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.

Alejandro Texas Salsa

The fruits of our Alejandro labors. Making salsa using peppers from our pepper farm! Very satisfying and very good! We chopped up Serrano, Costa Rican, and Hot Big Guy peppers. Picked up some Roma tomatoes, green onions, and red onions at a local produce store called "Fruit King" which is downtown Corpus Christi.

 Our mixture of chopped peppers, onions, and tomatoes with other spices.

 Added tomato Sauce and paste and heated to boiling for 10 minutes.

 Canned hot and boiled jars for 10 more minutes.

Walla, canned Alejandro Texas Salsa.

Lastest picture of Alejandro Pepper Farm. Not bad using a side of the house driveway area where we use to store a Sea Doo trailer. ;o)

Second Harvest at Alejandro Pepper Farm

What a nice second harvest at Alejandro pepper farm. The top left side of basket are Costa Rican peppers, top right side are Serrano peppers, bottom left side are Hot Big Guy peppers, bottom middle are Mariachi peppers, and the bottom right are Sweet Heat peppers.

It's time to make some salsa!

First Pepper Harvest at Alejandro

Our first harvest on September 1st at Alejandro pepper farm was modest but fruitful. We chopped them up for the freezer for a future use.

 Hot Big Guys were a little smaller than expected but very good to the taste.

 The Sweet Heat peppers had a great sweet mild taste. Our pepper plants are producing lots of fruit.

 The Mariachi Peppers are fun because of their orange and yellow colors they produce.

 Serrano Peppers are plentiful!

Costa Rican peppers are large and full of flavor.

Pepper Plants Baring Fruit

It's been a few weeks since our last post and the peppers are really multiplying. It's exciting to see your work start to payoff as we are getting very close to harvesting time for many of these peppers on the Alejandro farm.

Mariachi Peppers

Hot Big Guy Peppers

Sweet Costa Rican Peppers

Sweet Heat Peppers

Serrano Peppers

California Wonder Peppers

 

We added a new shot of fertilizer to the irrigation and moved to a 3 times per day watering as we get closer to harvesting.

Peppers, Peppers, Peppers

Peppers are starting to show signs of explosion, meaning that the yield is picking up the pace. Especially the Sweet Heat Peppers. We are getting a lot of blossoms on all the pepper plants.

The sweet heat peppers are startiing to yield several peppers. The plant is smaller that the others but plentiful in fruit.

The Serrano's are starting to yield several peppers.

Our smallest plants are the Tangerine Dream peppers. We actually have one plant barring fruit.

The Alejandro Pepper farm is really growing fast and are excited as we enter the harvesting season.

First Pepper at Alejandro Farm

Our first pepper at Alejandro Farm, Sweet Heat Pepper. Our pepper plants have expoded with growth these last few weeks. Pictured below is the pepper farm right after a thunderstorm. The got beat up a little but will be fine. The umbrellas we added provided a nice protection. We adjusted our automated irrigation down to twice a day.

Bugs Eating My Pepper Leaves

Bugs have been enjoying the leaves on our pepper plants. As you can see the holes all over the leaves. After doing some research we tried spraying soap water on leaves and found some moderate possitive results. I have also heard from a neighbor that using small amount of garlic juice mixed with water and sprayed on leaves is a good deterant as well.

Texas Brown Anole Lizard

One of the residents on our Alejandro Pepper farm is the Texas Brown Anole Lizard. These lizards are originally from Cuba and the Bahamas. On our farm he like to eat insects like spiders and cockroaches. This particular anole lost his tale at some point and grew back another one. Loosing their tales is a defensive move so they can get away from preditors like snakes and birds. Most likely our cat or dogs that enjoy chasing them around.

 

Male Brown Anole showing his bright orange frill.



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.

Paper Wasps vs Leafminer Flies

Our secret weapon against the leaf minors is the common paper wasp. They have built up a colony under the house easement above Alejandro Pepper Farm. These paper wasps are known to enjoy feeding on caterpillars, flies, and many other pesky insects that feed on our crops.

Though there sting can be strong, these wasps are basically social and only attack when defending themselves and their home. The nest pictured should be about as big as it gets since they're nest typically are up to about 30 wasps. I've destroyed these in the past but now I'm understanding the benefits they have for our garden. They pollinate and feed on nectar and eat flies to feed to their larva.

Leafminer Flies on Pepper Plants

Do you have squiggly lines on your pepper leaves? We discovered several on our pepper plants and with a little research found out we had a leaf miner problem. You can see in the picture below what appears to be a squiggly trail created on the leaf. This is actually the larva from a leafminer fly. The larva are actually inside the leaf tunneling through and enjoying the needed nutrients to maturity.

Some websites recommend to cut the leaves off and place sticky traps around the plants to catch these flies. However, with more research there doesn't seem to be any remedy for this problem. The sticky traps may have some effect but certainly not a cure-all. We went ahead and placed several through-out our pepper plants and as been somewhat useful in capturing some of these pests. We did cut off some leaves but will do so sparingly in the future as to not hurt the plant.

We've also learned that I'll need to learn to co-exist with leafminers but attempt to keep them from getting out of hand. I've learned from other accounts that this doesn't effect your yield of peppers. Since this is our first year in growing peppers we are anxious to learn the outcome.

Above are Serrano Pepper plants that seem to be thriving. In the back you can see a sticky trap that seem to be doing the job. 

Pepper Leaves Turning White

After planting our peppers to there final location we started to see the leaves turning white. We discovered that this scalding was due to too much sun light. Our plants had started to go into a shock and we need to com up with some sort of a remedy.

We decided to act fast and we ran down to the local home improvement store (Lowes) to pick up some portable umbrellas to provide some shade while our peppers acclimate to their new environment.

Our peppers were grown in mostly shade from germination to juvenile. To move them to mostly sun was quite a shock and hopefully we caught it in time and not lose any plants.

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)