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Growing Chiles in HEL - 2019

Today I took 27 pellets off the heat mats and transplanted them into their first small pots. Then I moved them into my temporary grow room (sauna) under the lights where they will spend the next 60 days or so until it's warm enough to move outside for the summer.
 
I've still got another 75 pellets on the heat mats and will move them to the lamps as they pop.
 
On the tray in the photo, there are two separate LED lamp rigs.
 
The lamp specs: 
 
Strip Length: 61 cm
Watts: 15 watts per strip (45 watts per rig)
Kelvin: 6400K
Lumens: 1500 per strip
PPFD (at 100mm distance): 399 µmol/s/m2 per strip
 
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PaulG said:
Mika, your deck looks like it has been there forever!
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Good thing I finally got it finished, Paul. The neighbors were starting to get construction fatigue from hearing my power tools go on for a few months in a row. They are also a bit irritated that I now have the best looking backyard out of the 5 rowhouses in the building.
 
I am naturally happy with the result since 1) money was not a limiting factor, and 2) I built it myself so I know it's done right. Also might have accumulated a few new tools along the way :-)
 
New tools are the best thing about DIY projects!
 
I'm not surprised it's the best looking yard, that
deck is beautiful!
 
PaulG said:
New tools are the best thing about DIY projects!
 
I'm not surprised it's the best looking yard, that
deck is beautiful!
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Spacing between deck boards was 1.6mm when I installed them and now it is about 5mm due to the wood drying. Hopefully it doesn't get much larger as it looks quite stupid to see the ground from between deck boards. Such is life with pressure treated lumber.
 
The entire backyard is getting more organized in general, which makes it easier to grow chiles :-)
 
The pubescens have a nice place to hang out.

Do you use both bbq/smoker units at the same time?
 
PaulG said:
The pubescens have a nice place to hang out.

Do you use both bbq/smoker units at the same time?
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Those Weber kettle grills, one is 57cm and one is 47cm. When we had 3 teens living with us, I did quite often use them both at the same time. Now that it's mostly my wife and I who I'm cooking for, we usually just use the large grill. I'm thinking of taking the smaller one out to our family's summer house to replace the crappy little portable gas grill that is currently in use there.
 
nice.chili said:
Great looking set-up and plants! Envious with the room you have to grow...  ;)
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Thanks. This place belonged to my wife's grandmother before we moved here and had not been maintained for 40 years or more (the place was built in 1959). The entire backyard had been taken over by a highly invasive tall bush that grows it's roots in a network, there literally was no backyard. The space immediately behind the house was full of old junk. We cleaned out all the junk with a few trailerfuls to the dump, cut down all the bushes, removed the bush root network with a pickaxe, removed several large tree stumps with a pickaxe and pry bar, wheelbarrowed over 5 tons of gravel 150 feet down to the backyard, put landscaping fabric down, built terraced walls with large blocks, backfilled with hydroton, and finally laid gravel down. That was last summer, the hottest summer on record in Finnish history. And then we ran out of time.
 
This summer we built the deck 43 square meters (462 square feet) on the space we had cleared and freed last summer. Before that, we still had to cut down and kill one maple tree that was in the way and also too close to the house. Building the deck was fun, too - my air compressor is not big enough to power a framing nailer so I had to attach 60 joist hangers using a hammer and ringshank nails (each joist hanger needs 4 nails). I had to buy a special anti-vibration framing hammer (Fiskars) to do the job because a few years back I had a complete end-to-end longitudinal fracture in the fourth metacarpal in my right hand (caused by torsion from a drill bit suddenly stopping and the drill body then beginning to rotate) and it still does not handle vibration well at all. I also got a Fiskars vibration-free sledge hammer for pounding the fence post spikes into the ground.
 
There is no way to get a car or truck down to my backyard so we carried all those 20ft long deck boards and joists down a hill and into the yard by hand - two or three at a time.
 
Maybe that story will reduce the envy just a bit :-)
 
internationalfish said:
 
...and increase the awe. Wow.
 
Looks like you did an exceptional job. :)
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It's just a lot of hard work. Any job worth doing...
 
Here is a photo from last spring after we had got the bushes ripped out and done some landscaping. Notice my growing area was pretty small, having pots on top of 2x10s that were sitting on top of cinder blocks.
 
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Did another inspection of the pubes this morning - the Manzano Rojos and the Montufars are just littering themselves with new pods, while the Pico Mucho only has 7 pods and is just dropping every new flower for some reason. The Pico Mucho is in a huge dirt container 250 litres (66 gallons), the Montufar is sitting in another container right next to it of the same size and same dirt, same nutrients, etc... and the Montufar is doing great. I don't know what is going on with the Pico Mucho - it doesn't look unhappy and it's not diseased or being attacked but it's not really growing much, either. Maybe it is just more of a hot weather variety and we haven't had too much hot weather at all this summer.
 
The largest plant in my garden is a Bishop's Crown baccatum. It's now as tall as me. I pulled a large green pod off of it yesterday evening and munched it down. It actually had heat and I would say that 3/10 heat level is pretty accurate.
 
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I also pulled off a green Montufar yesterday morning and used it in the ratatouille I was frying for breakfast. It had a pretty serious amount of kick - maybe 8/10.
 
Obligatory shots of the Manzano Rojos.
 
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So I just did a real close-up inspection of the Bishop's Crown and I was totally blown away. There are over 150 pods set already, over 100 open flowers and about 1000 flower buds waiting to open. This is my first time growing this variety and I really did not know what to expect but I did read during the spring that they are very large plants so I put it in a 30 litre pot.
 
podz - I'd be keen for some seeds. A trade for something I have, as you'd like - I'll DM you.
 
Certainly sounds like you've got quite the plant(s). I wouldn't have the patience to count pods vs. flowers vs. buds...  ;)
 
nice.chili said:
podz - I'd be keen for some seeds. A trade for something I have, as you'd like - I'll DM you.
 
Certainly sounds like you've got quite the plant(s). I wouldn't have the patience to count pods vs. flowers vs. buds...  ;)
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Calculation via extrapolation - I see 4 buds in a cluster, 10 clusters in an area the size of my hand, 25 of those hand sized areas, etc.
 
Sure, I'll reply to the DM.
 
Our outdoor plants only get watered-fed once per week since they are all in fairly large pots compared to their size and the coir-perlite-vermiculite mix also contains 20% vermiculite for the express purpose of retaining enough liquid to last for 1 week.
 
I am not differentiating the nutrient mix based on species or cultivar - they all get the same stuff. It's 40ml of Canna A and 40ml of Canna B into 10 litres of water. The 30 litre pots, which most of the pubes, chinenses and the bishop's crown are in - they each get about 8-10 litres of nutrient mix. The 12 litre pots which are holding most of the annuums, they each get about 3-4 litres of nutrient mix.  I _should_ also be using CalMag since Helsinki tap water has an EC of less than 0.1 and the Canna nutes are designed for 0.4, but alas I have been too lazy during most of the waterings. Maybe next time. I'm also going to pick up a litre of Canna PK 13/14 today and use that during the next major feeding to give a super kick to the flowering and fruiting.
 
That said, here is a breakdown on pod life in Podz's backyard:
 
Chinenses: Ain't doin' shit other than growing huge and green - 1 or 2 of them are moving inside under the big lamps as soon as it gets cold outside because I got to have me some CSB and CR for my winter-time chili-con-carne recipes.
 
Baccatums: Bishop's Crown is on track to be a record breaker. Brazilian Pumpkin is now growing again after some sort of major illness earlier this summer and might even put out some pods.
 
Annuums: All of them producing like hell except 2 padrons which died from the virus and the turkish one which got really sick but is also now recovering. So far the only plant in my garden with ripe pods is the Star Flame, which has 3 or 4. We have stripped the 2 padron plants (which are huge) several times each for green pods and fried them in olive oil and salt.
 
Pubes: Pico Mucho seems stalled, also dropping tons of flowers (every flower, in fact). Montufar(s) - prolific as hell, still continuing heavy veg, flowering and podding. Manzano Rojos - all 6 of these are continuing to grow like hell (up, sideways, everyways), flowers everywhere and many new pods every day. My deck is constantly full of an army of bumblebees due to these Rojos. At this point, none of the Rojos would even fit through a doorway anymore without breaking off branches. Half the deck is now littered with dropped Rojo flowers, but they are still setting a lot more fruit than expected.
 
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