You might want to check out my http://www.planning-a-vegetable-garden.com site for more information on raised beds and soil. I think the only other thing I would add to the raised beds is some kelp meal and a soil activator — I did that in my original raised bed and the plants have taken off!

(Now for some reason I am building more raised beds…can’t leave well enough alone.)

And one more thing — I’ve done the same as you, picked seeds out of grocery store veggies. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s always interesting!

- Jalapeno Early – lots and lots of them, since we eat them in almost every meal!
- Biker Billy (a Burpee-distributed Jal that’s supposed to be extra hot and extra large)
- Holland Red Chili (like cayenne but milder heat, popular in Indonesia and Holland, oddly enough)
- Serrano
- Orange habanero (I picked the seeds out of a supermarket pepper; I hope they fruit)
- Aji omnicolor (more of an ornamental than an eating pepper, I’m told)
- Godfather, a Burpee Italian sweet pepper hybrid
- Mariachi, which I think is a Santa Fe hybrid

It does seem, as you say, like the hotter they are, the slower they grow. My sweet pepper and the milder chilis are taking over the whole growing space, while the habs, aji’s, and biker billys struggle to keep up. It’s actually kind of frustrating, waiting on the hot ones to get moving. You wonder what they’re waiting for. It also seems like the hottest ones have kind of an aversion to water that the mild ones don’t.

An interesting side-note to this every-expanding project is that we spent weeks researching and debating the soil alternatives. We are putting in 65 square feet of brand new raised beds next week to grow the peppers (and the usual other suspects, too: tomatoes, herbs, lettuces, etc) but with a definite bias toward peppers. We are so new to this hobby and it got frustrating trying to get our heads around the soil options: whether to go peat moss – compost – vermiculite (i.e. Square Foot Gardener style), or 30 bags of Miracle Grow, or 100 % compost, or…or….or. As hard as we tried, and we tried hard, we could not find a real “consensus” strategy representing what most people do, other than that most do not use 30 bags of Miracle Grow. We heard a lot of “It just depends.” It left us with the predictable question, “Depends on what?” But nobody gave us a good answer to that question. In the end we decided to hedge our bets by putting in a little of everything. So we’re going with 2/3 Sta Green vegetable planting mix and 1/3 organic compost from two different sources, then a big big bag of Pro Mix BX, and finally a few handfuls of vermiculite thrown in. That, I think, is the best we can do at our current level of ignorance about soil.

I read your comments on the liquified worm poop yesterday, and we found a few bottles of it today at a store. I think it might be just what we need. Over the next two weeks, I’m going to run some experiments on a few of my more advanced seedlings to see if the worm poop does anything for them versus the untreated ones. A local commercial grower told us to just use TomatoTone and nothing else for the tomatoes and peppers, but I think we’ll supplement with the worm poop to give it some extra kick.

The funny thing is, we’ve now spent around $2,000 to, hopefully, produce peppers that you could buy for $0.30 at the grocery store (mostly for the raised beds). I’m hoping the peppers come out so totally mind-blowing that the economics and effort of it all suddenly makes sense, once we have the fruit in our hands.

So I’ll continue to run those worm poop experiements and post when I have some results. And, of course, I would love to come back later to brag (hopefully) about how our plants are growing and producing!

Thanks again,
Larry

Hey, good luck with growing your peppers! It sounds exciting, growing so many (you have me beat, I’m only growing about half your total this year). Let us know the varieties and stop by again later and post on how your plants are growing (not to mention producing).

May your peppers prosper!