We were finally able to transplant our peppers a few days ago. Ideally this would have been done several weeks ago, but the seedlings just weren't growing well. Andrea used the same seed-starting process for the peppers as she used for everything else, but after a good start the peppers just stopped growing. Finally she decided to switch to creek and/or rainwater in place of the tap water she had been using on them, and that seemed to kick start their growth. Of the eleven varieties she started from seed, all of them except the Habanero did well enough to transplant.
We planted a selection of both chili and bell peppers. These include Serrano, Jalapeno, Long Red Cayenne, Ring-O-Fire, Bulgarian Carrot, Paprika, Pizza, California Wonder, Carolina Wonder, and Orange Bell. The goal was to transplant two of each variety, but we had some extra space so planted an extra Jalapeno and Long Red Cayenne along with two extra Paprika.
Our transplanting method was very similar to that used for the tomatoes. The only thing we changed is that a bit of balanced organic fertilizer was added to each hole.
Like the tomatoes, we went ahead and installed the posts to be used for the Florida Weave trellis. We didn't quite have enough t-posts to do the entire trellis, so we substituted weaker u-posts for a few of them, although made sure never to use two in a row. We had originally planned to construct a few PVC Pepper Cages with the lengths of PVC we had been able to collect, but decided it would be much easier to just go with the Florida Weave for everything this year.
We had great yields from our peppers last year, so are hoping for similar results again. We grew them in the herb garden last year, which had the advantage of a layer of rabbit manure. With twenty-four plants, if we get even half the yields per plant as last year we should have many more than we can use.
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