Week 19: Take That Bacterial Disease!

Despite the bacterial leaf disease, the cayenne pepper plants are producing as I had dreamed they would. No doubt, this has been a successful initial journey into indoor growing! I harvested 13 peppers this week, but that will pale in comparison to this coming week's harvest. There are approximately 60 peppers (or more) in some stage of reddening.

The herbs continue to flourish. I finally decided to harvest a ton today and set out to dry.

So on to the glorious photos!

The process of ripening has really gone insane since the first few peppers turned red. As seen here, even the smaller peppers are turning red.

Thyme pre-haircut.

Thyme all cleaned up.

Parsley going everywhere.

Parsley after a trim.

Oregano hanging out of the pot.

Oregano with a new do.

Sage standing tall.

Sage just a little bit shorter.

Cilantro about one week after sewing the seeds!

Lots and lots of red peppers on both these plants.

Somewhere around 40 peppers soon to be harvested.

About 20 peppers in some form of reddish stage.

An abundant indoor garden.

The herb harvest. I will dry all of these out in the baskets.

Week 19 (Dixon) Update

Well here we go with Week 19. What a journey, my oh my. Well things continue to move along. The 3rd flush of peppers is ripening en masse now. I have now collected about 80-90 fully grown but immature peppers, and about 25-30 fully ripened red ones. There are now about 40-50 more growing on the plant, working toward maturity. I think the hype of these plants being prolific pepper producers was SPOT ON. Seriously....160+ peppers from 2 1/2 (killed on a few weeks back) plants, starting from seed, plagued with disease, and we've been doing this less than 5 months. I would say that GROW LIGHTS WORK.

Herbs: Another massive harvest. I can't tell you how tickled I am with these herbs. They have become quite wonderful to work with, and VERY easy to grow.

The big news this week in the Herb department was that Shaun graciously gave me a Rosemary seedling from his garden, as he was thinning his. This saved me probably 7 weeks of time, waiting around for germination and early growth. Time to hit the ground running with the new plant. See the exciting pics below, and also look for pictures of my first crop of dried herbs now in bags.

Oh, and I almost forgot. So I have tried the mature red Cayennes on two different occasions, and both were absurdly, painfully spicy (but of course I still love it!). This week, I tried cutting up a full pepper and putting it on a burger (in this case, a turkey burger) as a garnish, and WOW. It cuts most of the painful part out, and leaves the most AMAZING Cayenne flavor I have ever experienced. Highly recommend!!!!

Week 18: Harvest Time!

This is the moment I've been waiting for! I harvested 12 red cayenne peppers this past week! Ok, I admit I actually haven't eaten any yet - but that will come soon. I will eat it in Andy's presence and with a huge glass of milk sitting in waiting. All of these peppers came from the same plant. As soon as I harvested the first 5, which were almost red at the time of last week's blog, others immediately started to show some red. There were a few peppers which went from all green to all red in two to three days. My guess is I may end up harvesting all of the peppers on this plant by sometime next week.

The other plant with a ton of green peppers seems to be on the verge of heading to red. A few peppers show the first sign of color change, which is blackening near the tip of the pepper. The third plant is till not doing a whole lot pepper-wise. I'm thinking the 5 peppers on it may be all I'm going to get. Very odd.

The herbs continue to do really well. I added two new herbs to the garden this week - planted cilantro from seed and planted herb chives which I bought at a local nursery.

On to the photos!

First harvest!

Next batch quickly turned red after the first harvest.

Second harvest.

Red, beautiful red.

Third harvest.

The three oddest pepper plants ever.

More peppers  turning red.

A bad perspective, but this plant is right at 27 inches tall. Unfortunately, most of the flowers just die and fall. I trimmed the tops off because I didn't want to raise my grow lights any higher, so this will be the maximum height for these pepper plants.

Tons of green peppers. Red isn't too far in the future.

Rosemary finally showing signs of a more robust growth.

Garlic chives - a new addition to the garden.

Holy thyme batman! I really really need to harvest this stuff.

The entire happy family.

Week 18 (and 17, kind of) Upate from Dixon Microfarms

I am deeply ashamed and embarrassed that I missed out on week 17, and didn't even take the pictures to post them later. BOO!!! Well let me catch you up, faithful legion of readers: the crop of peppers that developed after I cut off all the green peppers upon my return from vacation have now grown to full size and turned red. That means from flower to ripe pepper was just about 5 1/2 weeks. At this particular moment, I have 9 red peppers on these plants! I tried the red pepper out on another one of my friends, and it almost reduced him to tears. I've never been so proud. I was marveling this week to my wife about how all the things I've read online would suggest that it is not feasible to grow peppers all the way to ripeness in any kind of timely manner exclusively under fluorescent grow lights. I think that has been soundly proven wrong...in fact these plants have grown and matured at almost twice their normal growth speed, near as I can tell. I'm not sure about the pepper ripening timeline, but it is no LONGER than normal.

There is some sad news to report, though. Two days ago I noticed mites on the Rosemary....tons of them. Thankfully they were not apparent on any of the other plants. I isolated the Rosemary plant outside, but now it's getting ready to snow. So in a rash act that I already partially regret, I CULLED the long-suffering (and slow-growing) Rosemary and washed it off and am now drying the whole thing. Hey, it's the circle of life. Don't judge me.

On with the show!!!!

 

I have too much empty space!! Now that rosemary AND basil are gone, I need to fill this space back up!

Beautiful red and green colors....dream come true.

Jungle!

Look at the TONS of flowers forming!

After the massive harvest 2 weeks ago, the parsley is back and ready to be cut again.

You'd never guess I cut out half of this Thyme plant 14 days ago. Insane.

Sage....like a rock. A beautiful rock.

I have harvested the crap out of this Cilantro plant....seriously 8 or more harvests so far. A few of the plants tried to bolt, so I cut off their main stem to force them back to vegetative. Nothing like playing god to help improve the mood since it never stops being Narnia-like winter outside here!

Final ode to the Rosemary...

Check out the bags of herbs that we dried from that big harvest (last post). These things smell so strongly that they are coming through the ziplock bags!

Week 17: Red!

Peppers are turning red! I have 5 peppers which have at least some red color. I'm thinking there will be an explosion of red on this pepper plant sometime in the next week or two. The second plant with a ton of peppers on it can't be far behind. The third plant still only has a handful of peppers on it, but there are signs of new ones just beginning to form.

I harvested some fresh herbs this week to use in cooking - yum, yum, yum! I'm not keeping up with new growth though so I need to either do more cooking or harvest and dry some of it out.

The tree amigos. I didn't take a tape measure photo, but the plant on the left is now 25 1/4 inches tall!

Red peppers!

A close-up of the beautiful red peppers, almost ready for harvest.

The whole shebang.