October 2018 Pepper Update

It’s about that time of year. The days are getting progressively shorter. The nights are now dipping down into the 50s. The plants are all but done ripening for the season. And with that comes the sad, but necessary task of closing out the gardening year, at least for my peppers. This post will just be a quick update as I’ll be wrapping up the year officially in a couple of weeks with my lessons learned for 2018.

As of this writing, however, I still have several plants that are still chugging along. My 7 Pot Bubblegum and Chocolate Scorpion at the overflow is packed with pods that should be ripe by the time I arrive this coming weekend to start clearing it out. But many other of my plants have already turned in their resignation. As a result I’ve already gone about cleaning out one of the raised beds — Habaneroville produced a staggering number of fruit for me, but the plants had slowed dramatically over the past couple of weeks.

I’ve also cleared out a couple of plants from the second raised bed, but still have a pile of standard and peach Bhut Jolokias that will probably ripen this week. I’ve also got a good number of the giant Cardi Scorpion pods that I really hope manage to finish up before too long.

As I said, the overflow plot is still producing, but at a much slower rate than previous. The kid and I will be heading over there this weekend for a couple of hours to get the plants harvested and bed cleared/prepped for the Winter. The weather outlook for the weekend looks spectacular so it should be a good time.

Hydroponic Peppers

While the outside season is quickly coming to an end, the three hydroponic plants are just now starting to put out buds. I’ve been pruning the plants back not to encourage further growth, but to keep them at a more manageable size — they just want to get huge! The two yellow Scorpions are the more aggressive of the plants in terms of the amount of nutrients they are intaking, often requiring refills of their reservoirs before the Lava Scorpion. All the plants look amazing with deep green leaves and stocky structures.

And speaking of that little Lava Scorpion, it’s covered in buds. Normally, with the outdoor plants I’d be picking off the buds to promote further growth, but with the limited room I have for these three plants, I’m letting them go to flower at their own pace. And it’s looking, so far, like I’m going to get a good number of fruit from all three of these guys to go along with a packed freezer of vacuum sealed pods.

It’s been a hell of a season in terms of production and I have plenty of notes on what I learned and how to prepare for next season. But that’s for another post later this month. Happy harvesting!