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2019 Hay Bale Pepper Patch

I've been a member for a while but never posted a grow log. My usual garden is too boring for that. I use 20-30 pots and overwinter my mama plants in a hillbilly winter shelter. Our ground here isn't good for in soil gardening and I've not been enthused enough to undertake the work and expense to build raised beds.
 
Now I have my peppers working the way I want and have the need for a much larger grow to supply a project. The main peppers I'll grow will be reaper, douglah and fatalii. For a couple of years I'll do hay bale gardens and heap tons of organic trash into the area. I have monumental amounts of pine straw, oak leaves and bonfire ash every year to dump in the walkways. I think this will do a world of good to make this new garden area mo'betta for eventual in ground growing.
 
I closed off a 38x38 patch in the NE field that gets full sun. This is the area I chose. The big painted guy is my fertilizer supplier.
 
The little painted guy is my running buddy and load inspector.
 
 
 

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I'm really glad to hear she's doing fine! It's always a relief to see them get back to normal after surgery!
 
I also have two buckets of solid black soldier fly compost they've been making for me for a couple of years. It's amazing how much those critters can eat. By the time I clean out what's in the bottoms of the 15 gallon buckets the 5's sit in, I should have a full 10 gallons of this stuff. I guess I need to spend it and start over next season. Disgusting stuff but it should be really rich. I bet the pepper plants will love it.

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I finally removed the solid compost from one of my BSF composters. This is what I was able to dump out of the inner 5 gallon bucket/bag. The butterfly showed up minutes after dumping the stuff into the bin and has been back for more many times today. Not exactly nectar but whatever turns his crank is OK with me.


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I drained the liquids from the bottom of the composter, rinsed out the 5 gallon inner paint strainer bag and buckets into another 15 gallon bucket and used this to soak some well finished grass clipping/horse manure compost in these bins.

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I'm still not sure what to do with this stuff but I'm thinking I'll let it all dry, mix it well and use it to top dress my plants this year. It should be some really wicked fertilizer.

I'm using the large pile of my more conventional compost (shown in post 965 previous page) to dig into my planting holes this year.
 
Glad your dog is OK man! I didn't read back far enough to see what happened with the lawyers and the explosion you were talking about. I will have to get in here and work back a few pages.
 
Glad your dog is OK man! I didn't read back far enough to see what happened with the lawyers and the explosion you were talking about. I will have to get in here and work back a few pages.

Thank you. Great to hear from you Andy. Our regular vet removed her stitches last Tuesday and was amazed at how far she came along in such a short time. It was brutal ordeal. The incision in her belly was 10". She's off restriction now and getting herself back to business as usual. Good thing. I don't know how I would manage to work another jungle without her help and supervision. Next step is we go back to Auburn for post-op baseline imaging studies. Regular follow-ups will confirm the malignancy didn't escape the tumor and she will remain cancer free.

Not much progress on the explosion yet. The attorney sent our evidence to a materials analyst in Atlanta in August. By late September this guy finished the preliminary report and said the wheel was clearly defective in manufacture with undeniable physical evidence it was the one and only cause of this thing blowing my thumb off. He told the attorney he may confidently begin filings whenever he wanted because he had all the dirt and the closer he looked, the more he found. Attorney decided to crank it up a notch and had him examine the sister wheel and a redesigned wheel to add defective design to the case. Then the expert and most of his staff got hit by the delta corona, and then it was the holidays and then it was the rest of the company down with omicron and yadda, yadda. Bottom line is he's been screwing the pooch ever since. This engineer needs to provide his work and return all the evidence very soon.. We're in no hurry but spending nearly year on analysis doesn't go well to reinforce a credible sense of urgency. Especially since no notice of our intent has been revealed to even to final link in the supply chain.

But, a benefit of the delay comes as I'm continually learning how badly this thing hurt me. The harder I work during the day, the more it throbs all night. It does seem to be a forever injury.
 
I got everything fairly well shaded, mulched and planted by early last week. I hit it with a little of low chlorine 18-7-11, microbes and I'm trying hard to get everything well established before I have to leave again next week. Hard to do when planting so late. The weather here is awful. No rain except for the quick splashes we get when the tornado fronts blast through and it's beastly hot already. Even though I started hardening them the day we got home from Auburn and I did this more than two weeks before putting anything into the ground, the heat is very hard on them. I wish I could have put them out a month earlier when the weather was more reasonable. Even that would have been late by my usual standards.

So far I've only lost one set out tomato and one nice YNBS pepper in a 5 gallon fabric pot I had in reserve. Both went to pure limp lettuce mode overnight Sunday and I couldn't save them. Odd thing is I gave my brother all my leftover tomatoes, 6 nice peppers and some squash plants Sunday afternoon. More evidence that no good deed goes unpunished.

I'm hoping we'll actually get more than a drop of the substantial rain they're saying we may get this weekend. We'll see. Otherwise, I have some simple irrigation set up for my wife who will be home alone with my crew.

Everything isn't quite as miserable as it looks in the picture because I planted into fairly deep depressions for more practical use of water. Regardless, I'm not impressed, even considering such a late start.

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The bean wall is coming along. One of my planted peppers looks like it's in danger. This picture shows some extra shade I put up over one area to see what goes on.

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A good thing is all my mama plants are doing OK even though for the first time ever, aphids got into my hillbilly winter shelter. I thought I was gonna lose one of my 2015 model cardi scorpions and a 2015 reaper. But they all made it. I have flowers on many and a bunch of pods on my YNBS mama plant. That one lived in the nursery all winter but still got aphids. I just found them and killed them much quicker. I guess I must do better pest control before overwintering next time. Just when you think you have it all figured out, ya get blasted.
 
Finally getting around to posting a 2022 season synopsis


Last year was wacked out. I didn't post much about it and only took a few pictures. I wasn't impressed. No pests except for a rabbit. I couldn't trap it and Cody couldn't catch it even though he went to the garden to chase it every morning before daylight. This little monster destroyed 8 of my pepper plants. No bug pests all year and weeds weren't a problem until the Chamberbitter started the annual party. Disgusting weed. I hit the garden with pre-emergent earliy this year in hopes of eradicating it soon. The plants were weird. I guess arbitrarily slowing them down to deal with Lia's problem took a toll. They were doing very well from the get-go on the usual 18 hours of light but by March they were down to 10 hours since I was trying to keep small but healthy. The weather was crazy, too. Way too hot for a very long time. The last week in April when I was gone on another trip, we finally got some rain. Eight inches in four days. Then the heat really set in hard and no more rain. Then it started raining again. Another eight inches in a week. Rinse and repeat. The plants really didn't like the alternating drought/flood weather cycle and the beastly heat.

From June:

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The plants did produce a good yield of large and wrinkly YNBS pods that are always super hot and delicious. They're my favorite pepper.


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The fortunate thing about the weather is the season extended to shortly before Christmas . I got the plants through two frost events including one when the temp in the garden went to 26° for a few. The thing that came in for Christmas was guaranteed to be too much so I knocked everything down and saved what I could. We had quite a few nights in the teens and a couple of day/nights when it never got up to freezing. Thanks to the longer season I ended up with a fuzz over 20 kilos of pepper powder so I must have picked around 100 kilos.

The tomatoes got to 6' or so right quick and flowered like crazy but never set a single fruit. Some plants turned into real freaks of nature. This from August.

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I found 3 green beans in the Blue Lake bean wall before the plants died off in August. I suppose they didn't care for the weather. Usually they produce until freeze kills them. The Blue Lake bush beans produced fairly well until Cadi the horse decided to be a bad boy and mangled the crop.

We've made a lot of Zucchini but the plants were done early and a second crop didn't work at all. The North Georgia Candy Roaster winter squash made very few fruit but an August planting of Butternut squash did very well.

I'm working on this year and will post about it as we go along. I adopted a modified plan for this year due to upcoming events. It will be a weird season too. Lots going on again and the family takes priority.

The good news is Lia's quarterly followup scans have all showed she's cancer free. Nothing from the adrenal pheo tumor got loose. Her next appointment with Auburn is April 10. The bad news is I found a new tumor in the back of her back leg. I took her to our regular vet the next day who examined and tested and learned only it's not a lipoma or mast cell. The doctors at Auburn will find out what it is and we'll take it from there.

More bad news is we found a fast growing tumor on the outside of Cody's right elbow in January. I took him in the next Monday. The doctor thought it was certainly a lipoma. At nearly 8 years old, we were planning to neuter him this winter anyway so our vet did the neuter and took the tumor the next day. The worst news is the tumor was a soft tissue sarcoma. Very low grade with super low mitotic figures but the pathology showed not so great margins which means tentacles and tendrils and lots of bad cells.

The good news is we'll be in Auburn week after next for evaluation. This is to plan for a treatment on their $4 million radiosurgery machine. State of the art and only one of three available for veterinary usage. This thing is so precise with real-time on-board CT they can literally take out bad cells one at the time. It may be breathtakingly expensive but we don't much care. In most of the world the treatment is hope the tumor doesn't grow back but they generally do and much more aggressively and dangerous. From there it's amputation. Not gonna happen to one of ours. I want it over now. He's young. 8th birthday is May 1. And never mind he's my service dog.
 
I found a couple more pictures.

I don't think many of the plants ever made it much over 5' tall. Definitely no jungle. This is from July.

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More tasty treats. They're sweet and fruity and they give you a minute to savor the flavor before the heat gets you. I love to slice them up and eat on tomato, avocado, swiss cheese and mayo sandwiches. One of my favorite things about summer.

Edit: I forgot one of the most important components of my summer sandwiches. Vidalia onion.

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I hardly dare to ask but... what does YNBS stand for? My guess is the Y stands for yellow so that's 25% already...

Those peppers surely look beautiful, massive and somewhat intimidating...
 
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Oh jeez, I'm guilty of one thing so many people around here do. Use pepperspeak alphabet soup assuming everybody knows what I mean.

I do, however, proclaim a certain amount of immunity since I have referred to this lovely pepper many times in this thread as Yellow Naga Brainstrain. Or other spellings or misspellings :P
 
I did try finding the full name in the thread but it's 50 pages and didn't read all of it 😳 I most likely missed it. I will read the entire thread again when I have a bit more time 😀
 
Hey DW, good to see you posting. Sorry to hear about the four-legged kids, but wishing the best for them. The YNBS look badass, as usual.

Best of luck with your garden and all that's going on.
 
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