Bonsai Sweet Heat Peppers

The sweet heat peppers in 2nd year certainly are keeping up with their reputation of bearing fruit first! Even if they look like Bonsai pepper plants. Yep, after pruning just 8 weeks ago the peppers are popping out. Our plants at Alejandro are much smaller due to the pruning but these sweet heat peppers are healthy with strong trunks and mature enough to blossom and produce.

It was unintentional to create small Bonsai peppers plants. In our first year we assumed that these plants would grow out again before baring fruit. We learned that these plants are mature enough to bare fruit even with just a few branches. It will be fun to see how these Sweet heats yield this year.  



Pruning Back Pepper Plants

The season is over and time to cut back our pepper plants and prepare for our next crop. Pruning back each plant can be a little tricky. Watching for new growth around the trunk and near where branches split off is a great place to start.

 Alejandro Pepper Farm after pruning

 Serrano Pepper Plants after pruning

 Sweet Heat Pepper plants after pruning

 Hot Big Guy Peppers after pruning

 Costa Rican Pepper plant after pruning

 Mariachi Pepper plant after pruning

Serrano Peppers new growth after pruning

In preparing for the colder month's we pruned down each pepper plant and reduced the irrigation down to once every other day. With the irrigation we added plant growth fertilizer to stimulate each plant.

Is this our last Pepper Harvest?

Almost the end of our pepper season. After picking several nice peppers from the Alejandro Farm today, I can tell this will be almost the end. Yep, there aren't any new blossoms on our plants so it's looking like the end of a great season. Harvesting Mariachi, Serrano, Sweet Heat, Hot Big Guy's, and we finally got some California Wonders. We've sure enjoyed our first season of gardening.

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.