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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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Thanks y'all. Jungle 2.0 should be a lot easier now that I know what to expect from it this year.
 
@CaneDog. I only put eight of my mother plants into the hillbilly winter shelter this year. In past years I have stuffed it with 20-30 plants but I was lazy this time and just cut them down to 5 and 8 gallon buckets. I don't believe the yellow scorpion was one that made the cut. In retrospect, I think that may have been a huge mistake. I was pissed off at the plant because it never did make another yellow pod. Now I will always wonder if I'd given it more years, would it have possibly morphed into a plant that produced red and yellow pods at the same time? Ha, now it's just another one of those things that will always make me say a bad word when I think of it.
 
I've been thinking about some of the factors that contributed to the jungle last year. Although I didn't use a whole bunch of fertilizer, I think the type of fertilizer I used did a lot. High potassium. Much higher than I've ever used before. What set me off on this was the 19.5-18-38 Masterblend hydro fertilizer I used for the seedlings that did so well. That stuff is impressive. For the outdoor fertilizer I started with a locally mixed, low chlorine 18-7-11 called Blueberry Special. That was my base and I built from there.
 
When doing the initial planting, I used a small handful of the base mix along with a good bit of compost downhole for each plant. After that, I modified the Blueberry Special with k-mag and phosphorus to come up with a final mix of 5.66-7.34-16.03. Mucho potassium. I fed the 1000 ft² of pepper plants 4½ lbs on May 19 and another 4½ lbs on June 24.  After that, the plants went wild. They were some cray-cray husky-healthy plants. I see another indicator now. Cadi the horse loves the deadwood from these plants. They're a treat like alfalfa for him. To me, that says even these scrap parts are full of nutrition.
 
I did get a good yield from the patch. The final tally was 364 pounds cleaned and sliced and processed through the dehydrators. It could have been more but a lot of the stuff I stripped and stored under tarps to save from the freeze from hell ended up going to waste. I was burned out and had to shift priorities to other things (like saving our gravely injured 15 year old kitty cat) so I kinda gave up peppers and only finished off what was already sorted and stored in the freezigerator.
 
The good news is Becky the cat made it. She's doing fine after surviving a brutal attack on Nov 17 that crushed her illium (pelvis) to powder on both sides and completely disconnected one of her hips from her body. She just took her first run in the outside air this week. Although she did teach me how damn fast she can run now, she'll never be the same and may never climb another tree but she's happy and healthy and in love with life. Still in rehab but gaining strength and getting better every day.
 
Are you up to trying new peppers ,eh. Got a good one for ya, Haskorea pepper, that is. You could grow it into a freaking tree. It makes great a powder. Just let me know if you want seeds. I have plenty to go around [emoji16].


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DWB, on 01 Jul 2019 - 9:07 PM, said:
 
I started this pile of tree trimmings and yard waste in 2015. It began life as a 12' pile resulting from massive front yard tree trimming project and I've continually added to it ever since. Mostly hardwood trimmings but some pine, cedar and other softwood stuff too. It's an ill-fated burn pile cuz it's in a place that's not really great for incineration due to the canopy above. The pile has been built up to 12' tall many times and melted back down to this height over and over again. There's gotta be a bunch of nicely rotted material at the bottom. Probably a few yards of it since this pile is perennially wet and forever in the shade. Maybe in the winter I'll dismantle it for a while and haul the good stuff to the garden for top dressing.
 
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Here's what's left of the 5 year pile. I was right, there's definitely several yards of great garden gold underneath with bonus pH adjustment on the side.
 
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PtMD989 said:
Are you up to trying new peppers ,eh. Got a good one for ya, Haskorea pepper, that is. You could grow it into a freaking tree. It makes great a powder. Just let me know if you want seeds. I have plenty to go around [emoji16].


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Thanks but I have varieties of pepper seeds I'll never get around to growing if I live to be 100.
 
DWB said:
34 jungle plants have survived the entire winter with no help at all. After I took count early last week I went ahead and banked up the survivors with rotting leaves since we were forecast to have a few very cold nights. We had three freezing nights with two down below 27°. Once that was done I uncovered the plants and they're fine. Before too long I'll finish snapping down the dead wood, pull the posts and reconstruct the support structure. Initially I'll use single posts at each end and run one rope down the center of the rows to hang the frost covers on. For the next month or so, I'll probably just bank up the leaves again when it's forecast to freeze.
 
 
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I learned something about in-ground overwintering in February. Although the plants survived all of the freeze and frost throughout the winter (including the many hours of mid-20's in early November) I learned they cannot tolerate lack of light. I banked them up again in early February but left it this way for about two weeks. This killed all but three that I didn't cover with leaves.
 
It's just as well. I would have killed them anyway. My friends in China began keeping me up to speed in mid-January so I knew the truth about the corona virus. After watching the mis-management and listening to the continual bullshit in this country, I decided it would be much better to dedicate my garden space to growing food for the family. Veggies may scarce this year with so many crops expected to go to rot with no migrants to pick them.
 
I do have my mother plants and will hopefully get back to some serious pepper growing next year. In the meantime, the soil improvement project is still in high gear and crop rotation can't be a bad thing.
 
To those I promised seeds and other pepper stuff: I didn't forget. I'll have them to you in time for next year. Sorry.
 
Mr.joe said:
A disappointment to hear the jungle is gone. I'm betting your food crop will flourish and be more useful for day to day eating. Hopefully you are staying healthy because that's what really matters today.
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Yes, disappointing but stuff happens. At least nature, inexperience and ignorance handled the hard choices for me. We've been taking the extra precautions to stay healthy for a long time now since we knew what was coming. We're also staying safe as possible. Living more than 20 miles from any and every town and an eighth mile off the road behind three wooded areas adds to that. As does having a good arsenal, three dry boxes full of ammo and a high level of self sufficiency :P
 
I truly hope everyone at THP stays safe and healthy. This world ain't gonna be right for a very long time.
 
skullbiker said:
You can still grow some good edible peppers for stuffing and roasting. I have several varieties going right now.
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I've never had success with growing those kinds of peppers. I had a few sweet pepper plants and others less than superhot and they were totally consumed by jungle. Simply disappeared. I was reminded of that this week when I found some of those plant tags.
 
CaneDog said:
Seems all the hard work is really going to pay off for you in the current situation.  That's great.  
 
Good luck with jungle v2.0 - I'm hoping to see plenty of pictures of plenty of produce!
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I've poured another foot of manure and rotting leaves into the rows over the winter and all the mass of the pepper crop went right back to the soil. Even the pepperwood is crushed down into it. I have huge piles of compost and humus and easily 10 gallons of BSF juice. The 15 gallon BSF buckets are still full of larvae and I've been feeding them all winter. Not sure how that works but I see them come to the surface in a huge roiling mass every so often. I suppose I'll load up the foul juice in my microbe sprayer and put it onto the rows. I'm using the same rows with the 6' spacing this year. We finally got ¾" rain last night after only a lousy inch since January. More to come over the next few days so I hope the pepper patch is ready to rock and roll with a whole new purpose.
 
PtMD989 said:
Hey DWB, are you keeping the garden the same size as last year?


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Yes. The plants will be widespread using the same rows and many will be ground dwellers but I'll be using all 1500 ft².
 
Hey DW!
 
Glad to read you have the program in order. I for one am glad I live 7 miles out of a small town, have fantastic dogs, and everything else you mentioned above inline ;)
 
Stay safe buddy! And that goes for everyone!
 
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