More planting

The first tray of Alma Paprika peppers is still doing well. A lot of the plants are sprouting true leaves and I'm going to transplant them later this week. I need to get more potting soil first.

Last night and today I planted 2 more trays of veggies. I accidently planted ~130 more Alma Paprika peppers (the rest of the packet) because the packet looked the same as the one that King of the North came in and I wasn't paying attention. Oops! Oh well, it'll be nice to see how the plants compare.

Here's what got planted. The numbers represent the number of rows planted to each variety.

Tray 1
13x Alma Paprika pepper
1x Letchi Tomato garden cherry
6x Black Beauty eggplant

Tray 2
11x King of the North pepper
1x Red Burgundy Okra
2x Stevia
2x Fuego F1 pepper
3x Cueno Giallo pepper
2x Yellow Stuffer pepper

Peppers are sprouting!

The first pepper sprouts started showing up yesterday. Some of them poked themselves out of the soil and had to be replanted. Their fuzzy roots were cute! I think this happened because I just kind of sprinkled them into the rows and covered them with dirt this year instead of planting them one at a time. It saved a lot of time but some of them were probably just below the surface.

Today, everyone seems to be going in the same direction.

And so it begins

I planted part of a starter tray with Alma Paprika seeds from Seed Savers tonight. It's now sitting on a heat mat with a humidity dome over it. I didn't count but I'm guessing somewhere around 100 seeds. I'm currently planning on planting about 50 plants and the rest will be for sale at Stillmeadow Gardens.

I'm planting these 15 days earlier than I did last year. I really liked these peppers but they had trouble ripening for me. They stayed at the yellow stage for what seemed like several weeks. Hopefully I'll get enough ripe ones to save seed this year!

I switched to using 20 row trays this year. They're a lot easier than the 288 cell trays I used last year! It was nice to just sprinkle some seeds into the rows instead of painstakingly putting them into one cell at a time. The main reason I switched was that I think they'll stay more consistently moist this way.