Do You Grow? Pepper Transplants and Solo Cup Trials

Good morning, I hope you are all well! Things are getting green over here! Well, inside it is. Outside we are still in winter mode but hopefully not for long!

I have been planting away and fixing our chicken/fox situation for the last week and a bit. The alternator also died in the truck so that took up a few days and kind of sucked. But, we got new Brahma chicks!! They are the friendliest most docile breed ever! Just love them. That made up for the truck haha!

#brahmachicks

Ok, ok. This is a #doyougrow, so. After going through all of my 3.5" pots from last year, I was faced with the problem of not being able to afford more. Not as many as we needed anyhow. After some research we decided to try solo cups. They were a third of the price of pots and about the same size.

I ordered the 16oz ones, and with a dremel we easily and quickly made 3 drainage holes in the bottom of each cup.

The dremel goes through 7 cups at a time and takes a quick 15 seconds.

Keep it on a high speed or you get gnarly edges.

Tada!

Now I have 1000 cups for the same price as a case of 400 pots! Being careful these may last 2-3 years, if not longer. As long as they are stored properly after spring transplanting they shouldn't crack.

I used the pots mostly for the peppers, they were smaller than the tomatoes. Cool thing about peppers, tomatoes and eggplants is that if you bury the plant's stem up to the first set of leaves, the plant will send out roots along the entire stem of the plant! This makes for a bigger and sturdier plant.

Those little white bumps on this pepper stem are "air roots" that will take off when buried in soil. They appear from seeking moisture in the air. Tomatoes often get them mid season in the garden, they can get crazy!

Air roots on a tomato stem.

I put about 2" of soil in the bottom of the pot, or about a 1/4 of the way up.

Gently drop the plant into the centre of the pot.

Or cup as with the tomatoes....

Fill with soil, holding the stem in the centre and bury the stem up to the first set of true leaves. Pack soil gently around the plant.

The cloned rosemary finally took off. Anything "woody" or shrub-like takes a while to root. Like, a month even! Patience paid off though.....

Ready to transplant!! Look at those roots!

Beautiful and green.

This guy right behind!

New rosemary plants ready to grow.

I moved most of the plants out to the greenhouse-inside-the-greenhouse. My next blog will be about that....so far it is working great. We have about 1200 seedlings in here to date. I haven't gotten a solid nights sleep since we put the plants out due to getting up to check the temp constantly haha! So far the lowest it's gotten at night is 12°. There are 3 cold nights left in the forecast (and one snow fall) 😒 then it should be smooth sailing! fingers crossed!!

Now I have to go plant up another few hundred seedlings, I hope you all have the best day and I am gearing up to be here with you all more as I get into a rythm on the farm here. There is also a new farm gig in the works....but more about that later.😉 For now, I leave you with baby plant pics!!

Purple Sage

Mini Sunflowers

Tobacco

Trimming some beauties back!

Thank you for reading! Take care of you and yours ❤