2023 was not a good year for growing for me. When I started I was unaware that I would be traveling a lot and also moving from a large city to a smaller city 500km or so to the north. The move and the traveling did not make my plants happy and several died and the remaining ones didn't produce much.
So in 2024 I wanted a better grow year. I traveled much less and I could also have plants outside, on a balcony, for the first time. So everything was in place for having a bounce-back year. It was definitely an improvement but quite far from the success I had in my first two/three years of growing peppers.
I got enough peppers to last me over the winter/spring but the yield was not great and most plants didn't really start producing until the season was almost over.
This is what six of the plants (I had 10) looked like in middle of October, a few days before I had to move them inside:
At this point I hadn't even started thinking about 2025 or if I was going to grow anything at all, but then I watched the documentary
Superhot: The Spicy World of Pepper People and I got bit hard by the pepper bug. I wanted a better season, more peppers, more varieties and most of all, I wanted to get my tolerance up again after a few years of barely not eating any fresh peppers at all.
So I got to thinking, what went wrong in 2024?
It felt like all the prerequisites were there. Good start with healthy plants and I used 7 liter (1.5 gallon) pots which should give decent sized plants. Also having the plants outside with lots and lots of sun and natural wind was sure to do wonders for them.
The more I thought about it, and also thinking back to the other years of growing, I came to the conclusion that the only thing I could've done better was feeding nutrients to the plants. I only gave them nutrients every 3rd to 5th watering and that could definitely be why the plants grew like they did.
I formulated a plan for 2025:
- Grow many varieties of different heat levels
- Have more plants outside, as many as possible
- Feed the plants more frequently and actually "listen" to what the plants tell me while growing
- Go back to basics and have a KISS approach (in case you don't know, KISS=Keep It Simple Stupid))
That felt like a good plan, but like all good plans it changed... several times.
I've been curious about growing in hydro and did some research, but initially felt like it required too much effort. I did a coco grow in 2018 and I did not like it due to how much effort was required with that medium. So I scrapped the hydro ideas... until I saw a Khang Starr video where he grew in mini hydro systems using a Kratky method.
It seemed so easy, didn't require buying anything fancy, and simply something worth trying without anything to lose. So a small trial hydro grow was added to the 2025 plan.
But watching more of K.S. videos made me curious about crossing peppers. Something I've never done. So the hydro grow was expanded with more plants.
Then a few days ago I saw the excellent video
@Pepper-Guru posted about container growing and I wanted to try growing in wide & shallower pots to see if it would affect the plants. But to see that I would need to grow the same variety in normal pots that are of similar volume so I could compare.
Since space is kind of an issue, especially with the number of plants I had in mind, I had trouble finding small enough fabric pots that still were wide & shallow, in the end I managed to find some decent ones that were about 14.5 liter (3.5 gallon or so). Twice the size of my regular pots, but not being able to find anything smaller I decided to go for those.
So in addition to the original plan the following will be done in 2025:
- Try growing in hydro
- If successful, try to cross peppers
- Grow most plants in wide & shallow pots
- Have 4 plants in "normal" pots to compare with the plants in the wide & shallow pots
So what started as a "going back to basics" season, has now gotten small side quests of experimentation and trying new things.
During all of this my list of varieties to grow has changed continuously but the final list is the following.
Hydro:
- Aji Cirel
- Aji Melocoton
- Aji Verde
- Aribibi Gusano
- Olive Jolokia
- Peach Ghost Jami
- Peter Pepper Red
- Peter Pepper Yellow
- PI 439416
- White Bullet Habanero
- White Moruga
- Yellow Bullet Habanero
Soil:
- Bhut Jolokia Peach
- Black Scorpion Tongue
- Bonda Ma Jacques
- Chocolate Hand Grenade
- Cumari
- Fatalii White
- Habanero Brown Egg
- Habanero White Giant
- MA Pale Rider
- Murupi Amarela
- Papa Joe’s Scotch Bonnet
- Scotch Bonnet Brown
- Sugar Rush Peach Striped
- Thor’s Thunderbolt
- Trinidad Moruga Scorpion Caramel
- Trinidad Moruga Scorpion Chocolate
- Trinidad Scorpion Peach
- White naga
If all varieties germinate with the current plan then it will be 12 plants in hydro and 22 plants in soil.
I'm going to sow a few extra seeds for soil in case I have bad germination, just to make sure I have 4 different varieties (2 plants each) to do the container experiment with.
Seeds were planted today, but this post is already too long, so I will do that update in a day, or two.
