Saturday, April 07, 2007

baby chili pepper sprouts

peppers in profile
second leaves peppers moved to south wimdow
My peppers have just started to get little second leaves. I'm thinking about transplanting them someday in the near future. There's only about 50 million of them. Today I moved them to a south facing window (where they have a view of the vegetable garden and lots of sun).

Capsicum

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Don't forget to harden them before you plant them outside, or they may die!

I made a post about this last year:

http://www.patnsteph.net/weblog/?p=28

kathy said...

Thanks. I enjoyed reading your post.

Once the second leaves are large, I plant to transplant to 2 inch pots.

To harden, I'll carry them inside-outside, inside-outside. Always a lot of work. I'll follow your advice and keep the time outside very short the first few days out.

They won't go out til May 15.

Do you have any advice on what makes a chili pepper hot? Often homegrown ones aren't as spicy hot.

Anonymous said...

Those long red cayenne peppers in your hot pepper mix look pretty hot! But you are right, sometimes they don't come out as hot as the peppers you buy, they can even vary from one year to the next. I think warmer and drier weather makes hotter peppers. I don't know if there's much you can do about that, living near Boston...

I haven't grown a lot of hot peppers. I have grown Anaheim and Jalapeno, like you are now, and they do vary from year to year. I know there are a lot hotter varieties around. Depending on what you think of the ones you grow this year, you might want to look for a hotter variety for next year.

Are you familiar with the Scoville scale (notice how some of the peppers have a wide range of values)?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoville_scale