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.
