Sulsa's 2022 grow log

As already stated in my welcome thread i'm fairly new to growing peppers. This is gonna be my second year of growing them.
Last year was quite a succes, started out with ten variaties that i could find locally and ended up with a garden full of lush plants and dito harvests. The climate here is not ideal for growing peppers, especially the 2021 season was quite wet arround here. Hoping this year will be a bit more favourable.

The plan for upcoming season is all about diversity in varieties. I'm trying to find the peppers i like the most and find good use for in the kitchen. Also cutting down on the number of plants per variety so i will not have to proces tons of peppers wich i don't really like.

Below my growlist for upcoming season:

Capsicum Pubescens (sowed 1-7-2022)

5x Rio Hualaga
5x Mini choco

Capsicum Chinense (sowed 1-15-2022)

5x Bonda ma Jacques
5x Bahamian goat
5x Habanero red
30x Adjuma yellow

Capsicum Frutescens

20x Chabai green

Capsicum Baccatum (sowed 1-15-2022)

5x Lemon drop
5x Aji mango
5x Sugar rush peach
5x Rainforrest

Capsicum annuum

5x Jalapeno el Jefe
5x Greek pepperoni
10x Cayenne
10x Cayenne #1 (big and beautyfull off pheno that popped up last year, giving it a try...)
5x Rawit
20x Piquillo de Lodosa
20x Kapia
20x Dulce de Espagna
5x Ancho negro

Most of this plants will be grown in containers in my backyard. I also have about 300 square meters of vegetable garden in wich i will grow a few varieties in open field. Did this last year with sweet peppers and this turned out pretty good.

First hook for this season... Rocoto mini choco (7 days after it hit the dirt )

 

[Sulsa]

That's how they've tasted for me when I've grown them and there was no harvesting around it.

They're cool plants, but the pods were among and perhaps the worst of the 3 dozen plus rocoto varieties I've grown, at least to my palate. My memory is there was a bit of an acrid chlorophyll flavor to them which I found unpleasant.

That's too bad! They sure are nice plants and good looking pods too. I still have a rio hualaga going that started to set fruits, hoping this plant will give me some nice and tasty pods!

On the minis, I harvest by feel.

For my money, the mini red is the best
tasting and juiciest of the mini rocotos.

I might give the red ones a shot next year, i've seen them in the collection of semillas.

 

[Sulsa]

Pods starting to color all over the place!
Also the first kapia and dulce de espagna turned red, that means i will be knee deep in sweet pepper processing very soon....

 

[PaulG]

Awesome pull, my friend!

 

[Sulsa]

This weeks harvest packed and ready for the freezer

Bahamian goat

Habanero red

Bonda ma jacques

Adjuma

Adjuma that crossed with the habanero red last year... had 2 plants that surprisingly turned out red instead of yellow.
Only chinense present last year was the habanero red, so must be a cross. Big healthy plants with big leaves and very productive with large fruits in this f1 stage.

Some pepperoni. These will not go in the freezer but will be eaten raw or pickled.

All together.

Forgot to weigh the cayenne... must have been close to 1,5 kg. Deseeded them and mashed them up in the blender. I put it in plastic bags and freeze them in flat packages. Easy to break of a piece when needed, i use it quite often for all sorts of cooking.

 

[Sulsa]

And almost forgot.... another 3 kg. of piquillos!

 

[francisp]

Impressive harvest.

 

[Sulsa]

Took some time contemplating how many shades of blue there are in the Ionian sea...

Peppers were left to fend for themselves for a while supported by a newly installed drip system ofcourse.
Came back to a whole bunch of colors in the garden, back to pepper processing it is!

And some more piquillos and sweet peppers

 

[Mildfruit]

Wow Sulsa! Im blown away by those roasted piquillos. Great colors from all those peppers. Great haul!

 

[Downriver]

@Sulsa You sure that's water? Looks like SKY blue to me! Seriuosly, awesome view, and picture, Sulsa.

And it looks like your drip system worked pretty darn good. Great harvest! Nice looking pods.

 

[PaulG]

+1 @Downriver - My thoughts, exactly.
On both counts.

 

[Sulsa]

Finally got around to proces last weeks harvest... busy times for pepper/vegetable growers!
Freezer is loaded and i do not have much time for sauce making right now, so i decided to start drying part of the bulk.
Dehydrator was working around the clock the past few days and so was i deseeding and cutting peppers for hours.

Also torched and canned all the piquillos again and most of the sweet peppers are processed! (Didn't take any pictures this time) Feels good having caught up on the crazy production of peppers and vegetables i experience lately.
This afternoon i was walking around the garden when i realised there was probably even more color right now, then there was last week.....

The sudden change in weather was too much for one of my bonda ma jacques and just like @MarcV almost all branches broke off. (I feel your pain brother!)

The branch that completely broke off was given a nice sheltered spot on the side of my house and pods continue to ripen nicely

Finally the jalapenos started turning red and i also spotted some color on the aji mango (thought they would never ripen)

 

[MarcV]

Those broken branches must have felt even worse to you, with all those nearly ripe pods on them... in my case it were mostly small unripe pods that would not make it to the end of the season anyway...

 

[PaulG]

Looks like those Bonda Ma Jacques are going
to ripen up great, Rene! I had the same thing
happen with a branch of MoA Binnets a few
seasons back. Tossed it on the compost pile,
and when I found it a month later, almost all
the pods were ripe.

They look great, nice Bonda pheno - broad
shoulder and pointy taper.

 

[Sulsa]

Those broken branches must have felt even worse to you, with all those nearly ripe pods on them... in my case it were mostly small unripe pods that would not make it to the end of the season anyway...

The most of them started riping allready so they will not be lost. Also i have more plants and they sure are productive.
The bmj are very brittle plants anyway with long hanging branches that are not able to carry the load of pods they produce. Normally i give chinense only one support stick but these will be needing a annuum/baccatum aproach to support next year.

Looks like those Bonda Ma Jacques are going
to ripen up great, Rene! I had the same thing
happen with a branch of MoA Binnets a few
seasons back. Tossed it on the compost pile,
and when I found it a month later, almost all
the pods were ripe.

They look great, nice Bonda pheno -broad
shoulder and pointy taper.

They sure are nice and quite uniform in shape and size. I have 3 plants and they all look very similar.
Very nice taste too. They have exactly the same taste as the adjumas. The aroma and flavor is much stronger in the adjumas though but the bmj are way hotter. Big difference between them is that the bmj pods have good flavor very early on. Small green pods allready have great taste whereas the adjuma tastes like grass the entire green stage and start to develop a load of flavor once the coloring sets in.

 

[francisp]

Pity, I bought adjumas already for next year, I better had bought Bonda Ma Jacques then

 

[Sulsa]

Pity, I bought adjumas already for next year, I better had bought Bonda Ma Jacques then

The adjuma remains my favorite chinense so far. No other chinense i tried had such a great taste and smell.
The heat might be a bit less than the bmj but they are still very hot. The bmj also has a more nasty burn (facemelter) whereas the adjuma has a more lingering back of the throat heat. After cooking this is... when eaten raw they sure will melt your face too!

 

[Sulsa]

The weathergods decided that the water shortage build up in the past 6 months had to be compensated in just 2 weeks... weather has been horrible around here lately. We even had daytime temps around 10C and we also had the first nighttime frost allready. Most peppers are still doing fine only the baccatums really don't like this temps and the annuums can't hold their branches up because of all the rain. Ripening has slowed down for all of them though.
Still lots of peppers to go....

 

[francisp]

Wow, you will have a really big harvest. What are the (peach colored ?) peppers on the 3rd picture ?

 

[Sulsa]

Wow, you will have a really big harvest. What are the (peach colored ?) peppers on the 3rd picture ?

Well... i allready had a lot to harvest... they just keep on making new ones!!!
Those peppers in the third picture are Bahamian goats. Lots of Caribean pork stew this winter.

 

[PaulG]

Those plants are loaded, Rene. I hope you
can broker a little more decent weather to
bring those to ripeness.