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Second Time's a Charm - My 2013 Grow Log

I bought a house last fall and my first thought was that I finally able have a garden with all the peppers I wasn't able to have before. My first and only prior tinkering with peppers was a couple years ago when I rented a house and was able to have about 8 pots with various varieties. This year I'm converting the back third of my backyard into a raised bed garden packed with peppers...and whatever other things the girlfriend decides.

I have a few pics of my preliminary work, I started my seeds in paper towels in a bag at the beginning of February and started transferring them to peat pots a week or so ago. My basement is a little chilly still, about a 60 deg ambient temp, but I had luck using a heat lamp wrapped in an emergency blanket to provide enough warmth for germination. Now that all the seeds are in pots the blanket is covering the florescent lights trying to keep as much light and heat on them as possible. I'm using a 4 bulb setup with 6500k "Daylight" lights.

I have next week off from school and plan on getting a good chunk of the raised beds built in the back yard.

Varieties I'm growing this year:
Fatalii
Carolina Reaper
Yatzi
White Habanero
Chocolate Habanero
Purple Jalapeno
Giant Jalapeno
Jalapeno
Santa Fe Grande


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Peat pots in plastic containers for easier watering:
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Lights are about 12" from top of pots all covered by an emergency blanket to reflect the light and heat back in:
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Click to expand...
They are already done germinating, I had pretty good germination rates and ended up throwing quit a few good seeds away because I didn't have room...kept more of the best varieties of course. In the second picture you can see some of the leaves sprouting up. I can see them all breaking through the soil, but not all of them have the leaves showing yet. I imagine within the next week or so they will really start growing up.
 
Welcome to THP. We're not all that far apart. Don't mean to pry, but how is it you have a whole week off from school this/next week? I thought the holidays were done for awhile. Oh wait, is it spring break already?

I've never heard of a Yatzi pepper, but I used to love the dice game Yahtzee. I wonder if there is a connection.

"ended up throwing quit a few good seeds away"

Around here, I think that's called pepper abuse.
 
Next week is spring break, we just had two back to back snow storms a couple weeks ago so it feels like I just got off of a break. Oh well, can't complain.

I spelled it wrong they call it a Yatzy, or Yatsufusa. It's supposedly a high yield cayenne type pepper. Looking forward to making some hot sauce and wanted a lot of peppers.

And yeah...I had too many germinated seeds and couldn't hold any more. I started with 5 to 10 seeds of each variety and could only keep 40 total. Wasn't sure how good my germination rate would be since it's in a cold basement with a jury rigged set up, but I did better than expected.
 
I started building my garden today. It is a pain in the ass, there is a pretty good incline so i think the people before us just put a bunch of big rocks down to help with the runoff. The silver lining: I was going to buy some landscape timber to support the front, but now I'm debating just using the rocks and various bricks I have laying around. Anyway, it's coming along, I'm off all this week so I'm going to be very tired.

Back yard.
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More detail.
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