Peppers are quite promiscuous. Peppers have “perfect” flowers, meaning that each flower has both male and female parts. If a pepper is left alone, it will simply fertilize itself. But, if you have other varieties near by, bees and other pollinators will make sure that your peppers will have two parents. If you are adventurous then this can be a great thing. Save some seed from peppers in a mixed planting bed and you will likely be surprised next season. You may even be able to tell which plants were responsible for your next generation of peppers. You will certainly know the mother as long as you make note of it when you collect your seed.

I have created three pdf documents for the three different plug flats that I have purchased for this season. 72 is the common size, but I also have 50 cell and 128 cell documents. Why the different sizes? Simply, different sizes of plants benefit from different sizes of cells. Small slow growing plants like onions and leeks do well in the 128 cell, and large extremely fast growing plants like melons, cucumbers do well in the 50 cell flats.

Ran across an article on Straight From the Farm this morning. 10 Steps to Gardening from Scratch. Hmmm. They add a disclaimer: “these steps are a tad idealistic”. Yep. Let’s go over some of the most obvious “idealistic” steps.