glog 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.
 
 

 

[CaneDog]

Looking sharp, DWB Seems like everyone's getting an upgrade around your place, peppers and people both.

 

[DWB]

Looking sharp, DWB Seems like everyone's getting an upgrade around your place, peppers and people both.

The new winter shelter has almost 2½ times more floor space plus a lot more potential shelf space than the old way. This best part is it's all so much more accessible. I'll finally have room to dig up some great plants from the patch to keep over the winter.

The new truck is a definite upgrade for Cody. He loves it. This truck has the electric sliding passthrough in the back window. He can safely hang his head out of that and enjoy the outside air.

 

[DWB]

The patch is doing well. Producing too much, still making babies and the bees are working hard on the flowers.

We had our first frost warning last night. I deployed some winter covers to protect my seed plants and some plants in the patch I want to dig up and keep for the winter. This is the only end of season heroics planned for the year. I didn't see any frost this morning but it did get down to 40.6° inside the cab of one of the trucks.

I love my yellow peppers but there's nothing prettier than a bunch of red and brown peppers. The ones on the right are the Canadian red cardi scorpions. I'm pleased with those. I put one plant out in the patch. It's a big, sturdy plant that's making a lot of correct but small pods. They have proper taste and heat.

Very much unlike their disaster of cardi yellow scorpions. I moved all of them out by the back fence all by themselves a long time ago. I did find a use for the rather large sweet and mild fruit they produce. I slice them up and add to my salads. Nice sweet peppers. Other than that, they're useless. I won't be collecting any seeds or keeping the plants over the winter.

This is the oddity of the year. I don't know what it is or what plant it came from. It looks like a red douglah, I haven't tasted it yet. I picked it two weeks ago.and it's still in the refrigerator. I'll try growing a few plants from the seeds and see what happens. Assuming it has seeds.

I thought I was doing a good thing for my carrot hot sauce by using the organic baby carrots this year. The problem is I got them from Sam. I recently learned these bunny luv organic baby carrots are the ecoli specials. I caught that just right (or actually, just wrong). They were removed from all stores on October 23. I bought mine October 22. Go figure. Good thing I cooked it all week at 190°F. Now I'm wondering how to safely sanitize the food processor. I don't know the melting point of the plastic body that may be contaminated.

I've already eaten a half quart of the sauce so it must be safe.

 

[ahayastani]

Now I'm wondering how to safely sanitize the food processor.

Chlorine should do the thrick.

 

[DWB]

Chlorine should do the thrick.

Thanks. That should work but I realized I can use the same Ensurinse I use for sterilizing my peppers. That's what it's for. It kills 99.9% of staph, salmonella, e-coli, listeria, etc during a 5 minute dip.. I'll just use the next batch of wash water and spin it up good in the food processor. No bleach stink.

 

[DWB]

I'm well pleased with the new winter shelter. Our first freeze was Friday night so I trimmed up 14 plants and loaded them in Friday afternoon. No downsizing of pots yet. It was supposed to get down to 31° so I added a 40W incandescent for heat. It actually got down to 29.2. The temperature in the shelter hit a low of 38.7. Today I added a small PTC heater with the intent of keeping it ~50°. I'm not sure how well this fancyass chinese electronic wonder with a remote control is gonna work out but will know soon enough. If not, I'll put in an old timey electric heater or a french fry light or a brooder light on a controller that will keep it between 40 and 50. It's supposed to be cold all week so I'll get it figured out.

The patch plants are covered and did well with the first freeze. After I make room for more plants by repotting, I'll dig up a few nice ones and move them in.

It sure is nice to open up the roof and doors and let the sun in. I fed them all some 1% Masterblend today. They haven't had any good food for a while. I hope they're happy.

 

[Downriver]

@DWB I like that new winter shelter! It'll be interesting to see how well it performs, compared to the original, one-of-a-kind, custom-built one.

 

[DWB]

I wish I did this years ago. It holds twice as many plants without any goofing around at all and it's dirt simple to feed, water and rearrange as desired.

Last night it went to 31.2°, The heater kept it between 48.7 and 50.5 at a cost of 1.56 kWh. Around 20¢. I opened it up for the sun around 9:30 AM.

 

[DWB]

With the infamous polar vortex coming and a forecast of a few days of hard freeze, I unplugged a couple of nice plants to overwinter in the shelter. The plants out there are doing well with the winter covers but this week will probably be the end of it. I got all the heroics out of my system last year.

I chose two nice plants ones to save. I never did this before. We'll see how it works out. I dug up the best of my yellow cardi scorpions and a very nice red cardi scorpion from Canada. I hacked then hard and have a small tarp loaded up with trimmings so the unripe pods can finish.

Yellow cardi mutant scorpion

Canadian red cardi scorpion

As badly as the yellow cardi scorpions joke seeds from Canada turned out, I have to say his red cardi scorpions are nice. Prolific with proper form, taste and heat level. They're pretty much a match to what I've been growing for 8 years.

The shelter is doing well. It's now comfortably full. They're doing well with the daily opening of the doors and roof for sun although I'll probably add a couple of grow lights for this week. They may not see too much sun. It's now holding 14 of my container grown mama plants and the two newbies on the right wall. I added a drip system for them. Each plant has 1 stabby root zone emitter and one emitter feeds into the gallon milk jug on the floor as an easy monitor to make certain they're all getting their twice daily ration of 1% Masterblend.from the 35 gallon tank.

I am very pleased with the second generation of my mutant yellow cardi scorpions. It's an awesome plant form, very prolific with pods that are identical to last year in heat and taste. They're stinkin' hot. Maybe next year I'll get a SHU test done.

Happy New Year!

 

[DWB]

Odd pepper of the year. When I was doing the final dehydrator load yesterday, I found this scorpion.

 

[DWB]

Well, we got the second part of her retirement home away from home. Bought Jan 11, delivered March 11. Only thing is in late January she saw the economy begin to self destruct, evidenced by her largest international clients and the people at the port going to high distress, high alert mode. She canceled retirement for a while.

The new winter shelter did well with the exception of one period of time, also in January, when we had a long period of brutally cold, hard freeze weather including one day and night when we got 9" of snow down here by the beach in Lower Alabammy. Everything had been running along suitably with a couple of tiny little fancyass PTC heaters amazon sent me to evaluate. They worked well until they didn't. Fortunately I also had my bigass Tractor Supply old timey heater in there ready to go. So, on snow night my temp monitors were telling me the heat was off so I went out and invoked the services of the old style heater. All good. All good as long as the power didn't go off. In the afternoon I decided I should fire up the generator to see about it just in case. All it would do is make a clunk noise and that's it. I didn't know what to think other than if it was too cold for me, it may be too cold for the generator. And wouldn't you know, at 3 am the power went off and it didn't come back on for a while. By 6 am when it came back on, it was down to 26° in there. Everything survived except the Canada red cardi I dug out of the patch. As it turned out, the ground terminal of the OEM motorcycle type battery corroded almost entirely off. Even though it was fully charged, the power transmitted though what little of the connection remained, it wasn't enough to turn the engine over.

I decided to give the patch a break. I've been working it kinda hard for 6 seasons so I'm letting it lay fallow this year. I cleaned it off, killed the weeds and sprayed with the isoxaben pre-emergent to kill off the chamberbitter weed from hell. After that, mulching, paving with cardboard and more mulch. I may poke and plant all my old bean seeds to fix nitrogen but haven;t decided yet.

Cody and I are in Auburn tonight. He gets his quarterly followup exam and rads in the morning. He'll be two years cancer free if he comes out clean.

 

[CaneDog]

Good wishes for Cody tomorrow DW!

 

[DWB]

Good wishes for Cody tomorrow DW!

Thanks CaneDog. Cody got a good report. He's still clean. It's now down less than a 1% chance the tumor will recur on his leg or metastasize elsewhere. Much better than in the beginning. That was officially 7% chance of recurrence and 15% chance the cancer would travel. I sure am glad we toughed it out this way rather than amputate for zero chance of recurrence or put him through 3½ weeks of radiation treatments.

 

[CaneDog]

That's great news! Looking forward to seeing Cody working the pepper patch for years to come.