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Tokyo Tent Tribulations 2023-2024

Well here we go again! After my friend @Alejandro took the last two plants off my hands (Jamaican red hab and sugar rush cream), I'm starting from scratch for the first time in a while. Very, very humble beginnings: One sprout and one hook!

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Granted... they're both basil. :)

Still under the lid, waiting for hooks:

Alma paprika
Looking forward to having these again. I grew them quite a while ago and had good results; hopefully, having gotten a bit better with the hydroponics, this time will be even better.

Chocolate habanero
Another one I've grown before (not looking to do much new this time around, mostly bringing back the old favorites). I know annuum x chinense isn't the most reliable mix, but if I decide to revive the hybrid experiments, I think it'd be pretty fun to try and cross choco hab and alma. Thick-walled smoky medium-heat paprika, here I come!

Perilla (Egoma)
In Japan, shiso is very popular, but in Korea, this stuff is much more common. It's also used to make my wife's favorite type of kimchi, so I figure I'll see if I can get it to grow well in the tent, rather than having to trek into Korea town every time we want some.

Since the tent is completely empty, I figure I might also start up some of the old mini container experiments again, though I haven't put any thought into what to grow. Maybe Trippaul Threat? We'll see.
 
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Two updates today!
  • There are exactly zero new sprouts or even hooks
  • My sense of time is even worse than I thought
I could've sworn it'd been something like three weeks since I started those seeds in coir. So I got really concerned, started a bunch more seeds in coffee filters (ten minutes ago), and came in to update this thread. At which point I realize... it's been barely over a week. Nice job, fish.

Which I suppose makes this a first update on the reinforcements.

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I'm still planning to make choco hab and alma the main event (along with the herbs), but I settled on Lemon Starrburst and Paul's Purple Thunder (which are some pretty old seeds at this point) for Kratky or maybe just small container grows.

Historically, I think I've had better luck starting in filters than in rock wool. And this will make it more obvious when things actually sprout rather than having to wait until they poke out of the surface of an opaque medium. I don't plan on throwing out the initial blocks; hopefully I just end up with a whole lot of sprouts to choose from and play with. Might not be a bad thing to have backups, though, since none of these seeds are less than two years old.

Anyway. Oops. :D
 
PaulG said:
@Alejandro is a good friend!
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He most certainly is! I didn't even mention the amount of homemade bread, preserves, and other goods he frequently drops off. I swear the man runs a farm a stone's throw from downtown Tokyo. Waiting for the first live piglet to show up.

The como-te-almas are the only peppers that had significant sprouts in the coffee filters (though I do see at least one root poking out of the Purple Thunder batch, so that's exciting!). I moved those, along with the rock wool basil, into a nicer medium, and they're all quite happy.

sprouts.jpg


So that's a start. I think there's also a root poking out of at least one of the KSLSB seeds, though the choco hab and the perilla were kind of the ones I was looking forward to most, so fingers crossed those make it through as well. Not enough time yet to start worrying about the rocotos.

My poor son, the guppy, apparently found reading Korean just far too boring and fell asleep.

korean-guppy.jpg


Just last night, I made another 10+kg batch of kimchi, so I understand his frustration with his mother's culture.
 
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As a great scholar once said: Hello there!

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I was out for a day and a half for a trip with my wife and nephew, which was... well it would've been fun, if our son hadn't been along. If you saw the last post, you might think he doesn't look like a lot of trouble. But sometimes he works hard while he's awake. In that time, though, the basil sprouts in the upper right went nuts, and the almas to their left did their standard bigass-cotys thing.

Before we left, I potted some coffee filter seeds; the KSLSB haven't broken the surface yet, but at least two had roots, and I dropped a few more in that are hopefully viable but a bit behind the curve.

To their left, the Purple Thunder surprised me a bit with two healthy sprouts! One's got a bit of a helmet, but at this point, I could cut it off Voorhees style and it'd still be fine (and one seed that was still in the filter broke out like crazy and just got embedded in the same pot). Beneath that, the Korean perilla has a single shoot, and finally, a mystery seed that rooted but also floated out of its filter and was hanging around in the bottom of the ziploc bag got its own tiny container, so we've isolated the uncertainty, just in case it turns out to be something good.

Still nothing at all from the choco habs, which sucks. And nothing from the rocotos, though I'll give them at least a few more days before I start freaking out (and I do have two more seeds I can start if these first two go a month without joining the party).
 
internationalfish said:
Excellent insight! I shall threaten them with the loss of their foreskins. If that doesn't work... well, I guess I'll call the mohel. It's no good making a threat if you're not prepared to deliver.
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Brick Top approves!

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Sorry, not the best quality on this image, but I think we'll all survive.

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On the right, the basil have taken up residence in their tray; I expect to let them go for a while and possibly root some cuttings to fill out the tray, depending on how well the existing ones do.

On the left, my two favorite alma paprika seedlings are now in their own pots. I don't really need or want two of these plants, but since I ended up with four good ones (and none of the other peppers are close to being potted up), I figured I'd let these two fight it out and see who gets moved to a bag.

Speaking of which, on the bottom, the remaining two alma sprouts got spur-of-the-moment transplanted to a new bonchi attempt. I was thinking of maybe going Kratky for these, but I hadn't prepped anything, and the old model gravestone I tried to use last time was sitting directly in front of me, already in a pot, so I just threw them at it. We'll see if I've learned anything at all!

In back, the others are mostly doing better than expected. We're up to four Purple Thunder sprouts and three Lemon Starrburst. I'm not sure why, but the mystery maybe-KSLSB sprout, which had absolutely the strongest root of anything that came out of the bag, seems to have given up the ghost. Going to keep watering it, but it really should've sprouted by now if it was going to. Also, the one perilla seed that actually sprouted is taking its sweet old time doing anything at all, so I'm thinking of just calling that a failure and starting some cilantro instead for the other herb tray I picked up.

In other news, last night I made dinner for a Russian couple we've known for years but also hadn't seen for years. It was a great time; my wife's nephew, who is Korean, joined us as well. And because my Russian friend's wife speaks Japanese but not really English, we had lively conversations going in Russian, Korean, Japanese, and English. I've thrown a lot of international parties, but that was almost certainly the most fun mix of languages I've ever experienced.
 
internationalfish said:
He most certainly is! I didn't even mention the amount of homemade bread, preserves, and other goods he frequently drops off. I swear the man runs a farm a stone's throw from downtown Tokyo. Waiting for the first live piglet to show up.

The como-te-almas are the only peppers that had significant sprouts in the coffee filters (though I do see at least one root poking out of the Purple Thunder batch, so that's exciting!). I moved those, along with the rock wool basil, into a nicer medium, and they're all quite happy.

sprouts.jpg


So that's a start. I think there's also a root poking out of at least one of the KSLSB seeds, though the choco hab and the perilla were kind of the ones I was looking forward to most, so fingers crossed those make it through as well. Not enough time yet to start worrying about the rocotos.

My poor son, the guppy, apparently found reading Korean just far too boring and fell asleep.

korean-guppy.jpg


Just last night, I made another 10+kg batch of kimchi, so I understand his frustration with his mother's culture.
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Hola, thanks for your kind words. Are you growing basil in the tent? If so, is it to fill up corners/maximize small available surfaces? If you want basil just let me know, I have enough, haven't been so lucky with the 100yen shop coriander seeds didn't really grow and started to flower.
I wish I have the space for life stock, for the moment barely enough for all the humans.
 
Alejandro said:
Are you growing basil in the tent? If so, is it to fill up corners/maximize small available surfaces? If you want basil just let me know, I have enough, haven't been so lucky with the 100yen shop coriander seeds didn't really grow and started to flower.
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Yes! I wanted to start growing some herbs. I don't really need them, it's just for a bit of variety. :) I have a lot of room in the tent right now; hopefully looking at four pepper plants on the top shelf plus a couple trays of herbs and maybe some lettuce on the bottom. I do have non-100-yen-shop coriander seeds as well, which I might use, but if you want some, just let me know. There's a ton in each package.
 
In just a week and a half, things have come along a bit!

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On the left, the two almas that are contending for a full bag, are overperforming, which isn't surprising. To their lower right, the pie crust is apparently what happens when cheesecloth either bakes under lights or leeches something from the substrate, I don't know. But also almas.

On top, you can see the basil doing very well. I just gave them the cheesecloth treatment as well, mostly to try and kill the mold... I've only just started bottom watering these, and I think the peculiar smell my wife has been complaining about is likely the fungus. We'll see if this helps that. But the basil are doing very well, and at this point opening the tent makes it obvious they're in there before you see them. Definitely a fan of that.

On the bottom, I took a Purple Thunder and Lemon Starrburst sprout and gave them the micro-Kratky treatment. We'll see how badly I can screw it up.

(Honorable mention in the upper right: Whatever that maybe-Starrburst was didn't make it.)

The four green containers in the middle/lower right:
  • Top left: Starrburst. There's really only one contender to get potted up here, but it's growing so slowly that it'd be a waste to bother until it gets bigger. Which it seems like will take at least a couple more weeks.
  • Lower left: Similar situation with the Purple Thunder, though there is one much stronger contender in there, so I expect he'll get an expanded home first.
  • Top right: The absolute gimpiest plant I've ever seen. The one perilla sprout that did come through, in part thanks to its severe helmet, is just comically weird. It is starting to look like an herb, though, so maybe it'll eventually get to the point where it's useful.
  • Lower right: The crown jewel, our rocoto! Though... it's got a wicked helmet. I'm keeping a wet towel on it most of the time to try and soften that seed casing up, so hopefully that helps. If not, I'll start soaking the two reserve seeds and hope at least one of those comes through.
Not a lot else going on here right now. It's been 38+ C outside for a while; Tokyo summer suuuuucks.
 
Update!

The almas are doing well; Alejandro took one off my hands, another has been potted up to its final bag, and the two in the bonchi attempt are reasonably healthy.

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The basil is... well, it's there. It's got a bit of blackening around the edges of some leaves, and you can see the pronounced upward curl... I haven't really tried to diagnose this yet. I just upped the nutrients for everything, so hopefully this is a deficiency that'll work itself out in the next day or two. If not I'll look further into it.

On the bottom, you can see the Lemon Starrburst and Purple Thunder. The individual ones will stay in those containers until they're ready for bags; Alejandro will adopt the two that are currently sharing a container.

The cheesecloth, despite its discoloration, seems to be working well at keeping the mold at bay (and keeping the medium in place for the bonchi).

Now I just have to get the last two rocoto seeds started and cross my fingers.

On the personal front: I thought I'd already posted this here... the poor guppy, having tired himself out with a tantrum, finally just powered off. He really needs a chalk outline.

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