Pepper co-op seed starting chat thread (all welcome)

With the HPS pepper seed co-op in its delivery phase, I thought we needed a new thread to talk about our pepper patch plans and to swap seed starting stories!

Whether or not you got your seeds in the co-op, please feel free to jump into this discussion.

My heartfelt thanks to all the participants who helped make the co-op go smoothly! Nothing will reduce the effort in involved in packing 11 thousand seeds into 600 little packs, LOL, but gosh it could have been a lot more work without such great co-op-eration!

^_^

Wow, I cannot believe I'm the first to jump in! Jill, thanks again for the wonderful coop, and for this chat thread, which I hope will take off soon!

OK I'll start! I've spent all my weekend trying to decide which peppers will get their chance this season, because there's no way I can host 20 plants! I've also got my DH input on the hot ones he'd like to see first. We decided to go for variety of shapes, colors (and heat).

Last year was my first try, with Critters ornamental Pretty Purple, and with 2 hotsies: Serrano Chili and Long Thin Cayenne. I managed to get fruits before our move to Texas, and during my visits back to Miami I've had some more. So, it was a success, without me doing too much!

This year, I'll try my hand for the following varieties:
Hotsies:
Aji dulce (OP)
Big Bomb
Fish (OP)
Goliath
Tabasco (OP)

Sweeties:
Banana Bill
Early Sensation
Flexum
Sheepnose (OP)

What do you think about it?
I'm still challenged by the climate here... I've got moisture crystals to add to the soil. Probably will go for pots, very little gardening space...

I have lots of questions that sprout in my mind, now that I have all these seeds. I'll start asking soon, so be prepared, be very prepared! Mwa-ha-ha!

goofybulb - while we're in very different zones, I've had a lot of success with some peppers in containers. Two years ago I grew Thai Hot in a container and they were great. Last year I tried Red Marconi (a narrow sweet red, good for roasting) in a container - not so great. It did much better in the ground. I think the Red Marconi's had trouble because I also had a couple of flowers planted with them, and it was too much competition. This year I'm planning on putting the hot peppers in containers, and the sweets in the ground - that way I won't have to worry about whether or not I've put the hots too close to other veggies - which I'm bound to do.....

I haven't started sowing yet, but with graph paper in hand I'm trying to figure out all the nooks that might be available for pepper plants... the shorter ones are usually pretty easy to work into any sunny bed. :-)

I'm having option anxiety... I am quite sure I don't have room for everything I have seeds for, so I'm trying to narrow down the list of everything I *must* grow this year. I think we aren't going to run out of carribbean hot sauce for a while, so no habs this year for example -- although I might have to plant a couple of the not-hot ones (like Aji Dulce) because I just love them. LOL

Although I've been informed that any crossing between sweet and hot peppers would only affect the seed, not the current crop, I think I've had my "sweet" peppers become variably hot when planted near hot peppers. I don't care if it makes logical sense or not; I am now making sure I've got 40 or 50 feet separating sweeties from hotties. (Love those terms, goofybulb.)

dryad57, answer me this ... why do you have to keep your hot peppers away from your other veggies? What size pots are you planting your peppers in? Also, we are in the same zone, so when will you plant your pepper seeds?

My vegetable garden will be incredibly small this year {10 x 10}, so I will be growing only one of each pepper plant that I do decide to grow and they will all be close together. I have a ton of veg. seeds I want to plant but will have to cut back to a bare minimum. So putting a couple peppers in pots would really help me out.

Ok Jill, One that I for sure will grow will be Aji Dulce since you rave about it every chance you get. LOL

toofew


This message was edited Feb 10, 2009 5:19 PM

It's just that I love that unique fruit scent and flavor of habaneros, but I can never add "enough" of them to a dish to suit me without ending up with food that would start a nuclear meltdown. The mildness of the Aji Dulce lets me pretty much add all I want! I think they're going to be very nice in pepper jam, too. :-)

toofew - Peppers grow real well in pots. I've mentioned it before, but I've kept this pot-ful of Maui Purple Peppers going for about 10 years now. The pot goes out on our patio during the warm months and by a window in my office in winter.

Peppers don't mind crowding either - this pot has about 8 plants growing in it now. I just pull old plants out when they die (they live 2 or 3 years) and let new volunteers come up from the seeds that drop into the soil. Right now, the plants have purple peppers, ripe red peppers, and new purple blooms all at once. With a 12-month season, they bloom twice a year.

edited to say: Note the tree and snow through the window at upper right. It wouldn't be a healthy place for a pepper plant out there these days. lol


This message was edited Feb 10, 2009 5:01 PM

Its snowing here so naturally I am dreaming of hot peppers. And the sweet ones as well. I am going to be doing some growing in buckets this year to compensate for having too many seeds for my garden. (This happens every year and expansion isn't as easy as letting out the belt a notch that also happens every year. Oh, and Jill, the pepper pusher, has declined to come over to help with the garden. ^_^ )

So, I have access to well priced 4 gallon square buckets that are roughly 9.5" x 9.5" x 13.25"h. I can also get standard 5 gallon buckets ~ 11" diameter 15" high. I would prefer the square buckets for aesthetic purposes and price but don't know if the 5 gallons would be much better growing environments.

Any thoughts? Oh and there will be tomatoes as well. Hmmm, now I'm dreaming of salsa.

Z

4 gallons will be fine for peppers... 1 per bucket probably for bigger plants... I've combined 1 Thai pepper with a Thai basil or two in a bucket that size, just for fun, and it worked out pretty well.

Do you suppose they will do well in buckets at the top of the driveway? Or would the concrete get too hot and bake the plants? I was going to plant them in the beds in the back, but the driveway gets more sun...

toofew - I made the mistake of planting a hot pepper close to my broccoli one year - and the broccoli picked up the capsaicin (or something ghastly) via the soil and tasted slightly spicy and rather dreadful.

Thanks, Jill. 4 gallon it is for the peppers. I think it will be fun to grow the Choclolate Habanero in the same bucket as the Chocolate Basil. Z

ROFLOL! (BTW, nobody finished the limerick I started on that thread -- please take care of it!)

Sorry Jill, I'm rotten at creating limericks, but am a very appreciative audience!

toofew - sorry, I forgot to answer your question about when I'm starting my peppers (others have handled the container size better than I could). I started my peppers March 4 last year, and I think that was a bit too late as I didn't get a lot of peppers from them - didn't get them in the ground until June and while I did get some great peppers, there weren't enough to keep me happy :-) Those were the Red Marconi, which are an Italian roasting pepper (I would put a pepper on the grill when I was grilling burgers, so that at least one person could have a grilled pepper on their burger - it was great.) ANYway, I'm planning on starting up peppers in about a week, and then praying I have enough room to keep them happy until I can start hardening them off in Spring.

dryad - critter fixed me up with Gypsy, Bounty, and Carmen seeds last year - those are all sweet non-bells because I've had trouble growing bell peppers in the past. I planted the seeds indoors the first week of March and transplanted to the garden the first week of May - I had about 20 plants total.

Those plants gave us loads of sweet peppers all summer and fall. In just one week we put 27 QUARTS in the freezer, chopped up fine in a food processor. We're still eating sweet peppers with just about every meal and recipe, and I'm hoping we'll be done with them by the time I have more peppers ripe in the garden.

This year I got Gypsy, Carmen, Flexum, and Sweet Spot seeds thru the coop, as well as one bell, Big Red. We'll see how the bell does, but for getting sustained, heavy sweet pepper production the non-bells sure worked better for me. The flavor's great, too.

Here were my pickings on Oct. 6, and this went on every 2-3 days for many weeks.

Now those are some FINE looking peppers! I'll have to go check the bundle I got from Critter, and some gifties I got from Star, and see what my best options are :-)

Thanks all for answering my questions. I have a few buckets that the cat litter came in, they sound about the right size. lol
I love the idea of matching up the basils with the peppers. And I will start the peppers before the end of the month.

Ozark, ... like dryad said, "those are some FINE looking peppers!'

Okay, so now come the questions from the totally inexperienced...I have cowpots that I plan to start my seeds in. Do I put one seed per pot? If not, how many? Do the seeds need to be soaked or nicked or anything before planting? Do they need to be started in pots or can they be sown directly in the ground? As long as I don't use harmful chemicals, any reason that I can't intermingle them in my flowerbeds? Will they take full Texas sun?

Those are the ones that come to mind right now. Sure there will be more later.

TIA!

I'm working on a pepper-specific article with photos, but there's a lot of basic info in my "Seed Starting 101" series of articles.

Here's a link to a post I did a while back with some pepper-specific info. http://davesgarden.com/community/forums/p.php?pid=2520811

There are many ways to go about seed starting, but this is what has worked for me. :-)

About square buckets - I've got some of those square black 4-gallon buckets in the picture I posted above. I like them for picking veggies, and they're made of real heavy plastic and would make great growing pots, too.

Chain is shipped to Lowe's stores in those buckets. In the hardware department they dispense chain out of the buckets and when a bucket gets empty they throw it away. I asked the hardware dept. manager to save me some of those, and he did. Two were free, and one day a "bigger" manager made me pay $1 for a third one - no problem.

Dryad and everyone,
I'm planning to make it as successful as I can in containers, as I rent, and there is just a little patch (1.5/10ft) that can currently be gardened. I have 16" and 18" pots reserved for the "veggie mission".

Please tell me more about the transmission of hotness to other veggies, please. I plan to also have a few tomato plants (again, first try), some beans and an eggplant.

Also, I'm curious about the open-polinated varieties. If I want to harvest seeds towards the end of the season, how far apart am I supposed to keep the plants (valid also for tomatoes) in order to have trusty seeds? The house I live in is a regular city house, it has a small backyard, as compared with the acres of a farm.

OK, you have to tell me (spill it!) about the chocolate basil! I am crazy about basil, love to grow it and eat it, have now several varieties (Critter lend me a hand last year, plus my own "disease" took over) but I don't have a chocolate one. Do tell, how's the taste? Can anyone spare some seed for SASBE?

Mmmm, salsa and chocolate basil!? I need breakfast!

Thanks,
Alexandra

Ah, the Eternal Quest for the Elusive Chocolate Basil.. Here is a thread about it: http://davesgarden.com/community/forums/t/950343/. Be careful... Those who read this thread find themselves spouting poetry and seeing visions of Big Foot.

Some people cage peppers to prevent cross-pollination. I think most peppers are wind rather than insect pollinated, so you can use the topography of your yard to your advantage. If you have an early-fruiting pepper, let some of the earliest peppers ripen for seed (with no or few other early bloomers, those seeds should be pure).

I generally don't worry a lot about it but be sure to tell people my seeds weren't isolated. There are a few peppers that I make sure to isolate because I want the seeds to stay pure, but for most of them I'm happy if I get something close to the original.

Fish Pepper and Aji Dulce were pretty well isolated in my garden last year, so those should come true.

If anyone has limited room on their heat mat, here's a space saving tip...

Last year I didn't have a heat mat, but had found an old yogurt maker in my grandmother's stuff and commandeered it. This was one of those groovy orange culture centers that has 6 glass cups in it to make yogurt by giving low regulated heat for long periods of time. Well, it's pretty small, about 6x8, so planting in flats was out of the question. I used the baggie method on the pepper seeds, putting them in damp paper towels and then into a ziplock baggie. Then I packed all the baggies in to the yogurt maker (without the lid so it didn't hold too much heat.) It worked great and the seeds had little root tails in less than a week at which point I potted them up into packs. They grew so much faster than the seeds that had been planted straight into soil without heat that they were soon as big as the seedlings that had been planted a month earlier.

I have a heat mat this year but it only holds two flats, and I have a million pepper seeds now, so the baggie method to the rescue! :)

Hmmm, are you sure we're talking about basil? I know of another plant that supposedly enhances/exposes one's (inner) creativity?

Have to go check that thread. Goofy needs basil.

goofybulb, you should only have trouble with the peppers' hotness traveling to other veggies if they're planted in the same dirt, close to each other. If they're separated in different containers you should be fine. (Unless they're other peppers, and then I'd follow Critter's advice.)

Danita...great idea. Be a fast way to sprout seeds for eating too. I'm going to try it.

For trays, I use the top of a 4 bulb stainless steel fluorescent light fixture. Amazingly, it just happens to keep the potting mix between 83 and 87 degrees. Holds 4 trays too. The fixture was a little pricey compared to shop lights but using it instead of heating mats has been a real plus.

Critter...ever grow fushimi peppers? I'm trying them this year.

dryad - I've never heard of hot peppers making vegetables planted near them hot also. That's not my experience - I've grown hot peppers and sweet peppers within inches of each other, and the sweet peppers didn't have any "heat".

If I were saving seeds, that would be different. Obviously, if a sweet pepper blossom got fertilized by hot pepper pollen the seeds saved from that cross would probably grow plants producing hot peppers - but that's in the next generation.

And as far as hot peppers making nearby plants of other species hot, like broccoli - well, I don't see how. Maybe this something that happens and I'm not aware of - are there any articles about it?

You've got me thinking about planting tomatoes, hot peppers, cilantro, and onions all intertwined and harvesting my salsa already-made in the veggies. (chuckle)

Don't tempt me with another must-grow variety! I've never grown fushimi, but I'm already having option anxiety, trying to figure out how many kinds I can fit in my patch this year. LOL

Your setup sounds like it works great! Peppers definitely like heat.

LOL - Ozark, that is a tempting thought. I put some garlic out last fall and it's coming back up, so we'll see how they're doing - I might put the roma tomato right next to them and a bell pepper to this side... :-> At the very least it's helping me decide where to put things this year! I always rotate stuff based on where the tomato was the previous year, and how much fertilizing may need to be done based on that.

And I swear the broccoli that was close to the hot pepper (it was a banana hot pepper) tasted ghastly, you could taste the hint of pepper in it and they just didn't go well together. The other broccolis that were planted around the garden but not close to peppers were fine. That was the deciding factor for me to put hots in containers (I use large porous ceramic for hot peppers).

I've started reading a biography of Jack Daniel of Lynchburg, Tn. (a personal hero of mine, lol).

I came across this quote by a Tennessee farmer of the 1850's, about planting practices of the time:

"When it comes to farming, I'd sink down to beggar-trash in no time if I didn't know the things I learned from my daddy and he learnt from his daddy about farming. Suppose you plant potatoes near onions. Well, the onions will put their eyes out. I've never seen a garden that throve good unless it was planted in the full of the moon. Give your gourd seeds a hard cussing or they won't come up, and always plant peppers when you're good and mad at your wife."

I told my wife I'm gonna have to get good and mad at her in the next couple of days - 'cause I'm planting my pepper seeds. LOL

But Critter...you have to grow sushimi.

Studies from Japan show it contains a compound that suppresses "UV-induced cyclobutane pyrimidine dimer in human fibroblast ":

http://sciencelinks.jp/j-east/article/200108/000020010801A0288106.php

In other words, fushimi peppers help DNA repair itself. Like DNA in skin that gets fried from being in the sun gardening.

What is interesting is fushimi peppers, a Kyoto vegatable, have been served for centuries in soup. Not something I think of doing with peppers. But the study above shows that the way to get the most of the good stuff in the peppers is by an aqueous extract....i.e. by boiling.

Grill the pepper and the amount of the active compound is lowered.

How did they know that in Kyoto 400 years ago?

Dryad, thanks again!

Ozark, then my pepper crop is doomed from the start! I sowed them on Valentine's day, while nicely chatting with my Dad! I didn't even have my husband around that day, so probably the hotsies will not turn out to be hot at all?

I managed to keep myself contained to just the 9 varieties mentioned...

Ozark I've laughed til I cried over that quote. I copied it to my blog. I think I'll have to give my peppers a good cussin because some are so slow. They're really getting on my nerves when 1 sprouts and I have to wait 2 or 3 days for the next and then there's the other ones coming up all together days earlier. They're really asking for it.

I remember lots of old timers talking about full moons and that you have to wait for Good Friday to plant the garden.

Wonder if those peppers will end up like the "angry onions" from the Burger King commercials:lol: I laughed so hard watching the farmer abuse those onions in the field:)

Love that quote too:) I do watch the Gardening by the Moon forum--really interesting.

OK, well I have the pepper seeds in seedflats and have offered the leftovers in the group trades & swaps so now I have to figure out how to grow all of these:

Sweet peppers
Carmen
Lilac
Banana Bill
Mandarin
Gypsy
Flexum
Sweet Bell mix
Cosmic Red

Hot Peppers
Kung Pao
Goliath Jalapeno
Super Chili
Fish
Tricolor ornamental
Big Chile
Suraz Mukhi (India)
Elephants Trunk (India)
Chilli Pusa long varieties (India)
Pinnochio's Nose

Mild Hot Peppers
Ancho San Martin
Spanish Spice
Aji Dulce #2

I don't want to waste raised bed space on the peppers so I am thinking to do them in pots (with SoilMoist crystals) along the driveway and in all the other sunny areas I can find.

I won't be saving seed from these so I'm not concerned about cross-pollination.



This message was edited Feb 17, 2009 9:46 PM

Watching this thread with interest. I need to start my peppers soon (though I don't have near the variety of you co-op folks!). If I could have gotten, say, 2 or 3 seeds each of 5 or 6 kinds, I would have dived right in! I just don't have space to do piles of peppers. Last year I did about 12 plants, and that was the most I've had yet. Boy, were they good, though!

Angie

Angie, do you like hot or sweet or both? I have a selection of small numbers of leftover seeds I can send, if you'd like.

I got half packs of 10 and that's still too many for me (apt/container gardening) so if you want some of mine I'll half everything with you. I didn't get any hot peppers--not my thing but you're welcome to any you'd like.

Maggidew, someone just pointed me to Critter's seed offer, and I just posted over there that I'd love to participate, if she has room. It looks like you have a great variety. How do you like the Gypsy peppers? I keep seeing that name pop up on the forum here. I have a hard time with bell peppers, but just tried non-bells last year, and loved them!

I was surprised that the Aji Dulces are under "Mild Hots" in your list. Aren't they a variety of habaneros? My DH loves habs, and I can barely stand to breathe in the vacinity! If those are a milder version, maybe we'd find some middle ground!

I'm gradually acclimatizing to hot peppers. . .last year I tried serranos, poblanos, habaneros, jalepenos, cayenne. . I can't remember them all! It helped that a friend dropped off a box of orphan seedlings that her parents were going to throw out when they didn't sell. :o) Just when I thought I found a local source, they decided not to grow tomatoes and peppers any more. Sigh.

Also tried Cubanelles, Corno de Torro, Goliath Grillers, and some mini bells called Yummy. Not bad, since all I'd grown was plain bells in the past! LOL I love sweet peppers, and eat them as snacks all the time. I have so much to learn! And it looks like DG is the perfect place to do it!

Angie