salsalady's first grow log

This whole forum has inspired me to attempt to grow a few peppers. After receiving some seeds from another forum member, I decided to give it a go myself. The original plan was to have a local farmer grow them for me, but I'd feel real bad if they did a ton of work all season and they only produced a few pounds of peppers.

SO~ Here we go!

The seeds I received are-
Red Savina habanero
bhut jolokia
trinidad scorpion
7 pot- homegrown
7 pot- other

I printed out the growing instructions from Peppermania to have something to work with, bought a couple 72-cell starting trays, some germination mix, recruited SalsaNut0.5 to help, and set to work.

We set the seeds to soak in warm bleach water, filled the trays with dry germination mix and poured water over top of the mix and into the bottom tray. Rookie mistake! An hour later and the water was still pooled up on top of the mix, hadn't soaked up at all. So we dumped the mix out into a tray, added more water and mixed it up by hand. Back into the cells and after rinsing the seeds, we were finally ready to plant!

While we had the seeds soaking in little cups, 'Nut0.5 bumped one that was pretty full of water and splashed some of the 7 Pot seeds into the Trinidad Scorpion cup. OH WELL!

We ended up filling both 72 cell trays and putting 28 more seeds in a couple other plastic things I had laying around. OMG! 172 seeds! What Have I Gotten Myself Into?!?!? And the really scary thing is......I have some Aji Amarillo, orange Peter Peppers, Fatali and Peruvian white hab seeds on the way! YIKES!


Here's the temporary set up. It's under a SS table out in the salsa kitchen (hope the inspector doesn't pop in for a week or two until I can get the rest of the set up done). There's a space heater to keep thing warm, a blanket to hold the heat in, a thermometer in the tray, and we used colored toothpicks for ID-ing the different varieties.

all tucked in for the night-

I checked this morning and the temp in the tray is a nice cozy 80F.


And, in trying to find buckets to grow the plants in, I found these-

These are 4.5 gallon oil jugs from a restaurant, the kind that fryer oil or salad oil comes in. I picked up about 50 of them at the first place I went. We took the cardboard boxes off them already. I figure we can cut away the tops, but keep the handle, poke some holes in the bottom....what do you think? SCORE or BUST?

 

[salsalady]

tbc-

Here's a couple pictures of what's been cooking in the salsa kitchen. All of this will be posted for sale in the Market place soon. It just takes time to get the posts and pics all together.

Thanks for everyone's help, information and support for this first growing season. It ain't over, but it's winding down and we've had a BLAST! Can't wait to see what we come up with next year.

I have some ideas for grinding the powders, so stay tuned to see what contraption might appear. I tried some dried habs with the blender blades in a mason jar, but the seeds did not grind up at all. Maybe they weren't dry enough ?!?!???, but the rest of the pod ground up to a really fine powder. I have a hand crank grain grinder with an idea of how to motorize it -wink wink- we'll see if it works. One word for a hint....DeWalt! LOL!

Cheers, Mates!

 

[slick]

excuse me while I wipe the drool off the keyboard...

 

[Tonly]

Just read thru this grow log. Amazing 1st year project. Curious, did your Aji Amarillo ever produce? I had 2 in raised bed and one in a bucket. I planted them from seed in January and got one pod in August. The plants in the raised bed are over 10 feet tall and just now are loading up with pods. We had below freezing temps this week and somehow these 3 plants escaped the carnage. Hopefully the pods will ripen. Heard good things about them. Maybe they just need a looong season? My plants were in morning shade with afternoon sun.
Once again, congrats on your season. Can't wait to try some of your products.
T

 

[salsalady]

excuse me while I wipe the drool off the keyboard...

Thanks, Slick Check this out... http://www.thehotpepper.com/topic/18689-assorted-affordable-sauces-and-stuff/page__pid__395956#entry395956

Just read thru this grow log. Amazing 1st year project. Curious, did your Aji Amarillo ever produce? I had 2 in raised bed and one in a bucket. I planted them from seed in January and got one pod in August. The plants in the raised bed are over 10 feet tall and just now are loading up with pods. We had below freezing temps this week and somehow these 3 plants escaped the carnage. Hopefully the pods will ripen. Heard good things about them. Maybe they just need a looong season? My plants were in morning shade with afternoon sun. Once again, congrats on your season. Can't wait to try some of your products.T

Tonly, The aji's were the tallest plants in the patch, they were the last to flower and even though we put 1 in the gh, we never got a single pod. There was one "mystery chile" that came from peppermania that we decided was a aji chinchi, a smaller cousin of the aji amarillo, and that thing produced tons of yummy pods. We'll definitely be growing that one next year.

Thanks for the comments.

SL

 

[cueguy]

The plants in the greenhouse are still surviving, but I'm not sure our budget will with the electric heater running 24/7 to try and get the last ( or should I say MOST) of the pods to ripen.

I've been picking pods as soon as they have a little color and putting them in brown paper bags to ripen. The majority ripen up just fine, and only in the last few days have there been some bad/rotten ones that had to be pitched.

This is a day's pickings from about 10 days ago-
red savinas on the left, fataliis top right, assorted peter peppers lower right, aji, carrots, ans de arbols in the top tub, 7 pods in the lower tub.

this is the fresh harvest of "green" red savinas, and red savs that used to look like the green ones but have been in the paper bag for a few days.

Peter Pepper, Fatalii and 7Pod

I harvested this batch of green pods from plants that were totally dead. There are still several plants that are putting out new leaves and I'll try to overwinter them, but many of the plants that were on the outside edges of the greenhouse just got too cold and died. These pods are headed for a batch of hot sauce (more on that later). btw- The bell peppers are from the store

A couple more still hanging on in the gh-

Some more pods headed for processing, including a SCORE from the local grocer. They'd received a box of orange habs by mistake and the habs were NOT selling. I expressed interest in taking all of them and the produce manager made me a great deal on 4.25 lbs of fresh orange habs. WOOHOO! They are in the large bowl. Also some fatalii.

Trays for the dryer- red savinas and an assorted tray of chile de arbol, orange peters, aji chinchi and fatalii, peruvian whites. I'm going to make some ground pepper flakes of assorted red chiles (chile de arbol, red peters, assorted hot red chiles) assorted yellow chiles( aji, fatalii) and an orange one (orange peters, bulgarian carrot, orange hab). Should be pretty if nothing else~

There is still at least a large bowl of red savinas and a small bowl of 7 pods on the plants in the gh. Just gotta get them to start to ripen and then hope for the brown bag to do it's trick. I honestly don't have a clue as to the quantity harvested, I haven't kept track at all since it's been so late and so sporadic.
To be continued~~~

Very cool - I have been just starting this year and loving every minute of it. I see all of those Red Savinas you have and I have about six plants of those and all this time I thought they were Caribbean Reds! I have two plants of what I "thought" were Savinas just now ripening and they don't have the little point at the bottom... This is good news - so I have six plants of Red Savina?
Thanks and keep up the good work!

 

[salsalady]

Greetings, cueguy/Larry! Welcome! Thanks for chiming in.

This is my first year growing also and I've read a lot of discussion about Red Savs and Carib Reds and the confusion between the two..

From what I understand, there aren't that many growers growing true Red Savinas because they are a registered product and you have to be licensed to grow them for resale. The seeds I grew were from a private person whom I trust and if he says they are Red Savinas, I trust them to be that. But also, this other grower does not isolate his different pepper varieties, so there is likely some cross-pollinating going on...which is fine for me since I'm not going to do anything with the seeds, just use the pods.

The problems or discrepancies can come about if someone like myself receives seeds that have not been isolated and then they grow them and sell the seeds as Red Savs, but they might not be true red savs. And there are also a lot of places selling carib reds as red savs because they don't know there's a difference. Does that make any sense??

Definitely do not rely on my pictures to make a "for-sure" determination about your chiles. You may very well have 6 RS! If so...YeeHAA!

I have noticed that all of the RS plants have a very consistent pod shape.

Anyway, thanks for commenting, and I hope you enjoyed the thread. I'm already looking to next year and trying to figure out this over-wintering thing.


There are LOTS of plants that have new green leaves and it's the first part of November, for crying out loud! I just cannot stand to let them get frozen!


mustsaveplants-mustsaveplants-mustsaveplants.

To heck with raking leaves...I'm saving peppers!!!



welcome again, cueguy. SL

 

[huntsman]

Great read, salsalady -

Well done, Ma'am!

 

[bigt]

The Yellow peppers at the top of post #126 look exactly like the Beni Highlands I'm growing this year. Good flavor, similar to a Fatalii IMO but less heat. Was one of my more productive plants this year making about 75 pods.

Great pictures and some fantastic looking concoctions! Thanks for sharing.