I'm probably a bit late here but wanted to chime in anyway.
If you're starting from seed for the first time, try not to plan too far ahead. Growing peppers from seeds is a whole different game to growing plants you've bought. There is a massive learning curve.
You will make mistakes (and if you're anything like me, it will be many, many mistakes) and you will
hopefully learn from them.
If you want to grow monster plants you have to learn how to grow from seeds first. It's going to be hard to do that in one season.
You can read a lot about growing peppers but because of the nature of growing peppers and the many different variables that will impact your specific plants, learning to grow from seed at first and maybe just growing a few normal sized plants this season will teach you a lot. With the knowledge you gain from doing that you will then be able to take it a step further.
In reference to the "many different variables" I mentioned above, here are a few (all questions are rhetorical):
Climate
- Indoor and outdoor heat - this can impact the temperature of your house, for example.
- The length of your growing season due to first/last frosts.
- Risks of heavy wind, rain and other weather.
- Max temperature or minimum temperature - if it gets too cold inside your plants could die. Outdoors, if it gets too hot, your plant may drop flowers.
Equipment
- Grow area - you can use an entire room dedicated to this, a tent or some kind of constructed grow area, a shelf or just a bucket on the floor.
- Lighting (This is something that needs to be researched thoroughly).
- Equipment to manage temperature (heaters, fans).
- Means to manage humidity - ventilation, etc.
- Means of pest control - how would you handle an aphid infestation in all your plants? Is it possible to bring all your plants outside during mid winter to spray them with neem? What happens if your cat decides the tent you spent 4 weeks saving up for feels good on his claws and he decides to scratch it multiple times daily? - The cat part is a true story.
Medium, nutrients and watering
- Media/medium. There are many options and all have to be learned. If you haven't grown from seed before you're learning as you go meaning if you make a mistake then every single plant will suffer because of that mistake.
- Watering plants indoors can be a pain in the butt, a system for it needs to be developed before the seeds are even in the media/medium
- What kind of nutrients would you use? Would you use them with every watering? Would you need to test EC and pH?
Hardening off
- Hardening off plants isn't too much of a process. Hardening off multiple big plants on the other hand will a massive pain in the butt.
Those are just off the top of my head.
All of this comes from personal experience. I was naive (perhaps keen is a better term) in my attempts to grow from seeds and in reality I should have learned how to grow from seeds before jumping head first into the deep end and trying to grow 20 different varieties at once.
Reading some glogs, seeing pictures and watching youtube videos made it seem very easy. Maybe it is easy and I'm just a slow learner. My point is that the concept of starting peppers indoors sounds simple but it quickly becomes overwhelming when you haven't done it before.
There is a lot of information out there but at the end of the day, whatever you read, see, watch or listen to is someones own opinion based on their own experiences.
You have to develop methods that suit
you, your climate,
your environment and
your budget.
Imo, learning to grow from seeds is a solid place to start. If you can learn how to do that over 1 season then you'll be ready to focus on growing big AF plants when the next season arrives.
great advice.