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A Fishy Winter Grow: Stuff in a Tent

Be it ever so humble...
 
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Currently, there are three pepper plants on the bottom (the four all the way on the right are garlic experiments). The one that's nice and rootbound in a tiny container on the right is a manganji, which I pretty much just want to see the pheno from. In the bags on the left, there's shishito (which I found out my wife loves, so that goes on the list), and Greek pepperoncini, a.k.a. Friggitello.
 
I'm really hoping to grow giant white habanero, both over the winter and outside next year, but so far I've had no luck at all getting them to germinate. Which really sucks, because I was hoping to cross those with CGN 21500 and possibly larger sweet varieties. 21500 was also supposed to be the fourth tent pepper. I should have isolated seeds for that coming from my current plant soon.
 
But as I've been attempting to germinate those GW habs, I also started a couple other things. My purple UFO did not grow true, but I started more to see if I can get something on-pheno; on the top shelf, I have two new seedlings from that envelope in rockwool. I also have two very healthy-looking sugar rush peach in there. While I'd prefer to grow the peach outside next year, if I can't get those GW habs to take, I might have to switch, and that could be a pretty good candidate.
 
So the current plan is to have four one-gallon bags on the bottom with a nice selection of mild to medium hot peppers, and go through just as much hybridization experimentation as I can with rockwool and Khang Starr style mini-Kratky bottles.
 
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internationalfish said:
 
Yeah, the person who brought it in was mourning its passing on our company Slack channel. I told her to hang in there; I think we can still bring it back.
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I had an OW last year that tried to die in retaliation for neglect and disregard. I trimmed it back to one fork, buck nekkid (the plant, fercryinoutloud) and gave it a good drink. I'll be dammed if a dozen nodes didn't appear on the trunk after a week or so...
 
The poor little guy in the office needs some more time, but at least now he's got plenty of water to work with (and hopefully the sun will decide to come back soon; seems like most of winter here is just borrowing standard British gloom for a few months).
 
In the meantime, I threw the last round of lemon drops into a mild fermentation with some pineapple.
 
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The pods on the left are about ready for seed harvesting. Hopefully the one isolated goronong I have has plenty, but the OP pods were pretty far from other plants, so they should be a reasonably safe bet anyway. The OP chocolate habs ought to have a good chance at growing true as well, considering that plant was pretty dense and liked to set fruit under good cover.
 
CaneDog said:
Did you have much pollinator activity on the balcony 'Fish?  I'd guess your seeds should be in pretty good shape as long as they were setting reasonably well.
 
Good looking ferment!  Like the purple onion.
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Thanks. I don't think there was much in the way of pollinators, but several of my plants were basically growing into or under each other (and that balcony gets a lot of wind), so I'm trying to be conservative about which pods I keep seeds from.
 
I probably wouldn't have used the purple onion if I'd, you know, been thinking. I had white onions as well, but this is the one I grabbed. Guessing it should come out fine, but still... oops. Hopefully if I end up with a good selection of purple pods next season I'll be able to make some powerfully purple sauces, though.  :eek:
 
CaneDog said:
Yeah, the color contrast looks cool in the jar, but probably less so blended into the sauce.  Glad to hear your winter will be brief.  I keep feeling like we're getting through winter here, but it's really only just beginning :(
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Winter here is mild -- it doesn't often hit freezing, and we very rarely get any snow -- but as far as good pepper growth is concerned, it runs from mid October to mid May (and there's a nasty month in summer where you either get some shade in place, which is logistically nearly impossible on my balcony, or you watch your plants stall). So I'm really hoping my germination efforts start paying off; definitely need the head start if I want better production this year.
 
For the sauce, that pigmentation is really just on the very outside layer, so I don't think it should brown out the sauce too much. But I suppose we'll see some time in April.
 
In better news, we had a couple guests over for dinner last night. One of them is kind of a pepper head, and he was happy to take my Halloween red habanero home, so that got a good home instead of going into the trash (my wife got tired of it sitting in the entryway). :)
 
I knew this little Kratky sugar rush peach had started setting pods, but tonight is the first time they've been reasonably photogenic. I got two out of at least three in the picture (upper right and lower left). :)
 
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This thing is a little bush, which kind of makes me wonder whether it'll be on-pheno, as what I've read suggests it's supposed to be reaching for the sky a bit more. But hey, fingers crossed. It'd be perfect to have a good SRP already this far along, since this is one variety I'd planned to have outdoors when spring hits. That'd be a bigger head start than I'd even hoped for, if only on one plant.
 
Tracking the min/max temperature in my little rock wool germination container, it seems to be pretty ideal, so I'm just going to leave those in there despite this taking too long. Also going to start alma paprika, naglah, and Zapotec jalapenos germinating tonight, so I'll at least have everything I want to grow this season started, whether or not any of them decides to sprout.
 
A Japanese friend -- former coworker, the same one who wisely decided I'd be happier receiving a bouquet of hawk's claw peppers rather than flowers when I left that company -- recently gave me a couple of dried pods. She said they're called Nanbu, after an old name for a region of feudal Japan. How freaking cool is that? Feudal peppers.
 
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They sound absolutely packed with seeds, so hopefully these will be easy to grow out. Since we're already going further and further overboard on new germination attempts.
 
Speaking of which, finally, a sprout! We'll see if this CGN 21500 comes out of his shell, but just knowing at least something is going to come up is very reassuring. Hopefully the rest follow this little trooper's example.
 
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I also did end up starting some alma paprika, naglah, and Zapotec jalapeno seeds, two to a block, three blocks each. Going to have to step up my mini-Kratky bottle production; if everything sprouts, I'm going to have an entire shelf in the tent packed with them.
 
CaneDog said:
And that Nanbu looks cool.  I find a backstory tends to make a variety even more interesting.
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Agreed, it's fun to have the little details. And this one produces plenty of seeds. I just took them out of one pod; figured this is probably enough. :)
 
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Got a very nice haul from the OP choco habs I grabbed, and not a bad quantity from my one ISO goronong pod. Definitely pleased about that. The Vault is coming along pretty nicely, and I have enough of several varieties for a decent germination test. So at some point I can at least figure out whether the way I'm using silica gel is even a good idea. 
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Another batch of seeds dried; this should be the end for the plants I grew this season. I'll save some from the Friggitello as well, but that's a 2020 tent grow, it just got started early.
 
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The Kratky kids are soaking up the solution like crazy. If they keep at it, I'm hoping to have ripe sugar rush peach soonish.
 
internationalfish said:
The Kratky kids are soaking up the solution like crazy.
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Mine too. It occurs to me that the root mass is displacing more and more liquid as it grows. So while the growing plant's demands are no doubt increasing, they seem to be increasing even more than that.  I find I'm on the floor filling more and more often, but the actual amount I'm pouring to reach the fill line has been decreasing.
 
I've also noticed the plant tends to slurp up a lot right away after I've topped up. Are you seeing that? 
 
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