10/12/2018 – Pepper Farm Update – Fresh Peppers are in their prime, but the season is nearing an end.

    It's been a while since I have updated the BLOG page so I thought I would give a quick status of everything in BOHICA Land.

    I can't believe the growing season has almost come to an end.  Although the 10+ day forecast still does not even get close to freezing temps, so I am hoping we can get all the way into November until we have to transplant the plants into the greenhouse and do a complete harvest of the rest of the peppers.  We have a ton of peppers available now and should have even more available when we complete the year end harvest.  

    It's been a crazy year as far as the weather goes...It started out with a late freeze that delayed the start by 2-3 weeks, then a period of what seemed like a month of constant rain almost every day.  Then in the last month we've had two tropical systems pass through.  But we made it through unscathed with little damage.  Nevertheless, It's been a very productive year and I couldn't have asked for a better summer on the pepper farm. 

    We will be tweaking a few things for next year's crop that we learned from this year's experience.  One of the main things is overcrowding of the plants.  Going to plan on spacing them out a little further.  Even though that will mean less plants, I think we will come out ahead in the terms of pepper production by giving the plants more room to grow.  Also the grow bags we planted will need to be spaced out more as we ran into the same problems there.  Also figured out the 3 gallon bags are just not big enough so doing away with those and going with only 7-10 gallon going forward.  

    This week we are starting our indoor grow room for next year's crop.  We plan on increasing the size and have developed what I think is going to be an awesome set up and totally different way of growing the seedlings.  We will document the build if anyone would be interested in trying it as well.  So stay tuned, the next month will be one of the busiest times of the year with lots of transformation to the garden and setup.

    Until next time!!