When to start your Seeds

When to start your seeds and when is the best time to order your seeds? 

We get asked all the time when do we start our seeds? Well we start with the hardest to start seeds first and the varieties that take a longer time to germinate. We like to start these seeds  in January, that way we have time to restart if we need to, and the varieties we start first are Capsicum Pubesence and any wild varieties we plan to grow and next is Capsicum Chinense which we like to get going before February or in February and next is Capsicum Baccatum and Capsicum Annuum we like to get them going around mild February. This way we will have some restart time if needed. Our cutoff time is March. We usually don't start after March. We have, but we don't get the same yields off plants started in April. Plants with good roots will have much better yields. We top our plants as soon as we can and we transplant in to  2 L pots to get bigger roots before we transplant into 3 Gallon pots for the season or into the ground in our tunnels. This is one of the key things that make it possible to get large yields from most varieties. We have had customer say that they only get one or two bell peppers per plant and how can we get higher yields. We get anywhere from 6 to 10 bells off most plants. This is due starting early and getting plants to have big roots along with topping plants. You should never just let a plant grow. It needs to be topped as soon as possible so plants can branch out. Another thing is to pick off flowers for the first month after being transplanted for the season. This will give the plant a chance to grow and get established and this will make all the difference. We plant out in June and wait until July before we let flowers grow on our plants.

There is one other way to get great yields from your plants and that is to winter them if you can. A wintered plant can start producing months ahead of seed starts. We have added a couple of pictures here to should you what you can expect from your plants. First plants that have been wintered and then pictures of plants that are to size and ready to let flower. These size plants are what you need to strive for. For best yields. You can have plants this big to if you start them early and prune them frequently. Plant size is genetic but there are only a small amount of varieties that are dwarf varieties and the rest are medium to large. Size can be controlled by pruning.