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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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A few more details:
 
Potting mix I made myself:
 
10L coir
1L perlite
1L vermiculite
 
 
Lamp distance is about 5 cm, so that 399 umol at 10cm is definitely higher at 5cm but I don't know how to calculate it. Let's just say that I think these lamps are providing a sufficient amount of the correct type of light for vegetative growth. I've got two more rigs for the shelf below this one, but they aren't ready yet (missing a few adapters). Should have those two rigs up and going within a few days.
 
After a few days of the plants growing in my sauna, things started to get humid and smelly. Today, I went and bought a UFO exhaust fan from a grow shop just around the corner.
 
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The grow room is still in its very beginning stages.
 
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Seedlings are looking very happy under the 24 hour light.
 
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Yeah, we're just a country full of people growing chiles in our saunas!
 
Thanks, I'm hoping for a summer like we had last year - over 100 days of sunshine and very warm. Still, it's almost mid-June before it's safe to put stuff outside overnight - often still does drop to 4-5C at night during the first week of June. My idea is to get an 8-10 week start indoors on the peppers - not too early or they get diseased and I run out of space.  I let them grow indoors for about 6 weeks after sprouting, then I literally cut them down to half their height so that they have a couple weeks of opportunity to branch out while still being indoors and are short, fat and robust when I move them outdoors.
 
Last summer, we dealt with heavy rains, wind storms and finally a long drought + heat wave. Dealt with plants being flooded, knocked off their growing shelves and finally our drip irrigation system was going through 170L of water per day just to keep things alive. Once, I accidentally pumped a nitrogen-heavy liquid fertilizer through the irrigation system after the plants were already flowering and they all dropped blooms and went into shock for about 3 weeks before recovering. I was growing in various sized pots and tubs with normal, bagged garden soil and expanded clay pebbles at the bottom of the pots for drainage. Soil was heavy, compacting very badly and did not retain moisture at all. Still, we managed to have a very successful season due to sheer determination.
 
This year, I'm really thinking of going pretty much full coir or coir+vermiculite and using specilized coir-hydroponic nutrients. For chiles, eggplants, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers and zucchini I am hoping to standardise on 12L pots and matching cloches that will be used at the beginning of the season. Hoping to cut my daily water consumption in half, it was just ridiculous last summer. We did have a backyard jungle, though. During the drought, the nearby pond dried up and frogs actually started visiting our backyard because there was always water dripping somewhere.
 
Last year was crap for growing for a lot of us, but, speaking personally, we had three fantastic Spring/Summer/Fall sequences in a row beforehand. Sooner or later you gotta pay for the meal! Hoping for better this season (say I one the eve of a forecast 18 inches of snow and ensuing blizzard)....
 
These are growing really fast now. This photo taken just now is 23 days since we planted the seeds! They have been under lamps 24-7 since they popped.
 
I may have given them some floramicro and floramato a few times already :-) I put 5ml of each into 10 liters of tap water.
 
 
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Did a bit of potting up today, the roots have been growing beautifully in the coir-perlite-vermiculite mix.
 
17 celcius outside today! We took the dill, lettuce and rucola outside to the planter boxes to make room for the chilis in the larger pots.
 
 
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DWB said:
My maternal grandparents emigrated from Finland many moons ago. They wound up in Upper Michigan. Pretty much the same kind of place, I think.
 
Yes, I have understood that there are a lot of Finnish people there in the UP. Did you ever get up there to visit?
 
OK, the internodal distance is really short with these 6400K lights.
 
New leaves grow UNDER the previous set of leaves in some cases.
 
Should I get a few 3000K lights at this point or just let it be?
 
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