Turbo 2014 Pepper Growing: An Anecdotal Methodology

scratchzilla · Feb 3, 2014

Looking great! I'm growing some Chocolate Fatalli this year too, just got my first sprouts this week, so you're ahead of me. I'll be keeping an eye on yours so I know what to expect. Good luck!

turbo · Feb 3, 2014

scratchzilla said:
Looking great! I'm growing some Chocolate Fatalli this year too, just got my first sprouts this week, so you're ahead of me. I'll be keeping an eye on yours so I know what to expect. Good luck!

Thanks Scratchzilla! Only 3 of my 5 Chocolate Fatallis germinated. Two are tiny (one shown below and the other hiding behind). But my third is ginormous. Its only two inches tall, but about twice as wide as tall, and has 6 leaves already. Definitely an over-achiever.

Pinoy83 · Feb 4, 2014

turbo said:

this is my mix, i use gardner & bloome products,they work good for me,i add clay soil also and cinders volcanic rocks

and this is my final mix, i add #4 sunshine and roots organic 707

turbo · Feb 6, 2014

So far the Paper Lantern peppers have been the star of the show. They are twice as tall as everyone else and most of them still have their first leaves (cotyledons). The Congo Trinidads are doing pretty good as well.

The reason I tried Paper Lanterns this year is they supposedly do very well in colder zones (they are known as Habaneros of the North). If this is true, it would be interesting to play with hybrid crosses of Paper Lanterns and other peppers to develop several different peppers that do well in colder climates. Later in the summer if I see that they do indeed grow better and are more productive than my other peppers, I may try my hand at some crosses.

My Fatallis are also doing pretty well so far, but the Chocolate Fatalli are inconsistent. Only 3 out of 5 seeds germinated: one got a seed helmet and is tiny (upper one), one is just getting its second leaves, and the third is Beast Mode!

I had two seedlings with seed helmets, a Chocolate Fatalli and a Congo Trinidad. The Choco Fatalli's two cotyledon leaves were connected together by the seed helmet, so they weren't able to extend out and make room for other leaves. So today I decided to try my hand at a surgical amputation procedure. I used tweezers to gently hold onto the seed, pressing down a tiny bit so as to not pull on the leaves, and with the other hand used an exacto knife to cut the seed away. I was able to cut the seed away with minimal damage to the leaves. We'll see how these two continue to grow.

Ahhh, the Lemon Drops. I was most excited about these seeds for some reason, but they have been a bit disappointing. I read that they have one of the longer "days to maturity" durations (120 - 140 days depending on the source) so it shouldn't be a surprise that they are slow starters. So far only 3 out of 6 have germinated, and one of them was just last night, 25 days after planting!

juanitos · Feb 6, 2014

i like your photo editing and plats look good.

that choc fatali going crazy

turbo · Feb 6, 2014

OKGrowin said:
i like your photo editing and plats look good.

that choc fatali going crazy

I use a free tool called Skitch. It makes it super easy to make annotations on photos.

Yea, I'm pretty excited to see how the Choc Fatalli comes out

turbo · Feb 15, 2014

Just a quick update. Nothing interesting going on really. Everyone is getting bigger and bigger, probably ready to be transplanted into solo cups. I wont be able to get to that this weekend, but hopefully sometime in the next week.

The Fataliis all look nice and healthy (far left), but the aji lemon drops are pretty scrawny (the 3 on the far right)

Paper Lanterns are growing really well (right half of the plants below), and the Congo Trinidad are also doing pretty well (left half)

It looks like my helmet head surgery (see previous post with pictures) worked pretty well. Both peppers that had helmets are growing nicely now, though both are a bit smaller than their neighbors.

Now that we're half way through Feb, its time to get my cayenne variants going. This year I'm going to grow Maule's Red Hot and, thanks to allaKazaam, a couple of Indonesian peppers, one called Cabai Rawit. I'll try to get around to putting these bad boys in the dirt this afternoon.

Cant wait to taste the sauce I'll be getting from all this!!!

Wildchicken · Feb 15, 2014

Wow your plants are looking happy!

turbo · Feb 28, 2014

Well, looks like I lost a few babies. Last week I had to go out of town unexpectedly for several days. I watered the base tray before I left, but by day 4 about half my Paper Lanterns were pretty shriveled up. My wife watered the tray and some of the Paper Lanterns came back to life, but 2 are a total loss and 3 have lost have their leaves. We'll see how well they bounce back. I was going to trim my set of 12 Paper Lanterns down to 6 plants when I transplant into Solo cups, so its not a major loss.

Interestingly all the other plants did fine. My Aji Lemon Drops, which were so small and stunted before, actually seemed to double in size this past week.

I plan on transplanting all seedlings into Solo cups this weekend. We'll see how well they handle the stress of the transplant after this last week.

blorvak · Feb 28, 2014

Sorry for your loss! At least everyone else is looking great!

thirdcoasttx · Feb 28, 2014

Nice start, looking good so far I'll be checking in from time to time!!

turbo · Mar 4, 2014

Went ahead and transplanted the starts today into Solo cups. Out of the original 35 seeds I ended up with 19 plants. I think I waited too long to transplant, as about half the transplants were root bound. Also, about a third of the plants have leaves that are a bit yellow, so I applied their first shot of nitrogen rich fertilizer (1/3 strength). Hopefully they get growing again.

I also started my next batch of seeds today for the shorter season cayenne peppers. I planted Cabai Rawit, Maule's Red, and Charleston Hots.

turbo · Mar 12, 2014

Well its been almost two weeks since I transplanted them and gave them their first hit of nitrogen fertilizer. They have grown significantly wider and their leaves have gotten their nice green color back. I'll be applying some Myco Blast next time I water them to strengthen their root systems.

The cayenne seeds have been in the ground for about a week now and I've got my first hook popping up. Its a Maule's Red Hot. I have high hopes for this cayenne variety. Cant wait to see how they taste!

turbo · Mar 15, 2014

The cayennes are coming along nicely. Growing really fast.

All the habs and fataliis are happy as well

turbo · Apr 2, 2014

Two weeks later and these guys are really filling out. They aren't getting as tall as I thought they might, thought I don't know if that is necessarily a bad thing or not. But overall they look really healthy.

The three tallest already have flower buds forming, so I'm going to trim those off.

Question: when do you or do you trim the tops off new plants to encourage new growth? Or should I not worry about that?

My cayenne's are also coming along nicely. I had a few casualties, but thats just natural selection. I'll probably transplant these guys into solo cups in the next week or so.

unk3390 · Apr 2, 2014

Great glog Turbo! Everything looks real healthy and shit happens with those losses. As far as stripping the plants, it looks like SpicyChicken is the frontrunner here.. everyone references his posts from last year. If I remember correctly, he strips the plants at 4-6". Maybe someone can chime in with the specific post?

How are you liking the T5 unit?

Gonna be following along!

turbo · Apr 2, 2014

unk3390 said:
Great glog Turbo! Everything looks real healthy and shit happens with those losses. As far as stripping the plants, it looks like SpicyChicken is the frontrunner here.. everyone references his posts from last year. If I remember correctly, he strips the plants at 4-6". Maybe someone can chime in with the specific post?

How are you liking the T5 unit?

Gonna be following along!

Cool, I'll search through SpicyChicken's posts and see what he says.

I got a 4 bulb T5 unit from 1000bulbs. One of the bulb sockets is "broken" though. It will burn through any bulb put in it in about a week. So really its a 3 bulb unit. But none the less, its worked pretty well. Everybody seems pretty happy

juanitos · Apr 2, 2014

yeah if you got another month you could prune now and be in good shape.

I pruned mine after watching youtube / spicy chickens glog.

There is a topic in growing forum called "Extreme pruning" look at that one

turbo · Apr 3, 2014

One interesting thing I've noticed. I've been watering my plants every 5 days (or 6 or 7 when I'm forgetful), and everybody seems happy about that. Everyone except the Chocolate Fataliis. The Chocolate Fataliis seems to really start wilting on day 5 or 6. It seems they need a bit more water than everyone else.

turbo · Apr 4, 2014

Pepper Growing, an Anecdotal Methodology:
I’ve been growing peppers 4 years now. Each year, up until now, everything I’ve done has just been through the experience of how I screwed up the year prior. And then I found The Hot Pepper. Its odd that it took me so long to find this place since I’m a bit of a researcher by nature, but when I came to peppers I just went by experience.

Over the past 5 months I’ve been reading a lot of different glogs, as well as the debate threads in the growing forum that spawn from techniques mentioned: germination techniques, topping, stripping, au naturale, to till or not to till, fertilizers and/or AACT, foliar feeding or not, picking buds, potting mediums, planting containers, and the ever present good ole fashioned “put the seed in dirt and let nature take its course”.

It seems like everyone has an anecdotal story where they did a thing, and that thing caused amazing growth and/or pepper production. Yet for every story, there is a counter story of someone arguing that they did nothing and had amazing plant growth and/or pepper production. Its overwhelming at times!

I’m not criticizing any of this. Its just what people do in the absence of scientific evidence (and sometimes in the presence of it). I have to admit that I’ve been bitten by this bug multiple times after reading about some technique, almost acting upon it in haste, then doing a bit more reading just to find a whole bunch of anecdotal information that disputes the original idea.

What I’m amazed at is how little scientific evidence there is in this area, via either university horticulture studies or large scale pepper production experiments. I get that peppers are just one type of plant in the entire range of commercial horticulture, but I’m still surprised. There is even an entire department at New Mexico State University (The Chili Pepper Institute) dedicated to commercial production of hot peppers.

And yet I rarely find information about experiments that follow good scientific protocols and involve enough plants and good measurements to be statistically sound.

I understand that large scale growers need to make money, and sacrificing portions of their crops for experimentation is a hard decision to make. I also understand that if they do learn a proven technique through sound experimentation, they might choose to not share it with their competitors.

So, whats a backyard obsessive compulsive gardener to do? For me, I have to pick one small scale experiment a year I guess. Pick one aspect the play around with, and resist the urges to mess with everything else.

This year’s experiment is all about planting containers that work best in the Pacific Northwest. Next year maybe it’ll be topping vs stripping vs au naturale. Who knows.

Either way gardening is a fun journey, isn’t it?