Insanity - The Girls

[Scovie]

Wow g, you know some shtuf. That's awesome that you're plants are still producing. I was just wondering about your over wintering...
Will you use lights? or just natural light? It sounds like with enough light, your girls won't stop producing! just curious~

Continue the good work

 

[geeme]

Well, my personal goal is that they NOT produce over the winter. If you put them in a cool (but not cold) low-light condition and water and fert them less often, they typically go dormant and don't require as much care. Then, early in the Spring, warm them up, give them more light, and fert more often. THEN they start exploding with growth. The overwinters last year started putting out buds too soon, and some even flowered, but these all fell off. I would have picked them off, otherwise, as I wanted the plants to be able to focus on growing new stems and leaves, to grow and bush out rather than staying small.

That said, yes since they are perennials when they don't get too cold, you can keep them going throughout the winter if you want, and they would require much more light than most people have in their houses to produce.Still, when I think about my perennials outside (trees, russian sage, etc.), they do go dormant over the winter, so it seems to me that letting the plants rest for a while is a good thing. There again, I don't know what happens if they're not in a super-cold zone like we have here - would they stay green but just not produce for a while, for example? I've done quite a bit of research on overwintering, focusing on dormancy, so wasn't looking for info on how to keep them active. That would be a good research item for some day, if I get to a point where that is desirable for me.

Interesting factoid I found the other day - rocotos can live for 15-16 years, so that seems to be an exceptional plant to consider overwintering.

 

[geeme]

So the two rocotos are STILL in the garage, as well as the two trin perfs. GOOD NEWS - found a rocoto (canario) just starting to turn yellow - FINALLY!!!


http://thehotpepper.com/topic/11175-crushed-candied-habaneros/#entry217110 GLink

glink

crushed candied habaneros

 

[megahot]

I told myself and many of you that I would not start anything from seed until after my son's cat moves to kitty heaven, because she LOVES killing seedlings. But here I am, starting a grow log. Must have lost my marbles....

This was the sum total of sprouts on 2/19:

I hope you have better eyes than I do, as I can hardly see some of the newest ones.

Today, just four days later:

The newest ones, which were somewhat hidden in the pic above:

The 2 ridiculously tall ones are tomatillos, not peppers.

So far these include Cayenne (3), Congo Trinidad (2), Douglah (6), Jalapeno (3), and Orange Hab (2). I also have a tomatillo and an jalapeño in cups - they germinated in coffee filters, but haven't appeared above the surface since I moved them into the cups. Finally, my real insanity: 27 more seeds which will hopefully germinate this week, in coffee filters.

A note on the pics: when I use flash, the leaves look yellow. When I don't use flash, they look more green, closer to like they are in person. So the middle pic is without flash, the other two with flash. There hasn't been that drastic of a color change in the plants themselves. And no, the cups don't color change, either!

Very nice!

 

[geeme]

I decided to resurrect this glog from 2011 as I have again started enough plants to possibly qualify as nuts. Maybe. Just under 40 at this point. Also, I thought it would be good to have quick access to my notes from my prior grow. I didn't have enough plants in 2012 or 2013 to mess with a glog as I was finishing up school. Graduated at the end of last summer, so no more excuses! Here we go…..
 
Snapped a quick pic to start with:

 
I don't have things organized just yet, but will be rearranging this weekend. I will likely post a better pic after that. 
 
Here are the types of things I'm growing this year:
 
Ancho Mulato
Congo Trinidad Red
Congo Trinidad Yellow
Rocoto Red (overwinter plus new)
Rocoto Yellow (overwinter)
Rocoto Orange (overwinter)
Aji Colorado
Aji Cristal
Aji Panca
Pasilla de Oaxaca
Jalapeno
Mini Bells
Round Mauve Eggplant
Tomato
Oregano - golden
Squash - yellow 
Thyme
Cilantro
Basil
Green Onion
 
I think that's it. The tomatoes were an "oops" - I intended to bring home Romas from the hardware store, but my son grabbed the pack for me and got the wrong one. Then the receipt managed to disappear before I discovered the error, so meh - we're growing tomatoes of an indeterminate type even though I specifically wanted determinate. 
 
I have not grown eggplant before, as I've been the only one in the house who will eat them. This is going to be a challenge, as I've noted the eggplant seems to want to be watered every other day. I have specifically been growing plants that preferred drier conditions over the past several years, so have to get used to watering the eggplant more often. It's kind of astounding to me, how much water that wants, and we haven't even hit real summer here yet - consider this morning's low was 57F - seems like I may have to water it every day once any real heat sets in. 
 
The aji cristal was the only plant that arrived in bad shape, likely from shipping as I've never had a problem with the seller before. I did not bother to contact the seller as the possibility of losing one plant wasn't a biggie for me. The plant had lost all except the lowest 4 leaves, and the top was curled over and looking a tad wrinkly. I decided to pot it up anyway - it probably had a 50/50 chance, and who knew if it was going to pull through or not? The top got worse, but the bottom is now putting out new leaves, so likely it will be fine. 
 
The jalapenos were kind of an impulse buy at the hardware store last weekend. You know… there they were…. calling my name! Ha! There was a pot with 3 plants in it, so it was a good enough deal. I separated one into a pot by itself, but decided to grow the other 2 in a pot together. I'm curious to see what happens from a production standpoint. We'll see if I care enough to keep a count as the summer progresses. 

 

[geeme]

One more quick "note to self" for the day. In doing research on growing eggplant, I found that eggplant prefer more acidic soil. I also found that potting mix for african violets fits this bill, so that is what my eggplant is in. I will be giving it african violet food from time to time, too. We'll see what happens.

 

[geeme]

One week later, and I still haven't organized my plants. 
The three against the house arrived from CCN in the middle of May. We've had some chilly weather since then, so they're taking their time. No worries, as I know they'll get bigger soon as they're finally putting out branches. The two in the front I've only had for a week. The red pot has rocoto, the two flanking it are ancho mulatto, and the little ones are jalapenos.

 
This is a motley group of chiles, squash and herbs. Two mini bells, an aji cristal, aji colorado, pasilla de oaxaca, and aji panca for the chiles. Thyme, purple basil and the stuff going wild is cilantro. Squash in the very back. I am definitely going to be drying some cilantro this weekend - I've only had those for two weeks, and they started out pretty tiny. The two tiny starter pots in the upper-right have green onion seeds in them. Hoping tomorrow will be sprout day for them. 

 
Sorry for the side-ways pic, but I didn't care to right it tonight - maybe tomorrow. The two in the upper-left (without turning your head to the side) are golden oregano. Lower-left corner is the eggplant. Also tomatoes and congo trinidad chiles. 

 

[gasificada]

Good to see you are showing off the family again, g!
 
I've only ever once ordered a plant through the post... and never again. The idiots posted it on a Friday (according to the postmark) so it ended up sitting in Aust Post limbo for three days (it was a three day weekend). And after I specifically ordered it the previous Sunday night in the hopes it would be posted the Monday and be in my hands well before the weekend. Fair enough maybe the plant wasn't ready to be posted straight away but how utterly thoughtless of a company to send a live plant knowing it would be sitting in limbo for three days?? Needless to say it did not survive.

 

[geeme]

Wow - sorry to hear about that. The place I order from doesn't use the regular postal service, as they know too many plants would arrive in bad condition. In fact, one plant did manage to arrive in less-than-desirable condition - the aji cristal I mention above. However, I topped off the bad-looking part and it's putting out new growth like crazy now. 
 
The only problem I'm having with my grow at this point is from chipmunks digging in the dirt around some of the herbs. I'm ok with that, as long as they stay out of my chiles. I have some stuff to repel them, but I've decided to take a wait-and-see attitude. 

 

[geeme]

We've had quite a bit of rains this past month, so the plants have been in and out of the garage quite a bit. We've also had some ridiculously chilly weather, so the plants aren't as far along this year as they have been in the past.
 
Here are my "problem children" - 3 squash types. The one on the far right has silvering, often caused by whiteflies munching. I got green lacewings and parasitic wasps to help with that. The other two have a "lovely" fungal infection on some leaves - they'll be sprayed with fungicide when it appears the sporadic rains have stopped. 

The 4 tomatoe plants that got "topped" by a deer recently:

Congo Trinidads, 1 yellow, the rest red. They're coming along nicely.

Eggplant to the left, 2 ancho mulatto next to it:

3 aji panca to the left. You can hardly make out the red rocoto in the red pot on the ground in the center, but it's back there. In front of that is an aji cristal.

On the steps and immediately in front of them, left to right and top to bottom: 2 mini bells, 2 golden oregano, 3 purple basil (in one pot), 2 thyme, late-started baby carrots, aji colorado and 2 pots of jalapenos.

Pasilla de Oaxaca in the center, cilantro in the back to the left, late-planted spinach to the right.

 

[SpraysOnTheWayOut]

Love 'em geeme

 

[geeme]

 
Came across this bee on an eggplant flower this morning. Only thing is I'm not sure if it's sleeping or dead. I have sprayed fungicide on my squash plants, but no insecticides.  

 

[John1234]

Let him be, he's just taking a nap after vigorous sweaty flower sex

 

[geeme]

Trying a slightly different germination approach this year. We'll see how it goes. Using little plastic bathroom cups with just water and seed(s) until the plant peeks out of the seed casing. Once out, gets placed in a bed of finely-shredded, dampened cotton ball. A baccatuum was the first to sprout. To the left of it are several chinenses (same type in one cup) and to the right of it is one other baccatuum. All the rest are pubescens. I've been changing the water every couple of days. 
 

 
Now that one has sprouted, I am going to wait only until it's fully up (cotyledons out of the casing) then move it to seed starting mix. There should be no mysteries this way. One of the things that has happened in the past is that I would move a seed to starting mix as soon as the plant peeked out of the casing, then nothing further happened. Well, most likely some kind of pathogen stopped the progress. Another thing I did in the past was wait until the cotyledons were fully up then extract the plant (carefully!) from the paper towel or coffee filter I started it in, then moved it to the starting mix, keeping the cotyledons above the surface. This was good from the perspective that I knew for sure it was ok once in, but sometimes getting the seed away from the paper towel or coffee filter was a bit of a trick. With the finely-shredded cotton ball, I should be able to remove most of it pretty easily and not care if some remains when it gets moved.
 
It's been interesting to watch the progress as the seed casings thin out, getting ready for the plant to push through. I wish I had a macro lens and could record the changes that take place before the plant peeks out at all. It's kind of a game, watching them go from solid white or dark brown to translucent and being able to see the tiny spiral of the forming plant then trying to guess which one will come out first. I am pretty sure the other baccatuum will be next, but it seems to me that a couple of the pubescens are ahead of the chinenses.   

 

[geeme]

A little update. 8 of the seeds came from Judy at PepperLover.com. 7 of the seeds came from my own pods from past grows. At this point 5 of the 8 from Judy sprouted, while all 7 of mine sprouted. I don't expect the remaining 3 from Judy to sprout at this point, as they show no signs of doing so - no thinning out, no faint appearance of the spiral going on inside. Nada. But more than that, there was a problem with Judy's method of shipping. And see, I knew about this from a convo a year or two ago in chat. For those of you not familiar with it, Judy places the seeds in little plastic ziplocs then places the seeds in an unpadded envelope. Oh, she writes on the envelope that it should be hand-cancelled, but she doesn't take any more precaution than that - not even a single layer of bubblewrap is added. So you can guess what happens when our "darling" postal service ignores the request to hand-cancel - yep, crushed seeds. Three packs of crushed pubescen seeds in my case. At $5 a pack, that's enough to warrant at least one layer of bubblewrap in the envelope, IMO. Think about it: it would be ridiculous if someone sold you a glass object then simply wrote on the box to handle with care because glass was inside. No, you would expect the vendor to wrap that delicate object in bubblewrap and maybe even add styrofoam padding to help ensure it didn't break in transit. Seeds are delicate objects, too, so I expect a vendor to take similar precautions when shipping, especially a vendor who has had a past customer complain about this very thing. So I picked out one seed from each of the three packs of crushed seeds - the best-looking seed in each - and tried germinating them. No surprise - they are the three seeds that have not yet sprouted. Yep, they're in the little blue cups in the post above, started on the same day in the same way as all the rest. Mind you, I'm not complaining, just reporting facts. I anticipated that she might ship the same way she did in the past, given the convo in chat that evening past. I did, however, hope she had learned from it. And I hope any readers of this post take pause and consider this the next time a new person asks for recommendations of seed vendors. Judy is a nice person and she tries to do good by her customers, for the most part. But she is as fallible as the rest of us - all of us. Sometimes we learn from our mistakes, sometimes we don't. The rousing cheer of "best" that comes about is slightly over-rated. Let's all make sure we are inclusive of all the reputable vendors on this site when making recommendations.
 
But back to my grow. At this point I have 12 seeds sprouted and placed into cups with drainholes cut into their bottoms and partially filled with shredded cotton balls. I also started one more seed just a couple days ago - a baccatuum from Judy (from one of the packs that was not crushed in transit, so I expect it to germinate.) The cool thing about the damp cotton is that it's slightly translucent - even before the sprout gets near the surface you can hold one of the cups up to the light and see the progress being made. And as the sprout gets very near the surface you can make out which are likely going to have helmet-head. Plus, even more exciting is that you can see the touch of green before it's fully up.  
 
Now I am trying to anticipate the next step. After the plants are fully up am I going to immediately move them to a starter soil mix, or am I going to wait until they have a couple sets of true leaves and just move them to pots with potting soil? I may split them up and try both approaches, but I haven't decided for sure yet. The one thing I do know at this point is I like the shredded cottonball approach. It doesn't matter how many times I start seeds, I always find it fascinating to watch the process as best as I can, and this approach makes it even easier to see. I'll be making more notes as things go along, to remind myself next year of any do's or don'ts that I learn about this approach this season.

 

[geeme]

Wow - I have never seen a baccatuum sprout in two days, which is what just happened (unless there was a mixup and it turns out this is an annuum.) I'm itching to see what comes of it!

 

[geeme]

Well, this isn't the best of pictures, but it's what I could get under the given circumstances. In the cup in the ower-left corner, in roughly the center of the cup you can see the sprout coming close to the surface of the cotton. The darker shade to the right is the seed casing and to the left of it is the plant. In-person you can definitely make out the green cotyledons. The seed casing only came off the cotyledons in the last 24 hours, as when I looked at it yesterday it seemed a likely candidate for helmet-head. 
 

 
In the cup in the upper-right corner, if you look carefully enough, you will notice two things (sorry, it's a tad out of focus at the surface level.) A bit to the left of the center of the cotton you can make out the plant itself. It hasn't greened up as much as the other one yet, but from the angle in the picture it looks kind of like a backwards letter "C". The other thing (which is harder to make out) is about between the 12 o'clock and 1 o'clock position from the sprout - a patch of tiny black spots. 
 
I intentionally did not put a fan on the cups yet, specifically so I could see the start of mold or fungus (such as causes damping off.) These cups have not come near dirt yet, so those black spots are definitely mold or fungus. They're very tiny at this point and also far enough away from the sprout that it won't be a biggie to remove them. It's easy to understand why a grower would have no idea that this was starting on top of soil, since the spots are so tiny. I am tempted to leave it be so I can track it spreading, but I don't want to kill the plant. I may just remove the infected section to a separate cup and let it go wild there. At any rate, this has been a pretty cool process to watch. And yes, I now have a fan on the cups - no need to let that stuff start on all of them!

BTW - If you click on the picture above you can see it more full-sized, which may help you discern what you're seeing a bit better.

 

[geeme]

Note to self:
 
I really liked starting the seeds in water in the cups. It gave me the opportunity to easily give them a fresh start every couple of days by moving them to new cups with "new" water and so all chances of mold developing were eliminated. +1 to a plain water bath (after an initial soak in h2o2) for initial germination. And it was pretty cool and interesting to be able to see the whole process a bit better by using a thin layer of cotton on top of the seeds. I now know, for example, that part of what can happen in the plant's attempt to shed the seed casing is that the tips of the cotyledons will come out first, so the plant basically has a U-shape - root end out first then cotyledons peek out - then as the plant straightens up it basically just slips right out of the seed casing via eliminating the bottom of the U. Of course, we know things don't always work out that way or helmet head wouldn't happen.
 
But while that was interesting and informative, that's the last time I'll intentionally use cotton after the roots peek out. It wasn't easy to extract the sprouts from the cotton, in spite of the fact that I shred it finely up front. The fibers do have a propensity to cling to each other, shredded or not. In some cases this was making it too difficult for the sprout to penetrate and so it was curling up on itself beneath the layer of cotton. In turn, it was kind of a PITA to extract the sprouts to move them to starter soil and I managed to lose one in the process. Glad I used the approach since I learned something from it, though. 

 

[geeme]

After giving away plants, this is my pepper list for this year:
 
Jalapeño
Aji Panca
Pasilla de Oaxaca
Aji Cristal
Ancho Mulato
 
Total of 13 pepper plants at this point. Pared it down this year as I still have an over-abundance of dried pods from the past few years. Also, all my dried pods are much hotter than what I'm growing this year, so I have plenty in the heat department. This year's grow is more focused on immediate eating rather than drying.
 
Non-peppers at this point include:
 
Little Fingers eggplant
Tsakoniki eggplant
Brussels sprouts
Red Romaine lettuce
Golden oregano
Wooly thyme
Tarragon
Rosemary - 2 kinds 
Purple basil 
 
This will be my first time growing brussels sprouts and I only have one of this kind of plant. This will be my first time growing these varieties of eggplant - hoping these work out better than the round mauve that I grew last year. The plant itself was fine and it put out plenty of fruit, but the fruit split wide open before ripe. Others have said they found the round mauve to be a low producer, anyway, so I'm not trying again at this point. May do so another year.
 
Will also be starting from seed:
 
Cucumber
Green onion
Carrots
Radish
 
I probably should have started the cucumber earlier, but I didn't. We'll see how things go.
 
After potting all the plants yesterday it seemed that the predicted storms were moving in so I moved all the plants inside the garage. Pics will come after I get them moved out, which may be next weekend given the weather forecast.

 

[geeme]

 
 

 
I managed to get the rest of the plants potted this morning and also filled 4 more pots with soil in prep for the seeds. 2 of the basil, 1 eggplant and 1 lettuce are looking very unhappy at this point. The basil came 4 in a single pot and the two were right next to each other. I swished them in a bucket of water but they absolutely would not separate so I cut the roots. We'll see if they pull through or not. The others are likely transplant shock so will likely recover over the next few days.