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2018 - The Farm

Well, I've been gone a few years from the board, and away from growing peppers, but looks like life is pushing me back that way again. 
 
I recently (last month) closed on a 25 acre farm in Central Illinois with some primo soil, and I'm going to give a commercial grow a test run. 
 
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From up on the roof, when I was doing some roof repairs on the outbuildings. Not much as far as the eye can see, but cornfields...
 
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Has a 4 stall garage and a horse stable on the property
 
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Probably do my grow room upstairs here after I insulate it
 
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Built some doors for the horse barn and patched the roof last month
 
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Anyway just dropped a cold grand on seeds from pepperlover and buckeye, going to hit a greenhouse supplier up for other materials next week.
 
Have plans to build a 30x72' greenhouse in the spring, and a ~1200 sq foot dedicated grow room. Too late really to help with this year's grow, but next year it'll save me a lot of hassle on hardening off. 
 
The greenhouse, I am going to do a piped infloor heat slab, with a horizontal loop geothermal system (I own a mini excavator) that is solar powered. So heating should be nice, uniform, not create heat / cold bubbles, and not dry out plants like forced air would. I build circuit boards in my day job, so I will also build a microcontroller to handle the automated watering system with soil moisture monitors and actuated plumbing valves on the water supply.
 
Also plan on building a "deep winter" greenhouse for year round production. Got blueprints I made from a couple of years back, those are walled on three sides with heavy duty insulation, with the glass wall side angled to face winter solstice, so you can grow in the deep freeze months of the north. In the summer, those get hot enough to use as a natural dehydrator, replace the tables with racks for bulk drying.
 
Only doing a half acre or so of peppers to start with this year, the balance will be put in corn. I can't manage more than that with the labor I have available. (When you start talking thousands of plants, simple tasks like up-potting grow in to hundreds or thousands of man hours...)
 
Going to hire some local kids to help, school has a good ag co-op program for high schoolers, they can get school credit working on local farms. Since the plant out and harvest doesn't conflict too badly with corn, shouldn't have a problem finding labor around here.
 
Anyway, that's the plans.
 
We'll see how it goes.. er.. grows.
 
 
My BB seeds were from a THP seed train. I don't recall who supplied them but I never pull seeds from someone I don't know. Anyhow just rubs me the wrong way that this is the first time I ever grew a hybrid of this nature, (I don't know if it's fair to throw "corporate" or "gmo" around) and ended up with weird plants, pods and seeds. No doubt I got some true BB in shape and heat. But think I'll just stick with zapotecs and the like tho.
 
Orekoc said:
Ouch, that sucks about the Bacterial leaf spot.  Hope it didn't spread anywhere.
 
Oh, not that it lessens your pain on the Reapers being stolen, but there are whole vineyards being robbed in Europe.  This has been going on for several years.  Tons of grapes stolen.  https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-45720218
 
 
 
The bacterial leaf spot only affected numex; as well as a handful of tomato plants directly downwind of them. There were several other varieties of peppers (both annuum and chinense) in proximity or close physical contact which were completely unaffected; sweet anaheim, 7-pot brainstrain, sweet french bell, pimiento crystal, and santa fe grande all within that block adjacent to numex, but none of those showed any symptoms of leaf spot.
 
However, we found today after some wind-breakage yesterday, that Aleppo are about 60% (3/5ths) infected with fusarium, so those are coming out too.
 
Genetikx said:
My BB seeds were from a THP seed train. I don't recall who supplied them but I never pull seeds from someone I don't know. Anyhow just rubs me the wrong way that this is the first time I ever grew a hybrid of this nature, (I don't know if it's fair to throw "corporate" or "gmo" around) and ended up with weird plants, pods and seeds. No doubt I got some true BB in shape and heat. But think I'll just stick with zapotecs and the like tho.
 
Well one thing folks often overlook when wanting to grow pure-whatever, is the benefits of landrace.
 
Like the pathogens above, how selective they are with very specific pepper plants. 
 
Over time (years) as we allow plants to open pollinate with one another we will diversify the genetic pool - crosses will happen. Plants which are susceptible to various native pathogens we have will be culled. Ideally I'd end up (10 or so years from now) with a few varieties that have a much wider genetic diversity (and much wilder unstable pheno type) which are resilient to the various pathogens we have. 

There's studies in Japan being done (still) which are aimed at isolating genes for r. solanacearum resistance. I'm not going to worry about genetic isolation, I'll do it the old fashioned way. Select the survivors who aren't showing signs of infection and plant those; while still maintaining healthy crop rotations and field sanitization to prevent massive buildup of pathogens in the soil. One of the nice things about ground cover is when we cut plants down at the end of the year, we can scoop up all the debris with snow shovels, pile it in to the loader bucket, dump it in a big ass pile, and burn it, if there's infections present.
 
I don't view off pheno as a bad thing. Those numex plants, for instance; off pheno plants crossed with purple jalapeno, throwing purple pods, weren't affected by the bacterial leaf spot NEARLY as badly as those dropping on-pheno numex pods. 
 
I'll continue to grow stock in isolation from 2019 and on, but every year I'll be continuously developing out open pollinated crops as well. Like I said, landrace selection and getting a wider genetic diversity is a good thing, as if you DO get hit with a pathogen your chances of it only hitting a subset of the plants is much better; in that case, you just don't harvest the susceptible ones for seed, and you have a higher chance of getting a resilient variety over time. 
 
It'll be interesting to see how it goes. So far this year I only had three major pathogens hit; s. sclerotiorum hit early and took a hundred or so plants that didn't get myco treatment, while fusarium and bacterial leaf spot much later in the year.  But in each case it was isolated to VERY specific types of plants. 
 
Disease resistance is always going to be one of the big factors moving forward. Some varieties I try will drop dead from various pathogens, while others? Might still thrive and be resistant to them.
 
Well, all products on the store are now marked "sold out" for the year, we're starting tear-down next week. Hopefully I still have enough time to build one or two high tunnels this fall. Gotta get the plants out before we can start on it though.
 
With 2 different pathogens in the field now (bacterial leaf spot and fusarium) it's time to cull the plants and clean up the mess. We got the numex hauled out this week, Monday we start on the Aleppo and MOA scotch bonnets which were symptomatic for verticilium/fusarium (not exactly sure which, without a lab test, irrelevant, same sanitation required for either).
 
I'll be drying about 4 bushels per day in my dehydrators (ordered two more). Will be doing it under cottage kitchen rules (which means prep at home, washing, slicing). Kind of a pain in the ass, to haul it all home to process, but .. whatever. I have two 10-rack stainless steel 1000w dehydrators that are hungry for pods and a room wired with 60 amps, so I can add a third if I need.
 
Still hunting around for a grinder that can do volume. Found this Chinese video and OH MY GOD THAT IS A LOT OF FLAKE.
 
Processing about 2 bushels every other day in to flake now
 
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Trying to race frost, even with lots of pod drop (from being over ripe) we are still pulling 1+ bushel per row off the plants, but I can only process so much.
 
Also have to do it at home, to be legal under cottage kitchen laws.
 
You should smell my house.
 
OMFG.
 
It's like.. absolutely amazing.
 
 
Ruid said:
I'm glad I got an order in before the whole site said sold out.
 
You Tom? If so, yours was the last order of the year to get fulfilled.
 
ShowMeDaSauce said:
So does this meen you will have some Aleppo powder for sale? I might need to try some to compare to mine.
 
Yes although I don't know at what price it will be yet, still trying to figure out what our costs are. Right now we're in a rush to pull in as many pods as we can, frost in the forecast tonight, tomorrow, and the next night, with a kill frost Monday.
 
We're turning the 30x70 building in to an impromptu cooler, all the doors are open to cool the 30x70' concrete slab as much as possible, for reaction mass, to keep the building cool for a week or so (after monday looks like temps climb back up slowly).
 
So cooling the entire building, pulling in all pods we can this weekend, and hopefully I'll be able to process as much of them as I can before they turn. Only got room in the deep freeze for about a bushel and a half, but we're still pulling in 1 bushel per row (roughly) as we pull plants.
 
After Monday I keep the ladies on processing while me and another guy start field tear-down. Get all the plants removed, ground cover up, t-posts pulled and stacked, etc. I started pulling the cucumber trellising this week - thinking I had more time until frost, but they changed the forecast dramatically for the worse this morning at 1148 AM.. so.. now we're just in pod pulling mode
 
HydroPepper said:
Wild guess - how many chillies do you think you have grown this year Trent?
 
Oh man, I dunno. We had 10x as many as we actually harvested hit the ground. The vast majority of 2500+ plants never got picked, once. When I was ripping out numex there were plants with hundreds of pods on them.
 
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Based on a rough estimate of 150 pods per plant (which might be very much on the low side since some plants had 500+ pods on each one, criolla sella, orange thai, etc) we had north of 375,000 peppers in the field. I'd wager it was closer to 1/2 million peppers.
 
When we were pulling out yellow fatalli plants to harvest them destructively, the ground cover was solid yellow with pods that had fallen off of the plants. We just never got that far in to the rows to even pick them, not once.
 
I was able to fill 1 bushel of Aji Limo in about 30 minutes yesterday - off of three plants. And there was probably 2x more than that which I didn't take off those plants because they were soft, or had already dropped off the plant.
 
 
SpeakPolish said:
Half a forking million, you could burn a state with that many peppers
 
LOL yeah dude when I was culling plants yesterday the knees of my jeans were soaked through and bright red w/ pepper juice, from pods that had hit the ground. My dogs didn't want anything to do with me for the first time, ever, when I got home last night. They took one smell and backed WAY away. (Each has had a 'taste' of peppers and decided they don't like them one bit)
 
ETA: I broke our white husky Neko of chewing on wooden furniture legs and railings by rubbing the inside of moruga scorpions pods on all of the wood. Never had one more incident where he chewed on wood. Not once.
 
 
^ also works to keep raccoons out of your garbage. Just toss a few pods in on top of the garbage and they won't ever come back to the cans, ever again.
 
Last time I threw a bag of freezer-burned Butch T's on and later that night I heard the raccoon who got in to the garbage SCREAMING. It was horrible sounding, but served him right. He'd taken the whole bag back to his hidey hole and when he got in to them, freaked the hell out. The last time I heard him, he was about a half mile away and still screeching. Just this godawful shrieking sound running through the woods out back until it finally got so far away I couldn't hear it anymore.
 
That was the last time coons got in to the garbage this year.
 
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