Hot Peppers
Is it hot in here or is it just the peppers?
Pepper Recipes curtesy of Mike Hultquist
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Personally I prefer Ocean Forest to Happy Frog. A couple of years ago I did comparisons across multiple plants, trying different soil brands and mixtures. Happy From did very well, but Ocean Forest consistently got me bigger plants with better yield.
I use all three of those FF nutrient mixes throughout the growing season, but honestly I haven't noticed a huge difference between those and more generic fertilizers.
I rarely use calmag, unless it is a variety that's particularly susceptible to BER, like Thunder Mountain Longhorn.
That's good to know, I think I will follow your advice and switch over to Ocean Forest for the plants. I am sure anything Fox Farms puts out will be quality products. I think their pricing is about the same at the end of the day. a 2cuFt bag vs a 1.5cuFt bag and $4 lower on the OF 1.5 bag.
I’ve gotten lazy the last few years and will try to step up my game this year.
After the first instance of blossom end rot, I decided to never risk it again - I always add calmag in between fertilizing.
Fertilizer-wise, I use whatever vegetable fertilizer my garden center has. Usually a balanced 10-10-10, but I know some people say to stick to a lower nitrogen fertilizer once the plant is ready to flower. Anyone know if that is truly beneficial for peppers, or is that one of those carryover ideas from cannabis that doesn’t apply to peppers?
I have heard that tomatoes and cannabis follow a similar fert regime to lower nitrogen once blooming sets in, The FF Grow Big has a heavier load on the nitrogen side (6-4-4) and then the Tiger Bloom moves to a heavier phosphorus load while dropping the nitrogen to half the ratio of the potassium at a 2-8-4 load. Good to know on the cal-mag, we have really hard water in the mountains here.
Do you let your water sit for a day or so to evap the chlorine or straight from the garden hose? I am assuming most here are going to be outdoors plants.
I have never let the chlorine evaporate and havent heard of anyone doing that outside of brewing beer - is this a common practice?
(note to others: if your local jurisdiction uses chloramine instead of chlorine, this won’t work - chloramine doesn’t evaporate)
Maybe not widespread. It was done at the dispensary I worked at years ago as a gardener. They used all organics and the idea was if the chlorine is killing bacteria in the water, it would also kill the microbial life that is beneficial to the root zone in the soil. Maybe that is exaggerated or incorrect.
Possibly, but it’s interesting enough for me to keep in mind going forward. The cannabis community certainly seems to be on the bleeding edge of maximizing growth potential so I try to keep up with what I can for my own gardening purposes.
Thanks for sharing this tidbit of knowledge!
On the opposite end, I was growing Recirculating Deep Water Culture years back and we would add in a chemical that smelled just like a pool to kill all the bacteria in the water, help with root rot, and make it sterile. This was because we didn’t want any microbial life around the root zone and all the nutes were chemical.
Now, I just stick with tomatoes and hot peppers but I learned a lot about indoor garden design.
Side note re: blossom end rot... how regularly do you water? I've found that a regular watering schedule (every 1-3 days, depending on temperature) has eliminated all of my BER problems without needing calmag. A lot of BER (IMHO way more than people realize) is because of irregular watering interfering with nutrient uptake. In these cases, adding more nutrients is not very effective; there's already enough nutrients present, but the plant simply isn't able to process it.
I found this to be even more of the case for tomatoes. Even with calmag, my tomatoes suffered significant BER unless I watered them every day or 2.
You are almost certainly right about irregular water being the most likely culprit. That said, I know of one person last year that had their peppers on an automated watering system and still developed BER. For me, the minimal cost to add in calmag outweighs the risk of losing a portion of my annual harvest.
With pepper plants, I always watered when they started to wilt. When I grew in pots, that was about once per week when they were small, up to every other day when the root mass has filled out the entire pot and summer was in peak heat. Only started growing in ground last year and am trying to get a feeling for a water schedule now.
When I switched to in ground is when I started to struggle with BER from watering. I think it was because they didn't start to wilt until 5-6 days after watering some weeks, and really needed to be watered more regularly than that
And yeah, you're absolutely right that there's no real downside to using calmag. I just point it out because sometimes it isn't enough to fix BER, but it tends to get a reputation as the Ultimate BER Solution:)
Agreed. I’m hoping to get my garden set up on an automated soaker hose at some point to rule out any irregular watering issues. Will keep that in mind that they might need more frequent water now than I’m used to providing.