2012 - Wulf's mediocre race to winter!

To set the stage:
It's May, everybody else has been preparing for months, many have their plants ready to go, 20 feet high if they're an inch! Wulf wakes up one morning and says "Hey, you know what I've never done? Grow anything, ever. I think I'll try that." Skip ahead. It's July. Wulf has a kitchen table full of cups and bottles with things growing in them. This time, they're growing intentionally. He thinks "Hey, you know what I should've done a month ago? Put the damn plants outside. I think I'll try that." Skip further ahead, it's August. The purples are the first to start creating flowers, followed by serranos, followed by the jalapenos. The scorps, habs, and peters are disturbingly masculine in their refusal to flower it up. Only a single purple pepper is in the beginning stages of forming.

Tune in next time I have nothing better to do to see if our daring hero has wasted an entire summer, or if the taste of pepper shall be enjoyed before frost hits!

 

[nee]

None of the peppers that I wanted to have grown/ripened, but damnit, I've created food!

It's a great feeling isn't it?
I was exactly the same as you by the sound of it... Never grown anything in my life before, and when I had that lightbulb moment where I suddenly wanted to have a go, it was the end of summer....but I went ahead anyway!

If you've still got it bad, you could always start some indoors under lights. It hasn't got to be anything expensive or fancy. I used 2 flouro tubes and had my first pod whilst still indoors. Plus it gives you something to do over those long winter months!

Have fun!

 

[Wulf]

I actually picked myself up a 600 W HPS bulb for my birthday.

Have yet to set it up, I'm down to a single trinidad scorpion that I haven't chopped all the leaves off of yet. Picked 2 aphids off of it today after thinking it was in the clear.

All my other pruned plants are getting enough leaves back that they could be re-infested at this point... Bah, we'll see how it goes. Hope I don't have to take every last one of em back to sticks just to do some Scorched Earth on the aphids.

 

[Wulf]

I have 1 serrano pepper that's almost ripe, and 1 that's half ripe.

I've pulled off about 7 ripe purples, but they're so small it's hard to do much with them.

Anybody have any suggestions on what to do with very small quantities of peppers? I think I'm gonna eat my first serrano whole and raw, just to know what it is I've created, but then the others are probably going to ripen one at a time. Saving them up to try something with a batch will probably have the early ones starting to go bad, and that's even assuming they all ripen instead of falling off the plant.

 

[Wulf]

I picked and threw out the rest of my purples still on the branch.

Some of them had started to ripen, but they all seemed to hit their expiry date and were getting soft/wrinkled/brown.