I didn't get a chance to snap pics on the 9th, but managed to get a few this morning. Among the many things I learned growing these this year has been fertilization. It would seem that the instructions on some of the botique fertilizers are more to increase sales than to actually boost garden productivity. Even though it is a bit pricey, I was trying the Fox Farms line of fertilizers. Their instructions online state to use every other watering. My Aji Panca is a nice looking 3' tall plant that has yet to make a flower. Every bud it started to form turned black and fell off way before they ever even got close to becoming a flower. I really want to see something from this plant, so last week I repotted it in fresh, high quality soil. It was a bit of a challenge doing this with a 3' plant, but I think I got it right. I took the entire soil ball out of the pot and laid the plant/root/soil combination on the lawn. I then used a hose to wash out as much of the old fertilizer soaked Miracle Gro soil from the roots as I could. I then potted it in my new soil mix that I plan to use for all of 2013: 50:50 Sunshine Mix 1 and 4, amended 4:1 with a mix of Ancient Forest, worm castings, and 0-5-0 bat guano in roughly 3:3:1 ratios. After potting it up, I watered it with SUPERthrive and BioWeed mixed in the water. It has been five days and never showed any signs of transplant shock. It's also starting to make small buds! I only broke off one small branch, which I saved and tried my hand at cloning. Anyway, here is the Aji Panca plant as of this morning:
Some plants seem to like to spread out instead of growing tall. Malaysian Goronong:
It's funny how different plant varieties respond to over-fertilization. A few of my purchased plants from RefiningFireChiles looked like they had some sort of virus infection. Now that I've stopped fertilizing them, their overall morphology is normalizing , and they're starting to bud up again. These are the Douglah, Moruga, Yellow Bhut, Goronong, and Peter Pepper. The Jamaican Yellow didn't seem to mind the over-fertilization, at all. It has four green peppers on it, but since I stopped fertilizing it, it is budding up again. The Goronong had four pods on it that it just suddenly dropped one day. Two other store-bought plants from an Iranian grocery store in San Diego are looking better, as well. The Chenzo has about 12 pods on it and is covered with flowers, and the Thai Dragon has three green pods and is loaded with buds soon to open. I'll post pics of these later if I get a bump, but I want to focus this update on the plants I started from seed.
To rehash, I initially sowed seeds for Butch T, Bhut, and Douglah. None of those survived. However, there were two small plants that were lagging that I couldn't kill, so I put them in my Wife's raised bed to fend for themselves. If they lived, they deserved to. Well, they lived, but I don't remember if they're Butch T's or Bhuts. I know they're not the Douglahs. Anyway, since they survived, I dug them up and gave them their own pots. The larger of the two is in the back of the photo below. The two on the left are ?Morugas (either Moruga or Brain) from pods I purchased from Baker's. The one on the right is a Brain Strain from the same order of pods. The plant that is mostly out of the photo is my Bonnie "World's Hottest Habanero," which is also recovering from being overfertilized:
These four plants are all budding up! Unknown:
One of the two ?Morugas:
Brain:
One day in late July I tried to germinate some seeds from a store-bought Anaheim. I kept the strongest seedling and here it is, budding up:
I really like the Chinese 5-color. I had 100% germination on these and they are growing like weeds. The seeds were gifted to me by Orozconleche. One of them has four small pods:
Other seeds I sowed from Orozconleche were Datil and Aji Dulce. These guys are growing nicely and they really seem to like the soil concoction I came up with. These were sowed the same time as the Chinese 5-colors, I'm thinking these were sowed in early August:
Finally, there were some seeds I got for Barrackpores from Vlad at Rainbow Chili Seeds. He also gifted some seeds for Jonah and his Impact F1. I also tried to sprout some more Douglahs at that time. The Barrackpores popped just fine, but none of these other three germinated within about four weeks, so I tossed the soil containing these seeds into my Wife's raised bed. A few weeks later I noticed a few pepper seedlings coming up in her bed, so I put them into cups. I'm not sure which these are, but they look chinense to me. Also in the photo is a Chocolate Scorpion that I sprouted a few weeks back. These guys are going to be ready for pots soon:
Well, that's 10 pics. One of the Barrackpores from that round of germination is also forming buds!
That brings me to today. I held out as long as I could, but after seeing how much the plants really seem to be thriving in our current fall weather (days of high 70's/low 80's and nights of high 50's/low 60's), it made me think how much they would like similar weather during our spring. I want my 2013 grow to be ready to start pumping out pods before we hit our summer highs. So, I organized and put seeds in to soak last night. They will be sowed today.
That's my life. How's your life?
I needed a good number of chocolate/brown/black varieties this year as three out of four I had this year died. And the remaining one, an Aji Panca, is a beautiful 3' tall plant that has yet to make a single flower!
