You got 'em, Eric, whenever you get ready....
Thanks for asking about my beds—You may regret it, because here I go—That particular bed is a couple of 6-plant rows I keep at my house in town. It's in the Red River valley, but a couple of miles from the main channel, so the soil is damnably dense, sticky, red-brown clay. The reason I'm telling you all that is because it took a heck of a lot of shredded hardwood mixed in with the clay to achieve the porosity and permeability that chile plants like. On top of that, as you noticed, is a 3-4 inch thick layer of straight shredded hardwood. The first year I had hell with nitrogen starvation caused by so much rotting hardwood, but once I figured out how to properly water and feed, the plants really took off, as you can see from the photo. My primary "base" food is Osmocote 14-14-14, but I just noticed on this bag I have here that they have changed the formulation to 19-6-12.
Hmmm....I'll see how that works...Anyway, it's not cheap, around $25 for 10 lbs, but you can see from the Guyana plant what excellent results it gives. What is critical, also, for these beds is the "watering channel" I finally learned how to build into the crowns of the beds. It's just an extra-thick layer of shredded hardwood along the entire crest of the beds, formed into a longitudinal channel. This allows for nice, uniform water distribution to the entire root system. It also makes it very easy to work in the Osmocote pellets. Before I built those channels I was watering twice a day, but the plants were still struggling with nitrogen starvation and dehydration.
Because it sometimes takes a couple of weeks for the plants to begin taking up nutrients from the Osmocote pellets, I often supplement with Miracle Grow Liquid. This stuff is great for a quick "nose hit" of nitrogen, which the
C. annuum and
C. baccatum types seem to really enjoy:
Thanks again for asking about my beds. Have I ever mentioned the Canadian study that turned me onto shredded hardwood in the first place? A real eye-opener...