Growing Guide
Germinate pepper seeds between 75 and 85 degrees F. Use a heat mat and soil thermometer even if starting them indoors. Make sure the soil is moist but not soggy otherwise your seeds may rot. Germination rates increase the warmer the soil temperature is. Pepper seeds can handle temperatures up to 95 F but it’s better to keep the temperature closer to 85 F. You’ll see most of your seeds sprout within 8 days at 85 F but at less than 70 F they can take up to three weeks. Most experienced pepper growers plant two seeds per cup and cull the weaker seedling.
Once your seeds have sprouted you will need to provide some ‘wind.’ An oscillating fan blowing gently over your trays will promote strong growth and will prevent mould growth on top of your soil in addition to discouraging baddies like fungus gnat flies. Couple the wind with some fluorescent light placed very close to the seedlings and you will encourage bushy compact growth especially for Capsicum Chinense varieties. The closer you can get the light to your plants without burning them the more beneficial it will be as long as temperatures at the plant canopy don't go over 100 F.
Liquid kelp meal provides great nutrition for pepper seedlings after sprouting and won’t burn your plants just follow the directions on the bottle. Whatever fertilizer you choose, though, you’ll want to feed your seedlings and plants lots of Nitrogen to start. Nitrogen promotes healthy green growth. Be careful… all purpose fertilizers are good but they will also encourage flower formation! Flower formation will slow down overall growth. You want to make sure your plants go into flowering only when they are large enough otherwise your yields will be low. If your plants are producing flowers and you want to ‘kick’ them back into the growth phase just feed them a high Nitrogen fertilizer for a few more weeks without much added Potassium or Phosphorus. If you feed your plants only Nitrogen rich fertilizers throughout the growing season your plants will get huge, but you may not get any peppers at all! You need to change your fertilizer to get good yields.
We transplant our plants into 100% compost (pH 6.5) around early June or whenever they outgrow their red solo cups. Be careful with the compost you use. Some compost products are ‘hot’ and will burn your plants. Our compost is mostly made from horse manure and soiled bedding made of hay. It’s aged for a few years. Potting soil is okay in a pinch, but you will need to fertilize your plants more often as there really isn’t much nutrition in potting soil.
Soil temperature MUST BE AT LEAST 65 F when you transplant into your garden or greenhouse and air temperature must stay above 60F otherwise your plants won’t like it and make drop their beautiful new leaves.
Peppers benefit from being buried deep during transplanting. They form new roots easily and a strong root system will increase yields. We usually pick off some of the lower leaves and bury the plants deep to encourage new root growth from the stems and lower branches.
When plants are big enough in June – early July and/or when first flowers appear you will want to switch the fertilizer to a flowering or more all-purpose formula. Peppers are heavy feeders so if you don't have rich soil with a healthy microbe population you will want to use fertilizer at least every two weeks. We use General Hydroponics Gro, Micro, and Bloom for our peppers. We start our seeds on a GRO (3-2-1 – green, red, orange) formula at 250 ppm and increase concentration after the seedlings sprout all the way up to about 800 ppm as plants reach full size. When we want to encourage flowering we change the formula to ORG (3-2-1 – orange, red, green) and plants will take up to 1000 ppm of that when they reach 3 feet tall. We alternate fertilizer then water throughout the growing season whenever plants are dry, about three – four days for three gallon containers.
Happy gardening!