Pete Maws Glog

Johnaton · May 2, 2012

Those look mighty fine, can't wait to have plants looking like that!

romy6 · May 2, 2012

Looks like you figured out how to handle the mites. Plants are looking happy :party:

slashroot · May 2, 2012

Cool little pet you got going on there hehe Very pretty goats weed plant, I am looking forward to mine maturing too! Tasted the pods yet?

Jamison · May 2, 2012

Looking good man. Way to take advantage!

mygrassisblue · May 21, 2012

I stumbled on this looking for Aji Rojo info. Great pics and looks as tho your 2012 season will be very productive ! Good luck on the hybrid work !

Tick · Aug 1, 2012

Hi all,

Thanks for the compliments! Sorry about writing back so late, but unfortunately I had to leave just as most of plants were finally ripening (including some of my most anticipated crossed pods). As far as I know, at least some of the plants are still alive and at least the Beni Highlands are being eaten.

As for taste, I did get to try a bunch before I left:

The ones I got to use most were the aji dulces, goat's weeds, and Tabascos and aji rojos. The aji rojos were taking a very long time to ripen, the dark pod in the earlier picture was still dark green when I left, but I think that they are often used while green anyway. I ate the goat's weeds, both black and red, and they had a great heat but kind of a dry taste, not much flavor. I used them to spice up soup. The Tabascos did start to ripen,and the birds loved them. They were hotter than the goat's weeds and they were the only peppers to actually make my skin flare-up. The capsaicin in them seemed to stick around on me.

Best tasting were the Black Hungarian, Beni Highlands and the Aji dulce (I got a lot of hot pods off that plant at least). The unripe aji rojos were good as well, but almost too earthy. The (still black) Black Hungarian had a flavor like many annuums, but more of it and also slightly earthy in a very good way. I think the climate or possibly my growing style upped the hotness of the peppers in general. I believe that Black Huns are supposed to be less hot than jalapenos, but mine were more like serranos. The Benis were hot but nice and crisp tasting from the few that I tried. The aji dulces were great. I ate them off the plant and cooked with them. They were kind of rasberry-flavored and actually had a slight heat to them.

As for the superhots, the nagas grew very fast and were actually starting to catch-up to my older batches of plants. I did have a few ripe ones, but was still deliberating whether I should try them when I left because of my experience with the congos. I tried one of the big congo pods pictured above when it ripened, but not the whole pod. I cut one open to take out some (hybrid?) seed and ate a small piece of the pepper's wall. Good flavor, but not much more heat than the aji dulce. A dud? So, I tried a small piece of the placenta - hottest thing I have ever eaten or want too at this point! (And I am able to eat a whole habanero without too much trouble). Almost started wheezing, so thought I should be carefull with the nagas (pretty peppers though).

So I missed out on the main part of my harvest and lost a bunch of my crossbreeding experimentation as well. I did harvest a lot of the seeds, but they are still in PR (hope they are still dry). I don't think there was much unwanted self-pollination going on as the pods that I hadn't pollinated adequately, or from interspecies crosses, had almost no seeds compared to non-emasculated pods. I was growing a few crossed seedlings when I left but it was a bit early to tell what they would look like. Anyway, I'm keeping the hobby going back in New England for now and have some new seedlings that I hope to overwinter (including a few from 2 of my own crosses).

Amoung the new plants are:
My seeds:
Cayenne x Goat's weed cross? - looks a bit fuzzy already.
Chinense x annuum cross? Came up much faster than their all chinense half-brothers, but could this be to differences between pods and seed handling?

Some new seeds:
Malagueta - fast germination (6 days), think could be a good overwinter.
Bradley's Bahamians - a little longer to sprout
Sonoran Tepins - 2/5 seedlings are tricots! And they all came up within 8-11 days! Hope they are tough.
Bode - nothing yet, do these take their time germinating?

And an orange hab plant from Home Depot.

Love this hobby and will keep it going.

Tick · Aug 6, 2012

New beginnings:

Tricot Sonoran Tepin:

Malaguetas:

Cayenne x goat's weed:

Aji dulce x annuum (I hope):

Tick · Sep 9, 2012

Progress despite seedling massacre!

So I was getting the hang of growing peppers in the tropics, mostly had success at battling broad mites and had a great crop almost ready when I had to leave. I restarted in Boston in the middle of this summer with a bunch of seeds that I hope to overwinter. Some are from newly bought seeds and some are my own potential hybrids that I salvaged. Some of the varieties I chose are relatively compact and/or good for growing in pots, others are just interesting.

These have been growing since July from newly ordered seeds:
Malagueta
Bradley's Bahamian
Sonoran tepin

And these were started from my salvaged seeds:
Cayenne x goat’s weed
aji dulce chinense x annuum cross – looking less likely, but the possible dad was an odd plant.

I also got a few plants from nearby garden centers in June to try for some peppers this season. A tabasco and habanero really took off and both look great and are full of good-sized pods. Thanks to finally having a warm summer up here, I think have a good chance to get a decent harvest from these plants. Some ripe tabascos already.

tabasco and Thai holy basil. Also a Thai Dragon to the lower right that didn't grow much, but already had pods when I bought it):

habanero and more basil:

The disaster:

I’d been moving the seedlings from a sunny spot in the front yard to a porch each night as I’ve had animals poke around sometimes in my pots before plants get established (more so in Boston than PR – just a few lizards there). However, I forgot how bad it could be up here… I repotted over a dozen plants into mostly 1 gallon pots three Wednesdays ago. I have access to nicely aged compost full of eggshells and combined that with old soil from pots that had been lying around since I had left Boston. I refreshed this with peat moss, pine bark mulch and some vermiculite and added some bone meal. Saw some disturbed dirt in a few pots while the plants recovered for a few nights in the shade, but everything seemed ok. So I arranged them in a sunny spot in the front yard and left them there overnight. That Sunday afternoon, I walked out to see a disaster; every new pot was dumped out and the soil was spread around and mixed with limp pepper plants. I scraped as much soil off the grass as I could and re-repotted, watered and placed the plants in the shade. A few had been covered by the spilt soil while they lay out in the sun, weren’t as wilted and have recovered completely (minus a few shredded leaves). Others are alive but not pretty, such as the Malaguetas and especially the Bahamians, and I’ll probably lose some. The only good thing is that I probably have to cull due to lack of space for the winter, so that’s been done in part for me. I had not repotted one Bahamian and it and some newer seedlings were untouched. But, I could not believe the damage. I’m was not paranoid enough to believe that someone did it, plus the pots were not kicked or thrown around, so it had to be an animal, but every pot? My best guess was a skunk that had smelled the bone meal. Two days later a neighbor confirmed my suspicions; she had heard something in the middle of the night and looked out her window to see a very large skunk among my pots. I usually like skunks and think they’re interesting animals, but sometimes they really stink.

Most of the recovered repotted plants (I have to put them in the tray at night and then put on table to keep skunks out):

The cayenne X goat's weed has bigger leaves than either parent, is fuzzier than I thought it would be and got buds about a month after germination. Both parents are annuums but the first node has two flowers on all the plants. At least some of the newer nodes have only one bud, but it's still hard to tell:

The possible aji dulce cross, but now looks all chinense to me. Would be ok, since mom was a great plant (see above):

Here is the plant's possible dad (if not selfed) at a young age. A Peppermania mystery pepper seed that was hard to identify when younger, but I am now 100% sure it was an annuum and figured out what variety it was as well. It was the fastest of all my plants ever to flower:

And finally here is a pretty little Sonoran tepin (Pepperlover):

Tick · Nov 4, 2012

During the last few months, I've been moving plants indoors and out, and into what limited sun I've had (my house is on the shady side of the street). Also, there was another animal attack a few weeks ago, even though the plants were on a table. Most pots were dug into and my favorite tepin was destroyed! I don’t know what is so attractive about my pots this year. The Malaguetas (I had been hoping to make hybrids with them) have been singled-out for attack by slugs/insects and they don’t like the cooler temperatures. However, I was surprised that the Aji Dulces have done well in the fall weather. Now that their first pods are growing, they appear to be in fact the chinense x annuum cross that I had hoped for! It’s surprising since the plants had looked so much like the chinense mom to my eye.

Now I'm trying to keep some plants going in the basement. For now, they’re under 4 T8’s but I’m hoping to build a reflective chamber (to maybe trap some heat as well) and maybe get a few CFLs to light the lower part of the plants. I'm hoping to keep some plants alive for an early start next year and to collect new F1 and F2 seeds from what pods they already have, as pollen production has dropped. Even brought in my now pretty big Tabasco - it's still loaded with pods, but I will probably let this plant go once I've used them. The Bradley's Bahamian looks like a potentially more interesting and useful frutescens to grow. It has darker leaves (a trait I like) and seems to tolerate the colder temps more than the Malagueta and possibly the Tabasco.

Here's how my first attempts at hybridizing look so far:

The Cayenne x goat's weed:

This is the best of 4 plants. I will select among the F2's for bigger fruit, fuzzier stems and a more bush-like form. Will also look for earliness and more flavor than goat's weed.

Here are some Aji Dulce X annuum. The plants had looked chinense to me as they grew - is this typical for a chinense x annuum? The one in the green pot has some nodes with 3 flowers and interesting flower stem (pedicel) placement. It also seems like it may end-up being more compact. They both seem more compact than the mom. There is a third plant that is like the white pot one but with longer pedicels. F1's should be fairly uniform, but there was probably some variation in at least one of the parents' population or it could be environmental.

Here's the fruit: - calyx looks more annuum - correct? You can see the aji dulce's (mom) fruit above in an earlier post.

Here's 2 nodes with 3 flower stems each (one stem has fallen off):