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. 

Serrano Peppers Two Weeks Later

Two weeks later we have 47 out of 50 Serrano's germinate. Nice germination rate of 94%. We have some late comers arrive and we separated those from the pack. So far so good. These seeds came from Burpee and real pleased with the out come so far.

One of the seeds had fallen off the side when I originally planted them. The seed decided to germinate and was growing off the side of the dirt pouch. Si I transplanted this little guy into a dirt pouch and propped it up with a tooth pick and twisty tie. We'll see how she does.

Dave Alexander

dave@justgofishin.com http://www.burpee.com/

Texas Orange Tree on Alejandro

While we're working on building up our pepper garden we provided a little TLC to our one and only Texas Orange Tree. Yep, we planted her in the ground finally after several years living in a pot. We installed a new automatic irrigation system for our landscape and transplanted our orange tree to a much better place and fresh water to drink on a regular basis.

The picture above is our tree last fall as she produce some nice citrus in spite of our lack of consistent watering. About a half dozen nice oranges for the first time last year.

After transplanting our orange tree in the ground you can see she's much happier with a drink of water every other day for a bout a half hour. Unfortunately, now that shes in the ground she's exposed to different kinds of creepy crawlers that enjoy feeding off the leaves and leaving eggs and so forth.

I stopped by our local nursery (Turners) to inquire about something for the trunk to keep ants and bugs from climbing the orange tree. They recommended Tree Tanglewood which is an insect barrier and the banding material that goes with it. In the picture above you can see the banding guard wrapped around the trunk of tree and a plastic tie to hold it in place. Then spreading the sticky goo on the banding material. This stopped the ants in their tracks. Then I used can of compressed air we have for our computers and blew off the ants on tree. The guard band gets replaced every so often as needed. I still have a few issues with others types of bugs that I'll address later. Hope this year we produce several more oranges then last year.

Germinating Serrano Chili Peppers

Using a Jiffy Greenhouse we picked up from a local home improvement center we planted 50 Serrano Chili Pepper seeds purchased from Burpee. After only about 5 days we have 28 out of 50 that have germinated in our Jiffy greenhouse. 56% is not to bad concidering that more may come in the next few days. Not sure what we'll do with all of these plants at this time since we have several others that should arrive in the next week or so that will be ready to plant in our Alejandro farm. Take a look at the close up of the first sprouts. What is interesting is that the leaves seem to follow the shape of a serrano chili pepper.
Leave us a comment if you've grown serrano's before. we'd love to her from you.

 

Irrigation and Garden Design

We modeled our pepper farm after my father in laws blueberry farm operation. We used 20 gallon EG 10000S Econ-Grip nursery pots from John's blueberry farm and realized we would need a few more. I tried stopping by our local nurseries to see if they would sell me some of their used pots and I had no takers. I was actually surprised by there unwillingness to part with them, even to sell. So I found a place online called Great Western that sells them for about $5.00 each. But they sting you in freight.

We tied into our automatic irrigation system with 3/4 inch PVC and added an "Add-It" device that makes it easy to add fertilizer as needed automatically as we grow our peppers.

This particular device is not meant for constant pressure and was meant for use with a garden hose. However, this is setup with the auto irrigation system after the station valve and is not under pressure continuously. The PSI max is listed at 60 and our water pressure measures to about 50 PSI. So we improvised.

We are just about ready for planting. The irrigation seams to be working great and after some calibrations we should be ready. Starting to look like the blueberry farm setup? Nice to be able to put some space to use on the side of our home. Hope y'all come back for our next post.