• Blog your pepper progress. The first image in your first post will be used to represent your Glog.

Emrikol's 2012 Grow Log

This is my first time glogging, so please be kind and patient with me. I've been gardening for probably five years now, but only got into the good stuff last year when I started half a dozen Bhut Jolokia plants. Let's see how much I can mess up this year!

Even though I'm running later than I would like, I officially started my 2012 season last night by settings some seeds out to germinate. I'm trying something a bit different, based off of pepperjam's Cups vs Bags experiment. I took the pellet tray out of a jiffy starter kit and am using it as one large "cup."



In my best handwriting, as you can see, I wrote a small description and drew a box for each cultivar I was starting in the tray. My idea is to wet everything, throw it on the heating pad at 79F, and hope nothing explodes. I've got a collection of pepper and tomato seeds, but unless the tomatoes grow teeth I'll spare everyone the boring details.
  • 7 Pod Brain Strain
  • 7 Pot Douglah
  • Australian Lantern Habanero
  • Bell Pepper: Orange, Purple, and White
  • Bonda Ma Jacques
  • Chocolate Habanero
  • Moruga Scorpion
  • NuMex Suave Orange
  • Peach, Red, and Yellow Bhut Jolokia
  • Trinidad Moruga Scorpion
  • Unknown Mystery Pepper that moved from its assigned square
  • Yellow Fatalii
  • Yellow Trinidad Scorpion


This is a closeup of what the final product looks like. I'm actually pretty nervous trying something this drastically new to me. Of course, since I came in about half an hour ago and checked on the seeds, I am feeling a little better:



I had to "work" the image a bit to make it show up better, but I'm pretty sure I see a radicle starting to poke out of the seed. I don't think that's bad for one day. Now back to keeping my fingers crossed!

-----

Updates:

9 March 2012 - My germination "medium" dried up. I feared for my life.

13 March 2012 - Nevermind. Things are fine. I've got pepper seeds that have popped!

20 March 2012 - Business as usual. Baby plants are growing. Germination is slow, but still happening fine.

5 April 2012 - Plants are larger, trying to get the garden beds ready.

7 May 2012 - I killed a bunch of my plants. Bummer.

20 June 2012 - I'm still here, but losing the weed war.
 
Click to expand...
Well, I think I may have made a few seeds mad. I noticed some mycelia starting to branch off a few of my seeds this evening. I think my problem is that I overestimated the amount of evaporation, and my dome-of-death was just too humid.

So I calls my wife and have her pick me up some hydrogen peroxide (3% solution), and I give everything a light spritz. I leave the cover off to help get rid of some of the extra moisture...

...and I start watching TV and forget I left the top off. The poor heating mat is running full blast trying to get up to temperature while my liquid evaporates away. I come to check on everything late tonight and it's all bone dry. Oh, I felt sick. The few seeds that had started popping out radicles are now showing no signs of them anymore.

I went ahead and re-wetted everything, and am now biting my nails hoping that I didn't screw it all up by being lazy.
 
Welcome the topsy turvy world of pepper growing......those seeds are really tougher than we give em credit for!Forge ahead- damn the torpedoes!
Good luck on the grow!
 
I'm able to come back with good news! gnslngr seems to be right--these seeds are tougher than I was ready for. The shots below were yesterday, and I've already got probably half a dozen seeds germinated and into pellet flats.

Things are nice. My seeds are germinating, it was 82 degrees out today, and I got off work early because our AC wasn't working! Woo!





[Edit: Stupid images messed up. Fixed]
 
Nothing major happening now, just slowly germinating and sprouting. Business as usual.

What's growing so far (I've added a few since the Pick-a-Pepper Seed Swap):
  • Random Tomatoes
  • Yellow Trinidad Scorpion
  • Moruga Scorpion
  • NuMex Suave
  • 7 Pod Brain Strain
  • Yellow Fatalii
  • Bonda Ma Jacques
  • Bell Pepper: Orange, Purple, and White
  • Unknown Mystery Pepper that moved from its assigned square
  • Peach Bhut Jolokia
  • Australian Lantern Habanero
  • Yellow Bhut Jolokia
  • Red Bhut Jolokia
  • Chocolate Habanero
  • 7 Pot Douglah












 
Nice beginning to your season - good job of getting everything
up and going! Looking forward to seeing how your season progresses!
 
The babies are starting to grow up. I probably should have already transplanted a few more of these into larger containers by now, but I just haven't had the chance yet. Luckily there's a long weekend coming up!





Last weekend we were preparing the boards for our raised bed garden, which I'm quite excited about. I'm hoping to have it done within the next two weeks or so.



I'm guessing about a third of it will be full of peppers.
 
Spicegeist said:
How are your plants doing lately?
Click to expand...

Thanks so much for asking! For a while I've had nothing to report. The little things are just growing bigger waiting to be transplanted. The rain and weather has not been kind to my gardening schedule at all; every time I have a minute to spare, it just pours I hope to have the garden filled with soil by the end of this week. I've been meaning to get some more pictures, but every time I review the ones I've taken they look like crap. I think it's time to put the cell phone away and break out a real camera.






No, wait. I lied. I have to admit it. I dropped a tray of some of my best peppers (and tomatoes) and I've been too ashamed to show my face in public. It landed upside-down and there were casualties. I'd say I lost about 20% of my plants, including my entire lot of a few cultivars. I've been babying the survivors and I think the rest will make it. Makes my stomach ache when I think about it. Am I allowed to write that off as the Angels' share?
 
Emrikol said:
I dropped a tray of some of my best peppers (and tomatoes) and I've been too ashamed to show my face in public. It landed upside-down and there were casualties. I'd say I lost about 20% of my plants, including my entire lot of a few cultivars. I've been babying the survivors and I think the rest will make it. Makes my stomach ache when I think about it. Am I allowed to write that off as the Angels' share?
Click to expand...
I hear ya... I dropped a tray of seedlings in February when I was carrying them down to my grow tent. The tray flipped over and slid down the front of my refrigerator. Fortunately, the primary nodes weren't affected and the plants grew out fine.
 
I lost a tray to either kids or a cat, I forget now. I just block it out now that it's in the past lol. How are the survivors now?
 
I'm not dead yet!

So far, I feel like I'm having a real bummer of a season. My garden is depressing me, and I attribute that to my slow updates. This is the first year I'm doing "raised" beds, and I'm fighting weeds like I've never fought before. Some say I may be losing, but we're not there yet.

After I put down my layers of newspaper and filled the garden with dirt, I started planting. Here's my bed of baby pepper plants (notice how they're so very small--already starting off bad. I think the slow growth might mean it's time to replace the grow bulbs).



Everything was going fine for a week or two after that until . . .



I have no idea what had been snipping the leaves off of my plants, but this is what the majority of them looked like. Luckily, everybody survivied but my Habanero De Arbol I got from (I believe) Smokemaster from the Pick-A-Peck of Peppers Swap. It's a real bummer too. I only had a few seeds, out of all he sent germinate, and only the one little plant survived. I think it may have been the plant I was looking forward to the most (always rooting for the underdog).

So, flash forward a few more weeks. I'd kept finding these little leaves popping up everywhere in the garden, and I'd been pulling them out. They came out with ease, so I just had assumed they were gernimating seeds of some sort in the dirt I bought. The week before father's day, I took some time off from cleaning the garden. I now consider that to have been a very bad idea.



Those little now-and-then leaves I'd been pulling out? I've got a garden full! Come to find out, I have some sort of ancient Viola breeding ground under my garden. These things have rhizomes the size of my fist. I don't know how long they've been hiding in my grass below the garden, but now I've got to pull them all out. The big downside is that I'm pretty sure I can't get them all without damaging my already planted plants, so some of it will have to wait until next spring.



And now, I present: some puny pepper plants









Did I mention that I also have a rabbit living in my garden? It's got a little hiding spot in my tomatoes. I'm pretty sure it's been eating my squash plants.

This is the most useless varmint dog in the world:
 
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