I am happy to announce I have had a successful harvest. Thousands of hot peppers and a variety of other great vegetables, fruits and berries. I would like to show to you the complete cycle from seed harvest to the end products and everything in between. In a future post I will explain to you more about the profitability of building a garden and expenses like grow lights, greenhouses, pots, trays, heat mats, fencing, water pumps, electricity, soil modification equipment, land, water and fertilizer.

Here is some cannabis grown in the forest without being touched. Even this prematurely harvested bud has seedpods which are glazed with trichomes which make it an excellent source of cannabinoids for butter or skin creams. It looks like Christmas is coming early this year. Here are some cannabis ginger bread cookies!

A Common Misconception
Oh, you grow your own food so it is free!

No. There are many hidden costs along with a massive amount of time involved. So why do I garden?

Apart from rising food costs as noted here in @stan's awesome article:
https://steemit.com/philosophy/@stan/sittin-up-with-the-dead-blog--post-006--bad-reasons-to-store-food

Here is the Life Cycle Assessment of a tin of tea bags. If we grow our tea in our yards and use a simple tea infuser we can eliminate this whole process.

Check out the intriguing article here

This doesn't mean don't buy exotic teas or that tea in fancy tins and bags should not be made. Certainly I can not get my hands on coca seeds. I've tried for years. So I buy the end product from Peru. I'm not always self sufficient, but when I am I enjoy the process of gardening and making my own products. I think if you try it you will too.

Here they try to defend the waste in shipping by stating their product reduces carbon emissions. But as any amateur indoor cannabis grower knows, the more CO2 you have the larger your plants get and the more CO2 they consume. The "green" movement is based on a pack of lies. It is not CO2 that is the problem but the chemtrails they are spraying that are holding in the heat at night so that it cannot escape the atmosphere. Also the chemtrails (stratospheric aerosol geoengineering) are depositing heavy amounts of aluminum into the soil which is killing trees. No trees, no CO2 consumption. So tell me again, who is causing climate change??? This along with other secret weather modification technology are being used to create a panic so the masses will bend to the will of the elites. The people who control the food and water control the world. You cannot legally collect rainwater or grow hemp here.

A few benefits of hemp are listed in this chart. As a manufacturer and 3d printer I am ecstatic over the possibilities of making all of my own materials straight from the garden!!!

Here is some of my grow lights. 6 x 48 inch fluorescents, 2 blue spectrum CFLs and an LED panel (about 400 watts of 1600 that I could scale up to.) Just enough lumens to max out these 700 Carolina Reaper sprouts that I am starting for next season. For seed sprouting information check out @meesterboom's pepper planting post. (If you do not keep the seedlings in a moist environment when they are sprouting then the leaves will not be able to escape the seed shell easily.) https://steemit.com/gardening/@meesterboom/scotch-bonnet-chillis-indoor-sowing-and-growing-part-1

Gardening brings blood, sweat and tears but I would have it no other way.
In my life there is never a dull moment. From secretly producing forbidden medicines to cooking up new recipes or saving seeds. Every day I have more than I can do. You learn who your friends are when you have a garden. Who is there to help when the harvest is coming in?

Here is the moment where @papa-pepper arrived back to the hometown and brought me numerous varieties of new seeds for my collection.

And this is when I diversified my seed collection that @arisa gave me. Now both @papa-pepper and I each have over 400 varieties of pepper seeds! Thank you @arisa for the wonderful gift you have given to us. <3 <3 <3

Here is some of the different varieties that we have grown in the past. This photo is from Pepper Poker 2013. Notice the flying saucer shaped pepper. That is the Uba Tuba which is my favorite flavor pepper with a hint of apple terpenes.

So how can a person make a living with gardening?

Well, if you are not in a medical cannabis state then peppers may be a great choice for a cash crop. Here's why.

The perimeter of 1 acre costs 1040 dollars to surround with cattle panel at 20 dollars for a 16 foot panel. 4 acres of fencing costs 2080 dollars. Every time you quadruple your land area your fencing cost only doubles. And this is just the new price. What if you could find it used for a cheaper price? And if you are on a tighter budget you can use electric fencing for only 1/10th of the price providing you have electricity access.

On average I've seen between 20-40 seeds in a Carolina Reaper Pepper. And 20-60 in a Ghost Pepper. If you use high technology and have no space in between the plants for walking paths then you can achieve 4,800 5 foot tall beauties per acre. I am starting a new business called Cyber Field Robotics where I will be developing bots to help with gardening tasks similar to what the Farm Bot does. With the system I am designing there will not need to be paths allowing for 4800 plants per acre at 9 square feet per plant. That's 4,800 x 20 seeds x 200 peppers per plant minimum if you grow it properly.

That's 19,200,000 seeds per acre
At 5 cents per seed bulk wholesale price that is 1 million dollars of pepper products per acre. Plus you get ounces of dried pepper powder from the skins of the pepper for every plant. That goes for 100 dollars per pound at wholesale price. So if you have all of this spice what do you do with it? Well, you could extract the capsaicin and sell it. Turn it into pepper spray. Or make hot sauce! Last week I made my first ghost pepper hot sauce and it turned out incredible. It goes great with bacon and venison cheddar tacos. I'll post the recipe another day. :)

Thank you for reading my thoughts. I have endless content from this summer and fall to share with you yet. I hope you are as excited as I am. God bless you all. <3