First Pepper Blossoms for 2012

Our first pepper blossoms are coming out. Very exciting stuff as these pepper plants settle in their new home at Alejandro Pepper Farm. We gave them a shot of fertilizer and we can see a noticeable difference in their growth rate. Below is the first evidence of a blossom from the burpee sweet heat pepper plant.



Our irrigation system seems to be working out very well with a occasional blow-out on the tube connections. Hey, we've got 50 psi coming through these lines. Guess I'll have to get the zip ties out. Still watering 4 times a day with 2 minutes per cycle.

Planting Alejandro Pepper Farm

Last Saturday we finally planted our peppers after nursing back the plants purchased from Burpee and our Serrano's we germinated from seeds. We lined the base of each 20 gallon pot with gravel and a secret ingredient you don't often find in this mixture. Look closely and you might see it...

Yep, those are sea shells my wife and I had gathered from several walks on the beach! After each walk we would place them around our mail box on top of the landscape rocks. Then recently we removed the rock and replaced it with hardwood mulch. So that's how we ended up with sea shells in our nursery pots. Who knows, it may be the reason we have a great pepper yield! Time will tell.

We used Miracle-Gro potting soil and mixed with organic choice. Hopefully we'll have great results from the growth of our peppers over time with this soil/compost mix.

After planting all of our peppers we setup a drip system to automatically water each plant. Since we have very warm/hot weather we decide to start out watering 4 times per day for 2 minutes. We'll make adjustments as we go.

Our auto drip irrigation system allows us to make precision water at preferred times and not worry to much about it. Patti and I get a kick out of watching our peppers several times a day. ;o)

Peppers Have Arrived

Just received our plant order of peppers for our Alejandro pepper farm from Burpee. We selected Hot Big Guy, Mariachi, California Wonder, Costa Rican Sweet, Sweet Heat, and Tangerine Dream. We also selected a Big Daddy tomato.

I was impressed by the packaging specially created for this type of product. Each container provided protection for 3 plants for shipping. I was curious how they would ship these.

Shipping these plants by ground, they arrive very much starved for water and sunlight. Many of the leaves had fallen off. I placed them out on our table for water and let them stretch and bathe in the sunlight hoping to bring them back quickly. The pictures are as they arrived right out of the box on 5/24/2012; 11:48am.

The ground shipping journey these peppers took from Harrisburg, PA to Corpus Christi, TX was 7 days. As you'll see this journey took it's toll on these plants. I'll be nursing these plants back to health but may take a few weeks. I'm somewhat surprised that burpee would ship them this way or even provide ground shipping as an option when it exceeds a livable time frame. As you can see it's very disappointing to begin this way.

Hot "Big Guy" Peppers

Mariachi Peppers

Big Daddy Tomato

Tangerine Dream Sweet Peppers

Sweet Heat Peppers

Sweet California Wonder

Costa Rican Peppers

When you compare these plants to the Serrano peppers we germinated from seed, I would have been better off purchasing seed. One of the Big Daddy Tomato plants arrived with just a stump. I don't believe this plant will survive. At almost $5.00 per plant plus shipping makes this a very expensive way to begin. Next year I'll plan better and get started in January.

Update: June 1st, 2012

After a week of nursing our plants purchased from Burpee we'll be able to plant some this weekend. Burpee gladly provided a refund at our request. We decided to request a refund for the tomato's, tangerine peppers and the mariachi peppers. These will take extended care to be able to plant them. All the other plants came back after a few days. 

Burpee's customer service certainly accommodated our concern and requests quickly. Certainly makes you feel like they care for their customers and stand behind their products.