Siv's 2019 first time glog

I have never grown anything intentionally before but I wanted to try. Last year I bought some seeds from a local supplier here and tried to germinate them and failed. Not a single sprout. I kinda gave up. But around May I saw a sorry looking ghost pepper plant (at least that's what it was labeled as) sitting at Lowes so I bought it and put it in a small pot. Despite my neglect (and being away for a month during summer), the thing grew and put out a good set of pods. So this year, I'm highly motivated to give some serious pepper growing a go.
 
Determined to succeed this time, I educated myself and learned about the need for heat mats etc. I also watched a ton of Peter Stanley and Kangstar's videos which were hugely helpful.
 
I started with the leftover seeds from last year and here's the status:

• Kraken - 10 started, 6 sprouted
• Douglah - 10 started, 2 sprouted
• Chocolate Moruga - 10 started, 0 sprouted

Then I placed an order with Sandia seeds on 4th Feb:

• Ring of Fire - 10 started
• Aji Limo - 10 started
• White Ghost - 10 started
• Fatalii - 10 started
• Rocoto - 10 started

Of this lot, most of the seeds have sprouted so I have transplanted around four of each into wicking cups (half in soil and half in hydroton) to see what happens:

 
Then Sandia seeds sent a coupon for 25% off and I'm a sucker for a sale so my second order was placed on 19th Feb:

• Bhut Jolokia Yellow - 10 started
• Bulgarian Carrot - 10 started
• Devil's Tongue - 10 started
• Yellow Jalapeño Lemon Spice - 10 started
• Mulato Isleño Chile - Chocolate Poblano - 10 started
• Bell Purple Beauty Sweet - 20+ started

The yellow jalapeno and bulgarian carrot have already sprung up, as well as lots of the purple bell. The first yellow ghost just popped up this morning:

 

I probably shouldn't have done this but after seeing the love for these varieties, I made a third seed order yesterday:

• Bahamian Goat
• Sugar Rush Peach

So my first lesson learned: Now that I know the importance of heat, humidity and light, I don't need to put so many seeds in. I have way too many seedlings now! I'm only gonna attempt 2 or 3 of the new seeds this time!


 
Now I'm debating how to grow these on. I have plenty of room in my garden so I'm thinking about a whole bunch of 5 gal buckets with one lot as self watering in compost and another as a drip watered hydro. I may do dutch bucket or I may try a venturi style nute injection, not sure.
 
Anyway, I look forward to seeing what happens to all these plants over this year!

 

[Siv]

I got all my early hydro starts in buckets now. I only have 4 or 5 left to do.
 
This weekend was spent getting the soil ready and setting up the irrigation system. I made my own mix using approx 20% perlite, 40% peat moss and 40% compost with a little blood and bone meal thrown in there. It was a lot of work to get that all mixed together and I'm pretty sure it's not mixed as well as it could be. I'll be supplementing anyway just in case.
 
I managed to set out 25 10-gallon grow bags and have all 11 of the early soil starts in place:
2x Kraken
2x Ring of Fire
2x Aji Limo
2x White Ghost
2x Rocoto Manzano
1x Fatalii
 
Now I need to decide what to put in the remaining 14 spots.

 
I bought a rabbit fence and used it as a tomato cage substitute. The large holes at the top allow me to get my hands through:

 

[Uncle Eckley]

You've got the fence down in the potting medium!  Good idea!  
 
I wish I'd bought this stuff instead of the 2x3in mesh I got..

 

[podz]

Looking so nice!

 

[Siv]

A quick update! I've moved almost all my hydro starts into buckets or soil, only a couple left. Here are some being prepared to move to soil:
 

 
My first pepper! OK, so I was leaving this to ripen but it seems it had other plans. It's a Ring of Fire cayenne and had a typical green taste and a reasonable kick so I'm looking forward to what its more mature brethren have to offer.
 

 
I'm now up to 17 hydro buckets. All the plants seem to be doing really well but only the ring of fire has fruit. A few others are just starting to flower now - I hope they hold up as temps are hitting the 90s now. I went through the laborious exercise of putting a tap and valve at the bottom of each bucket so that I can feed them from a central reservoir. It took a fair amount of work since I had to empty the nutrients before drilling the hole to tap and then fill back. But all done. They're certainly growing! Eventually these are going to go under an awning to get them out of the direct sun as the temps will get to the high 90s in a month or so.
 

 
I don't have a pic of the soil ones but they aren't growing nearly as fast as the hydro. I have added some slow release fertilizer and have ordered a venturi siphon so that I can feed them with hydro nutes occasionally. I'm hoping that the nutes don't clog up the drip emitters - I guess I have to dose the feed then run a good amount of plain water to flush through. I'll report back once I've done my first run.

 

[PaulG]

Very impressive grow you have going, Siv!
 
17 hydro buckets! 25 x 10-gallon grow bags!
Should be some serious poddage coming from
all that!
 
Is that your yard in back of the grow bags?

 

[Siv]

Very impressive grow you have going, Siv!
 
17 hydro buckets! 25 x 10-gallon grow bags!
Should be some serious poddage coming from
all that!
 
Is that your yard in back of the grow bags?

 
Up to 18 hydro buckets now!
 
I guess you could call it my yard - we're on 5 acres. Can't really grow anything other than trees out there as the wildlife will have it. That's why I put the pepper grow in the small fenced area we have.

 

[Siv]

 
This weekend I finally finished my float valve controlled kratky setup and moved all the peppers to their final positions. Mainly because my wife complained that she can't see out the family room windows because all the peppers were blocking it. Also, it's getting hot now and I checked the water temps and they're peaking at 101F in the black buckets with the sun and 90F ambient.
 
I took the photo at around 8:30am this morning and it shows how the sun covers the plants gradually from right to left but by about noon the shade from the overhang shades them all again. Hence the plants at the far right get about 4 hours direct sun and the ones on the far left get about half an hour. I have my rocotos on the far left so hopefully they stay cool and produce something.
 
The plants are just under the awning so should be relatively protected from the rain and also stay shaded throughout the hottest part of the day. Fingers crossed this works with the Texas sun/heat!
 
All the buckets are manifolded together with individual isolation valves. I added the two blue/foil buckets to see that water levels I was getting and it's about 7.5" on the far right and 7" on the far left (no valves because I ran out!). Once a black bucket gets to 7", I'll open its valve and feed from the master reservoir.
 

 
The float valve is in a separate bucket and is currently propped up on some wood, which I can lower if I need, and is fed from the 32" gallon trash can.
 

 

[Mr.joe]

I like the setup, I keep wanting to start a plant in hydro, but I need to learn to grow one in soil. I think the soiless grows are fascinating, but I don't know anything about them. Your plants all look great.

 

[karoo]

Excellent grow and write up. Please don't stop posting pictures, I just don't want to miss harvest time.

I will have to give this a try.

Sent from my FIG-LX1 using Tapatalk

 

[Siv]

I forgot I had a flickr account! No more messing with resizing pics and trying to fit with the site limits! Now that the hydros are fixed and won't move, I thought it would be good to take some status pics so I can compare each plant growth month to month. Here we go!
 

 

 

 

 
]

 

 
 

 

 

 

[CaneDog]

I forgot I had a flickr account! No more messing with resizing pics and trying to fit with the site limits! Now that the hydros are fixed and won't move, I thought it would be good to take some status pics so I can compare each plant growth month to month. Here we go!

 
That's great Siv. Your plants are looking strong. Nice blossoms on the Manzano and the leaves on your Fatalii are something else.  And pretty much everything seems to be into production mode.  Good stuff! 

 

[Siv]

I finally did an audit of my plants and updated my spreadsheet as best I could.
 

 
I did have more seeds sprout than listed however many didn't make it past "runt" stage. I also have a few that I lost the labels from so I don't know what they are! I gave 4 nice large plants to my uncle so hopefully he has some good luck with them. There are a couple spares that I don't know what to do with. The goat may go in the one spare grow bag I have. Two grow bags have overwintered plants from last year but they're looking tiny so I have no idea how they'll do.
 
The Sandia order 1 were the first I germinated in rock wool along with the seeds I bought in 2018 and didn't try. They were the ones I babied hence the higher success rate.
 
I didn't treat the Sandia order 2 seeds in rock wool quite as well and left them with the dome on for too long so many of them got tip rot and struggled.
 
I learned from my mistake and the last few from Tyler Farms and Baker Creek were germinated in using the ziploc bag method and I had better success with them.
 
Anyway, there's a lot here so I'm looking forward to seeing which ones I like and will grow again next year.

 

[Siv]

Time to give some love to the soil plants. The first bunch are the twins of the first set in Hydro but with only one Fatalii since the 4th didn't make it.

 

 

 

 
I had the best germination from the Aji Limos so there are two more in here for a total of 4 in soil. This one was started in hydro so it's a bit bigger than the soil starts.

 
One yellow Jalapeno with some pods on it despite being small.

 
The Bulgarian Carrot has a bunch of pods on it. One had a large hole so I removed it.

 
I originally planned to do vegetables in the grow beds and there are some carrots to the right but I decided to shove in as many peppers as I can. There are pairs of Bulgarian carrot, yellow jalapeno, purple bell and chocolate poblano. The sprinklers don't quite work well enough to cover the plants efficiently so I've ordered some more and will modify the watering setup.

 

 

[Siv]

After being a bit worried about the nute temps, my daughter and I went through all the buckets and covered them in tin foil. Makes a huge difference - they stay at ambient.
 

 
 
Poddage from the hydros! I'm so excited! I guess I knew this was coming but it still surprises me that I managed to grow these and they're fruiting.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 
No fruit are setting on the rocotos and no flowers on the Brazilian starfish yet. Everything else is is moving along nicely.
 
And one bonus from the soil plants, my first kraken pod!
 

 

[PaulG]

Super grow, Siv.
 
Both hydro and soil plants look just great!

 

[Siv]

A small update today on the hydros. I noticed come curling on the Sugar Rush Peach and Bahamian Goat and thought it may be calcium deficiency. Also, the fish pepper was looking a bit yellow compared to all the rest. I bought a EC meter and started measuring. The nute strength varied wildly between the buckets so my idea that there would be some kind of balancing between them was wrong. So the first thing I wanted to do was to pump out of the buckets and recirculate to have some kind of mixing of the nutes. But there is so much in the 20 buckets that just one 30 gallon trash can isn't enough. I added another trash can so I now have two 30 gallon feeds going to the float valve controlled master bucket.
 

 
As the temps have been going up, the water consumption seems to be increasing although the nute consumption still seems to be higher than the water use. Anyway, I set about pumping the nutes out of the buckets into the two reservoirs. I waited to the late afternoon when the plants were shaded but I was amazed at how quickly they wilted once all the nutes were gone. This was my Brazilian Starfish half an hour after I started pumping out:
 

 
It was back to normal an hour after I replaced the nutes. This shows how vulnerable these plants are! If they run out of nutes when I'm on holiday, they're basically gonna be dead. Hopefully the 60 gallon reservoir plus the level in the buckets is enough to last the 3 weeks when I'm away.
 
I'll finish with some flowers
 

 

[PaulG]

I am guessing that is a baccatum flower on top?

 

[Siv]

I am guessing that is a baccatum flower on top?

 
Yeah, Aji Limo. I'm definitely doing more Aji peppers next year.

 

[Siv]

Time for an update I think (mostly because I'm bored at home). I found this guy on one of my plants. Green Lynx Spider I think - one of the good guys.

 
My sugar rush peach is still curling. I have no idea why - I've refreshed the nutes and other than the curl she looks great Plenty of pods too.

 
Fatalii pod looking good:

 
Lots of white ghost:

 
The anaheim has lods of large pods - I have no idea how this fella is gonna cope with these - they're so big!

 
One of my guards. Love these guys - pity my wife hates them!

 

[Siv]

Now an photo update on the hydros. They're all growing pretty well and have lots of flowers. Some have set plenty of pods but others are dropping flowers now that the temperatures are in the high 90s.