I have not grown anything in hydro so my experience is from dirt and soiless mix growing. All peppers for me seem to germinate better with temps between 85 and 90 deg. once they germ i keep them between 75 and 80ish. As far as spacing if you only have a few plants it doesn't really make that big of a difference as long as you can get around the plants to harvest them. I would suggest no closer than two feet and at least three feet between rows if you are growing that many. As far as nutes i do not give them any nutes until they get there 2nd or 3rd set of true leaves and then it is only half strength, when they get about 4 inches tall they get full strength ferts.i guess they have to germ and start their initial growth at high temps.
i got a question for you guys that have been growing these, what do you recomend for nutrients? i figured i'd start out with GH flora- series cause i got some on hand.
i was gonna shoot for a PH of like 5.5 or 6ish assuming its like mary jane. please let me know if im wrong.
gonna put together a NFT system for these, do i need of spacing per plant, or can these be grown in a pretty compact system?
im gonna start them under 6000k 30w CFL's and pick up a MH fixture once they got a few leaves on them. ill keep you guys posted.
That's a lot of peppers! How long do you keep them under 4 ft fluorescents?Thanks, I germinate about 2500 pepper seeds a year and 2 -3k tomato seeds. it def gets the job done for me. Once they sprout they go directly under the 4' fluorescents.
Dale
there has been quite a bit of lighting experiments in the chilihead community and in my own basement, if I was going to leave my lights on any longer than 12/12 it would only be for the first 2or3 weeks after they pop thier heads out of the soil. It also depends on what you are going to do with your plants, if you are going to grow them in the house all year than you would want something other than floro lights and your on off cycle would have to be tweaked. I just grow mine for selling so i do not want them to flower or fruit just get big enough to sell.huh,do peppers not benefit from a longer light cycle? i was planning on starting them off on a 24-0 light cycle.
thats quite the operation you got going on there. were those jalapeno's wrapped with bacon on the bbq?that looks awesome.
well so far i got nothing poking up, but i can't seem to reach temps higher than 80 degrees with them sitting on the hot air duct. tonight i will build some sort of a ghetto germ-incubator out of some hi-R rigid insulation and a 40 watt light bulb. ill post a pic once im done.