Sweet or Spicy, post your growing notes from the Pepper seed mixes here! Share photos, observations, and questions.
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So far, I can say that the GTS mix had far better germination at lower-than-optimal temperatures than the other seeds we started. We’re targeting a landrace that will tolerate hot, dry, sunny conditions without sunburning. We’re also excited that we’ve got a collaboration with a plant ecophysiology research group on campus sorting itself out, so it’s likely that in a few years, we’ll be able to get quantitative measurements of photosynthesis efficiency and drought response to compare our landrace-in-process with various named varieties.
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I’m so happy to hear this. I’ve been selecting for germination in cool temps. (And contributed a significant percentage of this year’s seed.) I’m also selecting for cool weather tolerance in general, so it’ll be interesting to see how they perform in your hot dry conditions.
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I planted out some leftover seed from the 2023 mix, as well as some seed that I saved last year from the 2023 mix. (I wanted to give things a second chance to make it here, because 2023 was an anomalously bad year.)
The seed I had saved came up nicely, but somehow some cutworms had snuck into those pots (and only those pots!) and ate almost all of them. So right now, my pepper bed mostly contains plants from the original 2023 seeds. I started another batch of my saved seeds, though they will have to be really speedy to set fruit at this point.
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I’ve planted Grocery Store Bell Pepper mix (Capsicum annum). I’ve also got Lots of Aji Mirasol & Aji panca (Capsicum baccantum) seeds to plant from grocery store.
Have you tried repoting old pepper plants? If they don’t produce fruit, you can save the plant indoors to transplant next year
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first pepper harvest of the season. A good month before last year’s harvest (year 2 of my project and a very cold summer), but not much different than the year before, which was an unusually warm summer. These germinated without supplemental heat, so i’m definitely making progress on that front. Anyone else harvesting peppers?
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beautiful! I recognize some friends in there. 
I hope you’ll have some extra seeds to share.
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Looks great! This makes me hopeful about my pepper project going forward
How did you go about germinating yours? And did you overwinter any of your plants from last year?
All my plants were started inside a green house and then shoved outside. Weather is cooling down now and I have some pretty green but also almost ripe peppers. The jalapenos did the best. I’d love to direct seed tomatoes and peppers outside eventually, although everyone I’ve spoken to about this so far thinks I’m crazy haha
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I am selecting for germination in cooler temps. I still start indoors, but unheated/no heat mat, which in my spot can be pretty chilly early in the season. This year I did two seedings – one early march when I started tomatoes, and one early april. Very few germinated in the first round, about 80% in the second. The second round caught up pretty quickly, so I’m not sure there’s much value in starting early. It seems to stunt the plants for quite a while, when they do germinate.
Next year I’ll push harder at the cool temp germination and select more heavily.
I didn’t overwinter any sweet peppers, but I did pull some plants up and bring inside and let the fruit mature on the plants as they died. Hot peppers I overwintered a couple, they seem to overwinter fine here in pots outdoors.
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@anna Would you be able to add the “All other nightshades” tag/category to the post? I have that one saved in my categories section for ease of finding pepper posts
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I’m harvesting a few.
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I added the “nightshades” tag for you. Didn’t want to change her chosen category.
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Thanks jen, I was trying to figure out the right way to do this!
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