2018 - The Farm

Well, I've been gone a few years from the board, and away from growing peppers, but looks like life is pushing me back that way again. 
 
I recently (last month) closed on a 25 acre farm in Central Illinois with some primo soil, and I'm going to give a commercial grow a test run. 
 

 

 
From up on the roof, when I was doing some roof repairs on the outbuildings. Not much as far as the eye can see, but cornfields...
 

 
 
Has a 4 stall garage and a horse stable on the property
 

 

 

 
Probably do my grow room upstairs here after I insulate it
 

 
Built some doors for the horse barn and patched the roof last month
 

 

 
 
Anyway just dropped a cold grand on seeds from pepperlover and buckeye, going to hit a greenhouse supplier up for other materials next week.
 
Have plans to build a 30x72' greenhouse in the spring, and a ~1200 sq foot dedicated grow room. Too late really to help with this year's grow, but next year it'll save me a lot of hassle on hardening off. 
 
The greenhouse, I am going to do a piped infloor heat slab, with a horizontal loop geothermal system (I own a mini excavator) that is solar powered. So heating should be nice, uniform, not create heat / cold bubbles, and not dry out plants like forced air would. I build circuit boards in my day job, so I will also build a microcontroller to handle the automated watering system with soil moisture monitors and actuated plumbing valves on the water supply.
 
Also plan on building a "deep winter" greenhouse for year round production. Got blueprints I made from a couple of years back, those are walled on three sides with heavy duty insulation, with the glass wall side angled to face winter solstice, so you can grow in the deep freeze months of the north. In the summer, those get hot enough to use as a natural dehydrator, replace the tables with racks for bulk drying.
 
Only doing a half acre or so of peppers to start with this year, the balance will be put in corn. I can't manage more than that with the labor I have available. (When you start talking thousands of plants, simple tasks like up-potting grow in to hundreds or thousands of man hours...)
 
Going to hire some local kids to help, school has a good ag co-op program for high schoolers, they can get school credit working on local farms. Since the plant out and harvest doesn't conflict too badly with corn, shouldn't have a problem finding labor around here.
 
Anyway, that's the plans.
 
We'll see how it goes.. er.. grows.
 

 

[TrentL]

Only 350 peppers left to go in to the dirt.
 
Pics from my morning daily field walkthrough before I got sick this afternoon. Several hundred more peppers went in after I left today. Wife, younger son, and one employee worked all day on them.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
More cucumbers sprouted, thankfully after the cucumber beetle swarm moved on. Note the gaps? Those seedlings had sprouted in time for the swarm, and were destroyed.
 

 
East field, Tekne Dolmasi planted in gaps in the tomato row. Those peppers produce pods that can weigh a pound a piece so I figured I'd stick them under the tomato trellis, where there had been dead tomato plants. that way I can string the fruit.
 

 

 
There's some ultrahots nestled in there too. Wanted to plant a few away from the main blocks of rows in case of a viral, bacterial, or fungal outbreak in the main pepper rows.
 
Which is probably a good thing as I have *two* peppers (out of 2500) showing signs of either alfalfa mosaic virus or tobacco mosaic virus. I'm going to destroy those two plants tomorrow after documenting it. Two different patterns of mosaic virus visible, one on Tekne Dolmasi and one on Aleppo; Tekne Dolmasi were obtained from Pepperlover, Aleppo from Buckeye. 
 
Fortunately there have been ZERO aphids spotted on plants, so hopefully the virus hasn't been transmitted further. I will burn the plants that showed symptoms and monitor for further issues.
 
I'm also seeing signs of fusarium - over 60 dead or nearly dead seedlings were culled from the transplant stock before it hit the field. 
 
Two plants have died from what may be herbicide drift - both near the road, where sprayers drive past all day long either going to or returning from spraying runs - both 7-Pot Brainstrain. Several others near the road show signs of 2,4-D herbicide drift. I will flag them and harvest them as conventional produce, per USDA NOP rules.
 

 

 

 
We started construction of the first high tunnel end walls yesterday (this is the hardening off / isolation tunnel)
 

 

 

[TrentL]

Vacated spots in the grass from rows of peppers planted out. Only 350 left to go as of this evening.
 

 

 
Hydro plants still sheltered here; These will go in the north field after the pasture plant out is done
 

 
Some of the lower germinating varieties, these will mainly go to isolation house.

 
Busy bees.
 

 
Watermelon field
 

 
I think there's some residual herbicide doing the watermelons a bit of harm. The soil tested in abundance of all macronutrients but they are showing yellowing - I think the post emergent spray on the corn crop last year is still residual in the soil. It's slowing their growth quite a bit.
 

 

 
It also is hurting my germination rates in watermelons. I'm only seeing sporadic sprouting after 9 days.
 

 

Vacated spots in the grass from rows of peppers planted out. Only 350 left to go as of this evening.
 

 

 
Hydro plants still sheltered here; These will go in the north field after the pasture plant out is done
 

 
Some of the lower germinating varieties, these will mainly go to isolation house.

 
Busy bees.
 

 
Watermelon field
 

 
I think there's some residual herbicide doing the watermelons a bit of harm. The soil tested in abundance of all macronutrients but they are showing yellowing - I think the post emergent spray on the corn crop last year is still residual in the soil. It's slowing their growth quite a bit.
 

 

 
It also is hurting my germination rates in watermelons. I'm only seeing sporadic sprouting after 9 days.
 

 

 

[TrentL]

If you can't tell I really, really dislike paperwork. But I'm all caught up on my field layout map, field logs, input lists, crop manifests, prior land use declarations, etc.
 

 
Only thing left to do before my audit is print out a bunch of receipts from Amazon and other vendors I ordered inputs from, document seed purchases and gifts received, explain why I didn't use organic seed stock for the pepper crop, and so on. 
 
"There weren't any of the variety of seeds available as certified organic"
 
"A local seed vendor gifted seeds and I opted to use them in an effort to promote genetic diversity"
 
"These seeds were saved by me personally from previous pepper grows"
 
and so on.
 
 
 

 

[Genetikx]

Talk about a guy that deserves a break. I'm amazed that you can lose hundreds of plants regularly but still have hundreds/thousands still left. Enjoy the weekend

 

[TrentL]

Talk about a guy that deserves a break. I'm amazed that you can lose hundreds of plants regularly but still have hundreds/thousands still left. Enjoy the weekend

 
At the last pepper inventory we still had over 2300 viable organic transplants and 216 hydroponic. I lost over 300 in soil tests, about 80 from various reasons in the indoor grow (calcium lockout on some where they got too much bone meal when I accidentally OD'd a table), and I've lost about 200 during hardening off from wind damage, "oops!" (running a hose over them and breaking them off, dropping them while carrying trays, backing a truck over them...), and natural phenomenon (fusarium, severe sunburn, etc).
 
I planted 6,048 starter tray cells and got 2,500 transplants to go in to the field, so .. not too bad. Would have been a lot better if I'd had good germination rates from vendors, but with 12 complete trays of strikeouts from BE and PL, what can you do? When you plant four trays of Red and Orange Habaneros, two trays of Brown Moruga, and zero come up, and next to them are two trays of Big Sun Habanero and Yellow Fatalii and Reapers that have 90+% germination rates, sure as hell isn't the method of germination that's the problem. Same media. Same lights. Same water regimen. Same everything.
 
Combining that with the mild outbreak of Fusarium in plants that are still in 4" pots, which had sterile growing media, and the discovery yesterday of Mosaic Virus symptoms on two plants, I'm rather disappointed in the quality of seeds I got this year from commercial pepper seed vendors. 
 
I have very limited ability to deal with fungal or bacterial or viral infections, with this being an organic grow. So in the future I will be growing all of my own isolated seed stock. That way I alone control all of the variables. Hopefully Justin will be the vehicle that seed sales go through, he helped me out big time this year; over 600 of the plants now in the dirt came from him with no strings attached, and I'd like to return the favor. 

 

[Genetikx]

Justin is a agood dude just wish the guy could find work/life balance to post here more often. But yea if I need a seed and he's got it, he gets the sale every time. I was very disappointed in PL too.

 

[Ghaleon]

What would the pros and cons be for keeping a pepper plant alive year round?

 

[TrentL]

What would the pros and cons be for keeping a pepper plant alive year round?

 
You've never overwintered them?
 
If you can keep them alive it can give you an early crop. 
 
Or frustrate you to hell and gone dealing with them indoors for months. Aphids, fungus, and worse can strike.

 

[Ghaleon]

I've never grown anything ever. The only other thing I would be interested in growing isn't legal to grow here yet. lol
 
I thought overwintering referred to starting the plant in the winter time so they're a good size when you end up transferring them to outdoors for the summer. How many years can a pepper plant live? Does it reach the fruiting stage and just continue to spit out pods all year round if you keep it in the proper conditions?

 

[TrentL]

I've never grown anything ever. The only other thing I would be interested in growing isn't legal to grow here yet. lol
 
I thought overwintering referred to starting the plant in the winter time so they're a good size when you end up transferring them to outdoors for the summer. How many years can a pepper plant live? Does it reach the fruiting stage and just continue to spit out pods all year round if you keep it in the proper conditions?

 
No overwintering is taking a mature plant back indoors to keep it alive over the winter, then setting it back outdoors again in the spring.
 
Starting plants in the winter time is just something you have to do since most peppers have very long maturity cycles; much longer than most of our North American growing seasons. 
 
In their native habitats most peppers are perennial - they don't die off in the off-season, they just go dormant. You simulate that for overwinters by cutting them back, reducing light to them, keeping them slightly cooler, and holding back water. They will go mostly dormant for months, then when spring comes and you set them outside again, they take off like banshees. 
 
Trying to keep them producing indefinitely will stress the plant and kill it. They need their "downtime", they need to go dormant for a while. Gotta keep the natural life cycle up. 
 
Some folks on this board have 5-6+ year old pepper plants that they've overwintered from one year to another.  I don't know what the record is but I've seen some pepper "trees" here and there.

 

[Devv]

I'm hoping mother nature is nice for the rest of the season Trent.
 
Good luck!

 

[TrentL]

These are the two plants that I'm 99.9% sure have a mosaic virus - either tobacco or alfalfa.
 

 

 

 

 

 
I destroyed both after photographing them. One was a Tekne Dolmasi from PL, one was an Aleppo sourced from BE.
 

 

[TrentL]

Pretty sure this is fusarium wilt. Stalk is destroyed at the root line, roots destroyed and brown, causing the entire plant to wilt and die. 3 transplants plants affected, I dug up the root balls and destroyed all plant material. There were about 60 of these still potted in 4" pots that have been destroyed as well.
 

 

 

 
 

 

[TrentL]

Also when I was putting together a parts list for low cost garden irrigation for some others, going back through my past orders, I came to the revelation that I'd screwed up here pretty good on my own irrigation. I lost track of which hoses were which...
 

 
The blue hose? That I punched hundreds of holes in to for the drip irrigation? That was *supposed* to be my high pressure main line coming off the manifold. The bigger black poly hose? That's a low pressure line that was supposed to be my sub main and/or lateral that the drip irrigation plugged in to.
 
Instead of doing it that way I poked hundreds of holes in the expensive layflat vinyl high pressure hose instead of the relatively cheap oval poly hose. 
 
Kind of an expensive mistake since the expensive high pressure hose was supposed to be reusable year to year to feed water to the fields, and the less expensive poly tubing was supposed to get recycled at the end of the season. 
 
If I were to go back and do it all over again... lol. Would do it so much differently.

Yes, it works fine, but damn, when I make a dumb mistake it's costly.
 

 

[Ghaleon]

Tobacco is evil. lol

 

[Devv]

I've thought to ask this before. Do you ask your help if they smoke?
 
If so they need to wear gloves...

 

[TrentL]

I've thought to ask this before. Do you ask your help if they smoke?
 
If so they need to wear gloves...

 
*I* do, as does my wife, but the thought never occurred to me before that might be a potential source of virus.
 
I thought it had to get spread via insects?

 

[TrentL]

Tobacco is evil. lol

 
Hell, I thought about growing it, for my own supply.

 

[TrentL]

We got the last of the peppers in the organic pasture today. Now, only have ~90 or so to pot up for the isolation grow, and 200 hydro that has to go to the north field.
 

 
My phone gave up the ghost today so no pictures. It died, I thought that was odd because I'd given it a full charge last night. Got home, plugged it in, it showed 89% battery and 84% on the moto mod battery pack.. uhh.. wtf?
 
Start it up and got that screen. Guess it decided it was too hot out today.
 
I ran over 2,000' of drip line today, while my wife and future daughter in law planted the last of the peppers. 250 Turkish Cayenne, and 150 scotch bonnets. 
 
As they were wrapping that up I put together my new manual seeder, and ran out 20x 100' rows of organic Royal Burgundy beans. Those are purple bean pods that turn green when you cook 'em.
 
The seeder didn't do so well with cucumber seeds, so we'll still have to hand sow those.
 
Will roll out some sweet corn and watermelon tomorrow.  Maybe some snap peas too.
 

 

[TrentL]

Oh I did get a few pics on my phone before it died today.
 
After transplanting, the plants need more water than what you'd think with the soil moisture, as the coco root ball dries out faster than the surrounding loam. After a few days the plants start sending out roots in to the loam around them and they become less "needy", but those first 48 hours, gotta give them some moisture. I hadn't ran drip line yet on the transplants from yesterday and this is what I found this morning;
 

 
This is our dripline cart, complete with totally shredded flat tire (not visible, the front right is totally gone). Hey, it's not pretty but it works.
 

 
It was a hotter than a devil's ballsack out there today. 
 

 
I have < 2% body fat now, I've been eating like a pig but I'm out of belt loops now.