Potting soil is the most important part. There is no subsititute for a good mix. Fafard blends are top of the line and worth the money.
Fertilizing once a week with soluble fertilizer at the rates recommended will always yield wonderful results. Any even mix, like 10-10-10, will do., Although there are differences in formulations amongst the manufacturers it probably won’t make a difference on a pepper in a sunny window.
Recycling centers are a great place to get pots. You need different sizes. It is best to start small and move up gradually. Too large a pot will encourage root rot.
Large saucers to collect over flow are a good idea. As to watering, that takes practice. Ideally one would water just before the soil dries. Life contains surprises though, so plan ahead.
A sunny window on the south or west side is ideal and don’t forget to rotate the pot to encourage even growth.
One more question and then I think I’ll get started. If I buy fresh jalapenos at the grocery store, are the seeds inside viable or are they sterile? Could I just dig out one of the peppers and grow what’s inside?
You can use the seeds from the store peppers. However, as many modern crops are F1 hybrids, they may not come true to type from seeds. They will still be peppers, but they might not be the same pepper as the one you purchased.
Don’t bury the seeds too deep. 1 and 1/3 the size of the seed is a general rule for seed depth.
That’s a gerat nursery. I’ve grown some of their peppers before. One piece of advice that all should follow: organic fertilizers are nice, but do not use fish emulsion or guano products inside unless you can dig some right funky smells.
We did this one recently, but I can’t find it. There was even a claim that it depended on the colour of the fruit, IIRC
It’s purely a regional thing. Chilli is the only spelling regularly used in Britain when talking about anything organic, and we spell everything correctly
I grew some Cayenne Peppers this summer up North (OH). They remained dwarfed, I think in part, because of soil and sun conditions but produced a good amount of very, very, hot and tasty fruit. Drawing inspiration from this thread I decided to transport them and transplant them at my Mom’s place in Florida and see if I could keep them going.
I dug them up with their root ball, tied a plastic grocery bag around the ball, watered them liberally and placed the group of plants in a trashbag. Then I threw them in the backseat and three days and 1000 miles later got them transplanted into a window planter with some decent, fertilized, potting soil here in the sunshine state. They all had some peppers growing on them, but I left them on during the transport. They dropped some leaves after the transplant but have already begun to grow new shoots and branches of leaves! Finally, I picked all the peppers off to concentrate the growth of the plant into healthy foliage.
Peppers are tough little plants and about all they need is sun. You can even underwater them and underfertilize them to a certain degree and they still keep on going. I’m really surprised my transplanted peppers have taken hold and it’s a pretty neat little experiment. I also picked up a tomato plant and a habanero down here and I’ve put them in planters and have a little indoor/outdoor salsa garden going (Mostly they stay outdoors, though.).
I seem to have invented some new peppers this year, by using a variety of seeds from the last few years where different peppers were grown too close to each other. When they say peppers can hybridize, boy they aren’t kidding.
I take seeds from dried, intact fruit so I know for sure what I’m planting.
My Sante Fe peppers should have a distinct conical shape, starting yellow and ripening to red. All mine produced long, thin downward growing cayenne-like peppers starting green and ripening to red.
The Yellow Jellybean peppers are all crazy. Some of them may have crossed with the Sante Fe. Those plants grew much taller than regular Yellow Jellybeans (YJB), and developed the same conical shape as Sante Fe, started out yellow, then ripened to red. Another YJB decided to develop the normal, marble-sized yellow fruit but with purple splotches. That may have picked something up from a Purira or Peruvian Purple. Yet another YJB may have crossed with a Chiltepin. The whole plant and the fruit look just like chiltepins, only lemon yellow. They actually look more like yellow jellybeans than the actual YJB fruit do.
Then there’s a chiltepin which decided to develop dark purple fruit, rather than the typical orange. Same size & shape as a chiltepin, though. That may also have picked up color from a Peruvian Purple or something. It got frost damaged but I dug it up, potted it and brought it indoors. I want to see if the fruit ever change color from dark purple when they’re fully ripe.
I’m going to try keeping the unique ones indoors over the winter and then if I get ambitious about it, at some point I’ll snip off all the flowers & fruit, isolate them, then let them produce more fruit, collect seed from that and see if they breed true.
I’ve been meaning to do it anyway, maybe tomorrow I’ll take some happy snaps.
