Pepper notes from 2018, planning for 2019

I post my extras on our community message boards. I have helped many new gardeners get started and more experienced gardeners get different varieties than are in the stores, in this way. Also made some friends I wouldn't have met otherwise.

Those excess seedlings aren't the type of things most people would want to plant in their gardens, as they are barely starting to grow. I just start a bunch of them in vermiculite, then transfer them to the pots, when they come up. As I find out that some won't come up, I take some of the similar peppers, or if something just doesn't seem to be growing, I'll replace it. I never have any extra full sized peppers. I used to grow a lot more, when a friend grew a lot of peppers, but he moved away; he said it was really hard to not get the unusual peppers he got from me, but some are starting to show up in his area in recent years.

I just saw the 7 day forecast, and it had 48° and 49° for lows Sunday and Monday. After Tuesday, back up to higher 50s, so I may put off planting those peppers and okra - the only things I have left that may not like the low temps. The superchilis stopped producing flower buds, after I hardened them off, and started growing more leaves, so that's a plus. The 15th of May is the usual date I shoot for, when putting out peppers, so this is just getting it closer to that, though the plants are much larger than they'd usually be now, because of the earlier heat.

Mumsey, I just saw the noon forecast, and now one of those lows is 45°! While this might not kill peppers, it will stunt them - I learned this by accident years ago, when I planted a few peppers, and it started raining, so I brought the rest in. Turns out, the forecast totally changed, and there were several lows in the 40s, and before, it was supposed to be in the mid 50s! So I waited several days, before planting the rest, and later on, the ones that were planted early were much smaller than the rest. Eventually they almost caught up in size, but they were also behind as far as when they started producing. Something similar happened one season when the soil on 5-20 was so cold that my friend and I that were planting all of our peppers that day had a bucket of warm water that we kept dunking out hands into! The peppers were definitely slow growing that season, and a couple weeks behind the usual time they would begin producing. That's when I figured out why peppers didn't benefit from starting early, in WOWs. The one time I tried that, the peppers started 3 weeks early in WOWs, were smaller, and slower to produce than the ones I started normally - the soil was cold, even though they were in that mini-greenhouse, which tomatoes love!

I got all of my peppers and okra in today. This is the usual "average" date that I put in peppers, sometimes before, sometimes after, and this year I thought that I'd get them in earlier, because the tomatoes and EPs went in so early, but then we had the cold snap! Still, the peppers were a little overgrown, and some, while not really rootbound, had fairly solid root balls in the pots. Still, the Superchili was the only one that got early flower buds, that I have been plucking off there for the last week.

Only one very late germinating variety - Sangria - and the fresno, were undersized, as well as low germination %. A friend whom I shared the Fresno seeds with said that she had the same problem. Yet, it was a new seed pack, which I got because of this same problem before! I may have to save some seeds from some fresnos I buy, and just experiment with them before next season.

While planting all of those peppers, I came across something that I had forgotten about - some cojoined pepper plants!
Cojoined pepper plants, like Siamese twins. by pepperhead212, on Flickr

I first discovered this when pulling the newly formed seedlings out of the vermiculite, to tranfer to the soil mix. I wasn't sure if both (or either) would live, but I put them in the pot, and a few weeks later I dug away a little of the soil, just to see what it looked like. It was sort of like they had been grafted together! They are some of the largest plants out there now - Jalafuegos, I think.