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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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DWB said:
Two of my three nursery areas are in an insulated but unheated outdoor area and I'm still practicing and learning. Years ago I learned overwinter pepper plants become very unhappy below 40° F but seemed to do ok at 50°.
 
When I had the two tubs of plants in the smaller nursery area, they stayed above 50 quite easily but we've only had brief dips below freezing so far this year. Just running the 1000W LED from 4 PM to 8 AM took care of that.
 
After moving everything to the larger nursery area it's stayed above 50 without any supplemental heat. I run the 1200W LED on the same schedule. Then, last week we had some very warm days and I noticed a nice growth spurt while the low temp in the area never went below 60°. I suppose that means I should keep the area above 60° for happier plants.
 
So, my question is, what do you shed/garage/basement/greenhouse growers find to be the minimum "happy" temperature for growing out seedlings during winter?
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Running your light 4PM-8AM is a smart move.
My lights are on 2AM-6PM roughly.
When it's cold, I use a space heater on an intermittent timer during dark hours.
If your large nursery area stays above 50, they're safe. I don't think those temps will stall them much, if at all. The soil temp doesn't go that low, because the media contains moisture and its thermal mass retains heat better than air.
It was 38 here last night. My mature plants were fine in pots on the screen porch.
If you're really trying to drive growth, then seedlings will probably thrive more and have a faster metabolism at >60. 
 
CDNmatt said:
 
Yeah that is abit more then I paid for my 20x22's just a few weeks ago.
 
Sinn if you look around via different sellers on Ebay you should be able to find them cheaper..just might take some time to go through all the clutter and look through each listing..so I guess some people consider time money as well ...spose that would depend on the person.
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Yeah I just ordered didn’t even look I got the 20x20 it became a part time job watering last season gonna try it your way [emoji41]


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Mr. West said:
Running your light 4PM-8AM is a smart move.
My lights are on 2AM-6PM roughly.
When it's cold, I use a space heater on an intermittent timer during dark hours.
If your large nursery area stays above 50, they're safe. I don't think those temps will stall them much, if at all. The soil temp doesn't go that low, because the media contains moisture and its thermal mass retains heat better than air.
It was 38 here last night. My mature plants were fine in pots on the screen porch.
If you're really trying to drive growth, then seedlings will probably thrive more and have a faster metabolism at >60. 
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Thanks Mr. West. Keeping it above 50 will be dirt simple. I tightened the area up quite a bit today with an extra curtain at the open end to minimize heat loss. It's 46 outside now and it's already 66 in the grow area just from the grow light being on since 4 PM. I don't think it will be much of a stretch to keep it above 60 except when we have a hard freeze.
 
I do have a thermostatic electric heater. In fact, that's what the french fry lamp is clamped to in my picture. I'll play with that to see how it does but it draws a fuzz over 9 amps of my 20 amp supply when it's kicking out the heat on 1300W setting. OTOH, the nice thing about that is if I need to add heat during the day (my plants night) this won't goof up their dark/light cycles.
 
The soil temps were 57ish yesterday  We had a warm day so I ran the heat lamp 10 out of the last 20 and brought them up to 77-79. Not sure how long that will hold but it only cost me an extra 30¢ to do it.
 
My Masterblend kit arrived yesterday so I mixed me up some this morning. One of these tubs got a half gallon of fertilizer solution. The other tub got a half gallon of plain ol' well water. Here's what they look like now. I'll post up more pictures in a few days or when I see the difference it makes.
 
 
Fed with a half gallon of Masterblend. 1/25/19
 
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Not fed
 
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skullbiker said:
It will be interesting to see the difference in the two tubs. Which Masterblend formulation are you using? And, did you add anything else to it?


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I got the Tomato & Vegetable kit with MasterBlend 4-18-38, calcium nitrate 15.5-0-0 and epsom salts. Per recipe it mixes out to 19.5-18-38 with all the micros that are needed for hydroponic feeding. That's all I put in the mix. It specifies the same feed mix for veg-ing peppers and "nutrient hog" tomatoes.
 
There seems to be some color change in the fed plants already but I'll give it a few days and see what happens before I do anything else. I fed two tubs, gave plain water to one and left the tub with the youngest plants alone. In retrospect, I shouldn't have given the half gallon of plain water to the plants in the control tub.  None of them are uptaking very quickly and I'm not sure how quickly that should happen.
 
These babies are in 28 quart sterilites, 24 plants to the tub. A whole bunch of the half gallons I poured in yesterday are still laying in the tubs.  I guess it's because they're in cool conditions but they just don't need much water and I give them very little. Just some light top watering prior to yesterday but they were thoroughly soaked when transplanted into the bags.
 
I bottom feed/top soak large 5 to 15 gallon potted pepper plants with fertilizer solution several times a year but that's quick and dirty and in the summer heat. They don't sit in the water for a long time.
 
I'm starting to get the walkways filled in with layers of horse manure and leaves. Big job. Kinda like sweeping the sun off the sidewalk since the stuff melts down so quickly.
 
The thing on the left is what will support a bunch of Kentucky Wonder heirloom pole beans. My 9 year old girldog is always on a diet so she gets expensive frozen green beans in every meal. A dang 24 pound box of them costs over $30 now so I'm gonna grow a bunch and dehydrate them for her.
 
TEgp8mZ.jpg
 
I lucked out finding last year bales in October for under $2. Nobody looking to make high quality hay got to bale around here this year because of too much rain since Memorial Day. It never dries out. My friend who gave me the loads of compost still hasn't been able to bale his own hay. He's paying $8 for imported feed store bales for his sheep and horses.
 
We're supposed to have our first hard freeze tonight so I've been adding some extra heat in preparation. Yesterday I started thinking about a better way to utilize the heat of the french fry light and hauled in a hillbilly heat sink. I guess it works fairly well. Running the light for an hour heats the stack up nicely. A shot with an IR temp gun says 280° or so on the faces of the middle two while the bottom block below the spacer bricks only goes up to 100 or so.
 
Come back after the light has been off for an hour and the stack still reads above 80° no matter where I shoot. Seems like good conservation to me.
 
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Awesome DW great idea...We used to do this in our prospector tents at nights on our longer hunting/fishing  trips...We would heat up a bunch of big stones in the fire and bring them inside normally in the middle of the night when the tent would cool down.
 
Do you have that bad boy on a timer or something?? could easily keep it warm all night having it go on and off a few times
 
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