Growing Pepper From Seeds

2024 Author: Gavin MacAdam | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:38

Pepper belongs to nightshade crops and is a favorite of modern summer residents and vegetable growers. Delicious and healthy fruits are used in fresh food, for cooking or preserving workpieces. In Europe, this vegetable culture became known only in the fifteenth century, since before that it was grown only in the central part of America

Nevertheless, novice summer residents, when caring for such a plant, face a number of problems, for example, growing pepper from seeds. Moreover, this vegetable is quite demanding and capricious.

How to prepare seeds for planting?

It is a good idea to check seed germination before planting. The operation should be carried out fourteen to twenty days before the sowing process. To do this, you need to take up to five pieces of seeds and lower them in a wrapped cloth for 24 hours in warm water in a glass (water temperature 25C). After that, the swollen seeds should be laid out on a flat saucer and placed in a warm place with an air temperature of about thirty degrees, but it is important to ensure that the fabric is always moist. After three or four days, you can start sowing seeds in warm and moist soil, after which you need to wait for seedlings.

In the process of preparing seeds for planting, you need to start by disinfecting them with a weak manganese solution, in which they should lie for about twenty minutes. Then, by means of warm water, the seeds must be washed and soaked in a specially prepared solution with nutrients - a quarter of a tablet with microelements is soaked in one liter of water. Instead of such a pill, you can use other drugs - for example, "Rost-2" or "Stimul-1". In any of these prepared infusions, the seeds wrapped in cloth are dipped for 24 hours. This will help the seeds germinate faster and yield a good harvest in the end.

After the performed actions, the fabric with the seeds must be pulled out of the solution and rinsed with clean water. Next, the seeds are placed on a flat saucer for a period of twenty-four to forty-eight hours. The water temperature should be about twenty-five degrees for the seeds to swell. Within a week, the first shoots can be observed. In the event that the seeds were not prepared in advance, before planting, seedlings will appear later - in about a couple of weeks.

Many summer residents specially harden the seeds, creating temperature differences within five to six days. For this, after the processing procedure, the seeds are placed in the lower zone of the refrigerator for forty-eight hours. The temperature there is usually between two and five degrees. Then they are taken out and moved to a warm place with temperature readings in the form of twenty-five degrees. Then again they are placed in the refrigerator for a couple of days. After that, you can start sowing pepper in specially prepared containers. However, it is important that during hardening procedures the seeds are always moist.

When can pepper seeds be sown?

The final harvest depends on the time at which pepper seeds were planted in the soil - its timing and abundance. If the summer resident will cover the seedlings with plastic wrap, then sowing can begin from the very beginning until the twenty-fifth of February. True, some novice summer residents sow in March, which cannot be done, since in this case the pepper bushes will begin to bloom only at the end of the summer season. In order for the plant to bloom from the moment of the first shoots, it takes time for three and a half months.

But there are situations when sowing in March is advisable. But at the same time, it is worth taking care of artificial highlighting for thirty days, in other words, before the pick is made. The lamps should be six to eight centimeters from the plants themselves. They will need to be turned off at night. The backlight should be active from eight in the morning to eight in the evening.

Favorable soil compositions for growing pepper are soils, where various fertilizers have been applied. The first option is sod and manure humus, the second is equal parts of humus and peat. To make the soil even more fertile, you can add a couple of tablespoons of wood ash and one tablespoon of superphosphate. It's a good idea to buy a ready-made substrate called "Living Earth". In this case, you do not need to add fertilizer.