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.
