(that's what my brain told me one fateful May day so here I am!
)Harmonic_Heat's 2025 Grow Log
I like to ramble; bear with me! "Quick" background on my gardening/pepper growing experience and what led to this impulsive grow attempt. I haven't grown peppers since 2009 and only the one season, but, being in south Louisiana at the time that ran late. I've grown basil and other herbs here and there since moving to the Denver area but after buying this house my neighbors made my life a living hell (and still is ten years later) I mostly gave up on using my yard for anything but growing thistle and weeds while I stay indoors to avoid them. This summer I decided to torture myself and grow a couple of pepper plants after finding some red and chocolate "habaneros" (plenty of misshapen, odd pods, not sure what they were but had some heat, esp the chocolates) at a local Asian market back in early May.
I picked out 12 plants online, marinated on my decision for the evening to make sure they were what I wanted after paring my list down to stay reasonable...and then at 1130 pm the site's prices all went half off for Memorial Day and I wound up ordering 30 (mostly pairs)
And then I bought 4 more at a nursery around the corner that I didn't expect to have anything but orange habs and jalapenos. So this is the grow list (purchased online from chileplants.com unless otherwise noted):
1x Aurora
1x Black Pearl (local purchase)
1x Carolina Reaper (local purchase)
1x Centennial Rainbox
1x Scotch Bonnet (local purchase)
1x Trinidad Scorpion (local purchase)
2x Aribibi Gusano
2x Bequinho "yellow" (sent as mild substitutions for a similar pod-shaped hot variety, Chupetinho, I had chosen)
2x Candlelight Mutant
2x Dreamcatcher x Thunder Mountain
2x 7 Pot Bubblegum
2x Bahamian
2x Chocolate Brain Strain
2x Dragon's Breath
2x Fatalii
2x Mayan Habanero
2x Primofatalii
2x Sugar Rush Stripey
2x White Habanero #2
2x Wiri Wiri
Shipping went a bit sideways, or at least not according to their shipping terms, after some emails I was refunded part of my shipping cost and they said they would update their shipping terms to be more clear. I will say their customer service was/is top notch and I will likely order from them again next time I grow peppers. In short I paid for 3-day shipping but wound up getting 5 day shipping because they packed them Saturday figuring I'd get them Wednesday (UPS isn't that competent for my destination, they often add a day to original delivery dates) but they didn't show up until Thursday afternoon/near evening. I don't have a long grow season here so any setbacks can be costly if not "fatal" depending on which strain. They showed up looking fairly yellow/faded (some worse than others) and in exceptionally watered condition, 5 days like that in the dark, arrived in the condition I figured. Received June 5th.
Examples:
Versus locally bought (solo cups)...sorry for the varying white balance, cell phone camera. The most worrisome are the Wiri Wiri, Fatalii, Primofatalii, and Dragon's Breath.
I lucked out in a way in that the weather here was not too hot and was overcast a fair amount in the afternoons evenings for initial hardening off. Transplanting took a about a week due to other things going on and juggling time/energy. Started with the most root bound and yellow ones first. Bought buckets from Ace, not the cheapest but I prefer to support locally owned business over big box anything and a 1" hole saw.
Promix BK (not BX, not HP), bark based medium with mychorizzae and lime
Transplanting
Green tarp because I figured they might not like the light colored paint under the leaves and for easier clean-up later.
Eventually planning to move them to my yard where I've put down some cardboard and black plastic to cover the thistle and other weeds and give me an easy area to walk around. It's also the spot in my back yard that will receive the most sunlight from now until fall. Although, with the recent heat wave, kinda wondering if I should be more cautious heh. Plus the wind. 30-50+ MPH gusts aren't uncommon here. Also planning to put down some landscape matting or something so it's not too slippery (on a bit of a slope, on a hill). Not too enthused about it being black due to heat, but, I can worry about that later.
After getting everyone transplanted I finished mucking with the flowers and herbs I bought and have just been working on getting the peppers hardened off. Slowly moving them away from the house a bit each day. There was some minor sun scalding early on but overall they've done well all things considered. Have been fertilizing them with Botanicare Grow Pro 3-2-4 and their Cal-Mag offering. New growth looks greener but because they spent 5 days in waterlogged conditions, and then I decided to water them all deeply on one particular Tuesday even though the forecast called for ~40-50% chances of rain for the next 4-5 days and strong storms (never really rains at my house, can be about to get wrecked by massive storm clouds aaaaand...nothing, maybe a sprinkle), and then Mother Nature decided to actually rain at my house every single afternoon when she normally either goes to the south or north of my house no matter how promising. So they sat in extra wet conditions for another 5-6 days until that passed. And then we went from low-mid 80's to 4 days of ~100F temps a few days after that. I mulched them with straw this past Monday to help retain moisture and watered them well on Friday on day 2 of the heat wave. I've had to move some of the straw today after realizing how good of a job it was doing to help let the medium (can't call it soil really) try and dry out a bit. I expected the hot, dry weather to dry them out much quicker.
Today
Using my food thermometer (instant read) to check soil temps. Will be up-potting most of what's in the clay pots to buckets and other larger containers. Their medium temps are ~95-100F+ whereas the buckets are reading about 95 on the very edge but only 85 towards the center and the big, black containers have an even higher temperature delta from exterior to interior as expected. Have also been considering reflective coatings/materials to help reduce root temps.
I've been going out at night between midnight and 4AM and hunting for aphids and other pests. So far just a few aphids here and there, easily taken care of by hand, for now. Plenty of hover flies and wasps around, saw a green lacewing today, and a nice, large Phiddipus (jumping spider, she was very gravid...spiders are another passion of mine, used to keep and breed tarantulas and scorpions and sell to dealers, now I just keep a few, 17 or 18, down from 130 plus babies/egg sacs).
Anyway, that's enough for now I suppose. Wanted to get this log going and detail out the very basics. I have no idea if the super hots will produce much, if anything, given their current sizes and needed maturation time but I'm trying to be optimistic. I titled this "What could go wrong?" because we get such extreme temperature swings here as well as changing weather conditions (I've seen it numerous times where it's 80 one day and snowing the next, not so much in the summer, but fall and spring anything can happen), the sun here is exceptionally harsh because of the altitude (I'm around 5600' ASL I believe, just over a mile up) and "full sun" plants here sometimes aren't actually capable of handling it, plenty of pests around from Japanese beetles to aphids, and our growing season is relatively short since we often get late freezes up to Mother's Day if not a bit beyond making it hard to put stuff out even when it's nice in the spring and we might or might not get an early frost in the fall.
Thanks for reading if you're still with me! I'll post some more individual plant pics another time but you can see in some of the photos that the new growth is looking better, although, there are signs of being overwatered (bubbly/misshapen leaves). Hopefully that's behind me now though
