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
 

 

[podz]

Continued along with a few up pottings this evening, still a lot to go.
 
Bishop's Crown (C. Baccatum). This is easily my largest plant and the leaves are already the size of my hands. I put it into a 7.5 gallon pot.
 

 
 
And into the 3 gallon pots: 1 Medina and one Star Flame.
 

 

[podz]

 
That is a great, calming song.
 
Haha...Arrakis...well, probably your fault, this..because it made me think "Fear is the mindkiller" and I chopped half a dried 7 pot unto a store bought pizza and paaaiiid for it...it was a pretty small 7 pot fruit too.

 
 
Fear is the mindkiller :-) Never thought of that before when about to eat a hot pepper! That is incredibly funny!

 

[podz]

Got amost alll of the Annuums potted up this evening. Still about 5 left to do tomorrow. Chinenses will wait for a while still, I think.
 

 

[podz]

HEL is heating up. Today was the first officially "hot" day this year in Helsinki. In Finnish, we call it "hellepäivä" (scorcher) when the temperature reaches 25 celcius or higher. Next days won't be so warm as this one, but it's warm anyway.
 

 

[podz]

OK, guess I need to start using dropbox for photo linking.
 
My newest acquisition, not a pepper but a tuberous scarlet begonia. I will multiply this beauty into 100 scarlet begonias for next year.
 
Test for dropbox linking:
 

 

[podz]

OK, so I had started way too much stuff and ran out of room so I moved it all outside last Saturday. Went through what I was going to plant and what needed getting rid of. Placed some ads in Facebook Marketplace and ended up selling over 200 EUR (about 35 pepper plants). Due to the extreme demand for hot pepper starts / small pepper plants, I decided to start another batch today. They will be large enough to sell 3 weeks from now (since I have awesome lamps and awesome nutes), which is still not too late to produce pods this summer. Especially as they are both baccatums, which grow extremely fast.
 
Started these in rockwool instead of coir pellets, for a hopefully faster germination time.
 
20 x Sugar Rush Peach
20 x Lemon Drop
 
That ought to be enough to earn me a few hundred more euros of easy money - especially when the garden centers run out and people forgot to buy on time. I might even grow one of each for myself.
 
Photos coming when they hook!
 
 

 

[skullbiker]

You could take a bit of that money and get yourself a THP Extreme Membership. Then you could post your photos without screwing around. And, as many as you want!

 

[podz]

Yeah not a bad idea at all!

 

[podz]

You could take a bit of that money and get yourself a THP Extreme Membership. Then you could post your photos without screwing around. And, as many as you want!

 
Money is not an issue here. Paypal is. Otherwise, I would have already signed up :-)

 

[skullbiker]

 
Money is not an issue here. Paypal is. Otherwise, I would have already signed up :-)

I certainly am not an expert on these matters but maybe someone can chime in with a workaround for overseas customers where paypal may not be an option.

 

[podz]

I certainly am not an expert on these matters but maybe someone can chime in with a workaround for overseas customers where paypal may not be an option.

 
Overseas has nothing to do with it. I got banned by PayPal due to having accounts in multiple countries.

 

[skullbiker]

 
Overseas has nothing to do with it. I got banned by PayPal due to having accounts in multiple countries.

ooooppppps![emoji51]

 

[podz]

In any case, I guess I am stuck linking photos with dropbox until there is another option to pay for a sub than with PayPal. HEL, I could even send cash if necessary :-)

 

[deolater]

Continued along with a few up pottings this evening, still a lot to go.
 
Bishop's Crown (C. Baccatum). This is easily my largest plant and the leaves are already the size of my hands. I put it into a 7.5 gallon pot.

Weird, my Bishop's Crown leaves are tiny, as are my other baccatum, Lemon Drop.

 

[nmlarson]

Everything looks great!  I'd love to see a photo of the cloches you talked about.  Cloches seem to be more a European thing....good ones, that look nice, are hard to find here in the US.

 

[podz]

Everything looks great!  I'd love to see a photo of the cloches you talked about.  Cloches seem to be more a European thing....good ones, that look nice, are hard to find here in the US.

 
 
Thanks. There is a photo of them back in post #48 http://thehotpepper.com/topic/71210-growing-chiles-in-hel-2019/?p=1629575
 
They are not just a "european" thing, they are pretty much a thing of days gone by. They were really popular back when people had workers and before greenhouses were invented.

 

[podz]

 

Continued along with a few up pottings this evening, still a lot to go.
 
Bishop's Crown (C. Baccatum). This is easily my largest plant and the leaves are already the size of my hands. I put it into a 7.5 gallon pot.
 

IMG_1200.jpg
 
Weird, my Bishop's Crown leaves are tiny, as are my other baccatum, Lemon Drop.
 
And into the 3 gallon pots: 1 Medina and one Star Flame.
 

IMG_1202.jpg

 

 
 
Greg, I think your quote attempt might have failed? Did you mean to say that your Bishop's Crown leaves are tiny as well as your Lemon Drop?
 
I grew a Lemon Drop last year in a 1 gallon pot IIRC and it had fairly dainty leaves. Still, it produced a huge amount of pods which I still haven't used entirely.
 
Never grown a Bishop's Crown until this year - I started 4 and sold 3 of them. I have read that they can have leaves up to 30cm (12 inches) long. Mine aren't quite that big but they are the same size as from my wrist to my fingertips and I have relatively large hands.
 
Since I moved everything outside and nights are fairly cool, growth has pretty much slowed down on everything except for The Pubes. We are expected to have a bit of a cold snap between Sunday night and Monday morning (down to 42F for several hours) so I'll probably need to carry the Annuums and Chinenses inside for the night. They are too big for the cloches now - or I could just cut them back and make them fit :-) That would probably be a recipe for explosive growth as soon as it gets warm for good. Maybe I will do an experiment with a few of them, like one Padron and one California Wonder (bell pepper). It would be really great to gain a good understanding of how they could help in practice with the up-down temps that we experience in Finland until almost mid-June. I mean, last summer we had the hottest summer in recorded history and it was really damned hot already in May but we also did still have a night during the first week in June when the temps went down to 2C (35F). Wife and I were carrying a large amount of heavy shit in and out of our bedroom to the backyard every morning and night for two weeks or more. Screw that.

 

[podz]

Enter exhibit image twelve thirty-two, Mr. Montufar.  Day by day, Mr. Montufar (Monty) stretches his arms and spreads his exquisite wings - a sign of evil in the making, of the monster yet to come, an imp if you will. But at this early stage in life, everyday he's just forking. He's in his PRIME - one, three, seven, you get the fork, Monty?
 
There are plenty of others in the garden, but as for Mr. Montufar - Every Girl Crazy Bout a Sharp Dressed Man!
 

 

[deolater]

Greg, I think your quote attempt might have failed? Did you mean to say that your Bishop's Crown leaves are tiny as well as your Lemon Drop?
 
I grew a Lemon Drop last year in a 1 gallon pot IIRC and it had fairly dainty leaves. Still, it produced a huge amount of pods which I still haven't used entirely.
 
Never grown a Bishop's Crown until this year - I started 4 and sold 3 of them. I have read that they can have leaves up to 30cm (12 inches) long. Mine aren't quite that big but they are the same size as from my wrist to my fingertips and I have relatively large hands.
 
Since I moved everything outside and nights are fairly cool, growth has pretty much slowed down on everything except for The Pubes. We are expected to have a bit of a cold snap between Sunday night and Monday morning (down to 42F for several hours) so I'll probably need to carry the Annuums and Chinenses inside for the night. They are too big for the cloches now - or I could just cut them back and make them fit :-) That would probably be a recipe for explosive growth as soon as it gets warm for good. Maybe I will do an experiment with a few of them, like one Padron and one California Wonder (bell pepper). It would be really great to gain a good understanding of how they could help in practice with the up-down temps that we experience in Finland until almost mid-June. I mean, last summer we had the hottest summer in recorded history and it was really damned hot already in May but we also did still have a night during the first week in June when the temps went down to 2C (35F). Wife and I were carrying a large amount of heavy shit in and out of our bedroom to the backyard every morning and night for two weeks or more. Screw that.

Wow, I really screwed up the formatting there.

Yeah, Lemon Drop and Bishop's Crown for me produce nearly identical plants with small (3-5cm) pointy leaves. I got a ton of pods from the Lemon Drop, but the Bishop's Crown didn't produce anything last year. I'm hoping the bigger plant from overwintering will do the trick.

I wonder if the difference we see in leaf size could be explained by climate. My Montufars aren't anywhere close to as beautiful as yours. It was 35C yesterday....

 

[nmlarson]

 
 
Thanks. There is a photo of them back in post #48 http://thehotpepper.com/topic/71210-growing-chiles-in-hel-2019/?p=1629575
 
They are not just a "european" thing, they are pretty much a thing of days gone by. They were really popular back when people had workers and before greenhouses were invented.

Thanks! I've not seen anything like that before. I've been Jonesing for one of these ever since I came across a photo of it years ago.