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)

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.

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. 

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/

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.

 

Inspiration

Patti and I have often talked about growing peppers and tomato's and other fresh vegetables for making our own salsa. It's was only recently after visiting my wife's dad did we decide put our plans into action. Over the last several years her dad has grown and developed a wonderful blueberry farm in the Hudson, Florida area. John Curry gave us for the trip home several nursery 20 gallon pots to help us get started.

Each plant is set up to a drip irrigation system where they are watered twice daily. The birds are another matter. He uses air cannons and shot guns with blanks to scare the birds away.



Grandpa in the middle
and dad is on the right



In reflecting on my new found desire to grow peppers I feel like I must be getting in touch with my own agriculture heritage as I get older. My grandfather worked as an irrigator in the orange groves and my dad owned a large orange grove in Southern California in the late 60s. Probably explains why I love Oranges.



So Patti and Is agriculture heritage comes from Florida Blueberries and California Oranges. Just makes sense to grow peppers in Texas.

Any who, we will begin our journey of growing peppers and tomato's at the side of our home in Southern Texas and post our progress and things we learn along the way. We hope you enjoy and leave us a comment from time to time. Our next post will be on how we setup our pepper farm and varieties we chose to grow.