepper pron than what I've been posting this past year.

I've got a LOT of new plants & news to share...I think I'm gonna end up bouncing back and forth between the existing survivors and the new starts, as well as occasionally delving into some of the pepper research & experimentation I have been doing lately, like advanced seed germination techniques (for those hard-to-sprout varieties!)

Hmm, which plant should I start with???...