Failed Pepper Projects... Yours ??

MNXR250R

MNXR250R

Mine have been numerous.  What about your's ?
 
For me....
 
Outdoors >>
I've had the Sun completely murder my newly germinated seedlings (BzzzZAP !!)... Literally turned them to ash under the baking sunlight (so not ash... just gray, lifeless plants)... Two days !
Kept a Burlap sun-screen over the peppers for too long into the season... growth was FAIL over the season.
Watered WAY too much.... limited growth and pale leaves (did this for more than one season by the way... and especially on my tomato plants )... and I'm allowed to keep growing ??
Didn't give the plants enough fertilizer in the "new soil" (big box soil)(this year).... damn !
Plant spacing was too close... hoping for high density. Plants didn't get enough sun. All suffered.
 
Indoors>> (315W LEC)
Planted too close together.... High growth plants shaded slow growth plants. Noob.
Nutes were WAY to high (RDWC Hydro) for the intense light of the 315W LEC (this year....new to indoor growing).
Changing lighting (from T5, to LED to 315W LEC) caused HUGE shock to the plants... all of them.
Controlling the in-tent temperatures... FAIL !... while I vented the heat, I sucked out all of the humidity. Does this matter ??? I don't know...... yet.
Biggest FAIL of this year was bringing a Chi-Chien plant that had been outside all summer and doing very well, inside to "over-winter" it without quarantine.... I brought SH!Tloads Aphids into my grow room! Still dealing with those little F^uckers.
 
There are more FAILS,.. many, many more ..... I think I have a FAIL or two every single day  :dance:
 
Anyway, Happy Growing,
 
Jeff
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
wow thats unfortunate !! 
 
at least it looks like you know all the mistake you did.
 
1 thing positive is i am sure that you learned a shit load of stuff this year so you don't replicate them next year
 
dont worries every fails makes you a better and a stronger grower, keep  going and don't stop !!!
 
( this fall i shocked 5 clone that i took from my best plant wen i took them and brought them directly   under my indoor  full spectrum light  they all died)
 
i wish you better luck for next season
 
j-f
 
 
I probably started about ten seeds this year. Six survived and five produced. I'll only get 3 ripe reapers and maybe 7 chocolate ghosts. Probably 10 habaneros. My notBhutlah has given around ten so far and there should be about five more ripe before it's done. Unknown black prince cross has done great though
 
Definitely over-watered the sh#@#$%t out of existing peppers but managed to squeeze by as they were plants that were a few years old and strong (inherited them from a friend). 
 
Lost a few batches of peppers recently while trying to ferment them to make hot sauce (at least i think the batch is toast!).
 
1-This year started out with all of my seedlings being hardened off to fast and all of them died (60 plants total)
2- None of my super-hot produced a single pod except my ghost pepper plant which is my least favorite. I gave away all of the pods.
3- I have allot of ripe peppers now but don't even want to make any sauce which sucks. I will try and make some this weekend.
4- I have 6 jalapeno plants with red peppers on all of them and some just rotting on the plant. 
5- Can you tell I'm in a funk lol..............................
 
My first year was a failure. 
My second, I got so busy and I left my plants on my front porch (Which had sun for about 8 hours straight typically) in black pots. One week I forgot to water, and every plant was dead as a doornail. Dry soil temp was like 110 degrees. 
 
I had some excellent germination this year in some Jiffy peat pads, moved the tray into a window, then stupidly knocked the carefully organized seedlings onto the ground.  Lost all of my order, and only salvaged four out of forty or so.   :tear:
 
I started again, but what a set-back.
 
HabaneroBeets said:
I had some excellent germination this year in some Jiffy peat pads, moved the tray into a window, then stupidly knocked the carefully organized seedlings onto the ground.  Lost all of my order, and only salvaged four out of forty or so.   :tear:
 
I started again, but what a set-back.
Click to expand...
 Did the same thing except involving me falling down stairs once with seed tray in hand. What wasn't dead after the fall and scattering remained unidentified until I started getting pods. 
 
I already posted about starting over. Lesson learned, don't leave the door of your grow tent open to heat it with a space heater when you have cats in the house. I had plants starting to flower before the cats ate them, so I had to start all over. The nice thing is that now the seedlings all sprouted at the same time so much closer in height with each other, but I still have a feeling the Thai's are gonna tower over the habs.
 
2017 was my first grow; as you might imagine, I had dozens of small outright disasters, and countless minor setbacks but, b/c I had set extremely low expectations and anticipated complete failure, I planted a ton of seeds and most of them grew reasonably well and bore some fruit. Overall, I'm psyched, but yeah... I made some big mistakes with overwatering, using shitty soil, battling invertebrates, and the biggest one: procrastinating out of paranoia. I was so scared to harden my plants off and get them in the ground, which basically postponed everything else I accomplished, in terms of success. 

Check my blog for detailed minor failures.

But yeah, the main reason I decided to come in on this one is to say that my cat loves eating leaves, too. He hasn't destroyed anything entirely, but he likes to graze on my chile plants, any chance that he gets. I don't understand it because, in the midst of a bicycle pub crawl, the fellas and I stopped by the community garden to sample fresh pods. A couple of us, tipsy enough to conduct experiments, decided to try eating chile leaves.

My buddy Padge: "do ppl eat the leaves?"
Bike808: "I've read that the leaves are poisonous, although other sources claim they're not. Either way, the leaves ain't popular."
Padge: "Seems a terrible waste. Should we try some?"
Bike808: "To see if they're poison?"
Padge: "To see if they're any good."
Bike808: "Ok, let's try some leaves, then."
Everyone else: ¨You 2 are f@#%&ing idiots."

Padge tried some leaves from a particularly bushy Paper Lantern; I opted to eat one big leaf from a tall Naga Morich plant that, up to that point, had disappointed me in terms of producing pods. (But by August's end, it had pumped out zillions of small but otherwise lovely pods.) We both agreed that raw, undressed chile leaves don't taste good, at all.

I felt vaguely nauseated the rest of the night, but Padge didn't. It might've been placebo effect, it might have been the lager. I did detect a lingering vegetal aftertaste that mildly irked me for about an hour, of that I'm sure

So, yeah, that drunken folly was probably my biggest pepper faux pas, thus far...
 
More like "getting out of hand" than an actual "failure" for me.
Grew a few peppers plants (the Bonnie Plants brand you get already growing at Home Depot) in 2016 using raised planters and standard Miracle Grow potting soil. Did ok that way.
Tried something new (for me) in 2017.
-Bought seeds online and planted in rock wool
-got more sprouts than I expected since it was my first time trying
-couldn't stand to waste any sprouts so I moved them all into larger peat pots (with Miracle Grow) as they grew bigger
-didn't want to part with any of the now larger plants so I wound up placing them all in 35 20-gallon grow bags full of Fox Farm Ocean Forest potting soil.
-plants go nuts and after making gallons of sauce, pickled peppers, and pepper jelly I still have a freezer loaded with pods and a couple 1-gallon freezer bags with dried peppers.
 
 
 
MNXR250R said:
Mine have been numerous.  What about your's ?
 
For me....
Indoors>> (315W LEC)
 
Controlling the in-tent temperatures... FAIL !... while I vented the heat, I sucked out all of the humidity. Does this matter ??? I don't know...... yet.
 
 
Anyway, Happy Growing,
 
Jeff
Click to expand...
 
 
  I have grown indoors at 10-85% RH and it makes almost no difference what the RH is
 
My 2 big mistakes happened in 2016. First mistake was not having a big enough garden box for all of my plants. The tomato plants towered over my cayenne plants. I got some cayennes but as much as I should have.
Mistake 2 was not putting my fermenting hot sauce in a safe ,out of the way place. I had it on top of the fridge and my wife was getting some chips off the fridge she knocked my sauce off the fridge and it busted all over the counter. My second batch survived long enough to make it into the fridge but my wife cleaned out the fridge and threw it out. She said something about she thought it was spoiled pasta sauce. I thought I had it clearly marked.


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willard3 said:
 
 
  I have grown indoors at 10-85% RH and it makes almost no difference what the RH is
Click to expand...
 
Hey Willard, experience is often more useful than knowledge, so thank you for the reply ! I really appreciate the information !
 
Just quickly, my "experiment" was to reproduce the native environment of Bhut and/or Naga Jolokia pepper plant. So when I say that I FAILED with controlling the temps, what I should have said was that I couldn't keep the humidity at the desired target while keeping the temperatures low. Good thing I don't rely the written word to make money !!!
 
NOW, with that said, I have read many times that LOW ambient humidity and HIGH ambient temperatures inside of the grow environment will make the plant increase its transpiration rate (to keep the leaves cool). This would normally not be a problem as long as you have a good root structure, and plenty of moisture in the grow medium so that the plant can transpire as much water as it needs to keep itself cool.
 
My concern was that when using Hydro nutes, the system would suck up excess nutes because of the higher transpiration rates, and possibly cause toxicity in my plants. I have read of this condition many times.
 
Looking back now I can't say I ever saw a plant that had suffered from excessive transpiration. I'm not saying that the condition doesn't exist, but more that I haven't actually "seen" it.  I was very worried when I started growing Hydro that the "toxicity" condition "might" happen, and so I spent a lot of time and effort to prevent something that "could" or "may" happen.
 
Maybe that can be added to my "FAIL" list..... being too damn paranoid about things.
 
SO THEN,, thank you again for the information Willard !!.  I will no longer worry about the humidity if my grow tents. I've never seen out RH drop below 30, which a lot higher than your 10 !!!!
 
Happy Growing,
 
Jeff
 
PtMD989 said:
My 2 big mistakes happened in 2016. First mistake was not having a big enough garden box for all of my plants. The tomato plants towered over my cayenne plants. I got some cayennes but as much as I should have.
Mistake 2 was not putting my fermenting hot sauce in a safe ,out of the way place. I had it on top of the fridge and my wife was getting some chips off the fridge she knocked my sauce off the fridge and it busted all over the counter. My second batch survived long enough to make it into the fridge but my wife cleaned out the fridge and threw it out. She said something about she thought it was spoiled pasta sauce. I thought I had it clearly marked.


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Click to expand...
 
 
THAT.... is just plain hilarious !!!
 
Jeff
 
MNXR250R said:
 
 
THAT.... is just plain hilarious !!!
 
Jeff
Click to expand...
Knocking the jar off the fridge was an accident, but I think she pitched the jar of sauce just to piss me off. It was clearly marked.


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After all the threads about the "mostest of the mostest", finally a thread that's more my speed.

One of my goals this year was to make some mistakes so I could learn what I could get away with. I succeeded!

Too many boring mistakes to list them all.

My favorite mistake was when all my Chocolate Habaneros finally got big enough to bear fruit, the pods were actually all Cayenne or Brazilian Starfish.

I'd love to be able to blame this on my seed vendor, but I harvested the seeds myself from a fellow gardener who graciously let me have one of his Chocolate Hab pods.

Next year, I pay a little closer attention to labeling.
 
DontPanic said:
My favorite mistake was when all my Chocolate Habaneros finally got big enough to bear fruit, the pods were actually all Cayenne or Brazilian Starfish.
 
Click to expand...
 
I can't tell you how many time I've lost track of what plant was where.  I usually start out with everything labeled, but sometimes when I'm in a hurry, I try to commit to memory where I put this plant or that plant.  Well, I'm over 50 (have been for three years :)) and so my "mental sticky notes" just .... aren't sticky anymore  :P
 
Happy Growing,
 
Jeff
 
Had a seed cell in the oven ( turned off ) to keep a constant temp.

The Mrs. turned the oven on to preheat and melted half the tray. Thought she burned the seeds....75% of them went on to germinate.
 
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