Cool, a triple cotyledon. What's with the rock wool cube seedlings, will they be grown hydroponically all the way?

Wow, Brennan. Not growing any hot ones this year, huh? ;)

Isgen, some will go into a kratky setup and some of the cubes will go into soil in a few days.

MikeUSMC, I decided just to go with the milder peppers this year

Lots of varieties I have not heard of before. There are getting to be sooo many strains it is impossible to track them all. Certainly sounds like heat is your theme for this year's grow.

I guess being in N.M. a start now is about right. I still have well over 2 months to wait yet before I start my grow.

I have had those three legged cotyledons a few times. I was surprised the first time as well. What I have found is that the three cots is about the only difference you will find in that plant. All mine grew up to be otherwise completely normal.

Nice list of heat there Brennan. I'm "about" done for the season---still have some bells I'm waiting to ripen fully and a couple of Jals that I'll let go until/when we get frost. Have pulled all the superhots except 2 Bhuts/Nagas with their last batches ripening. Just made my last chile relleno casserole the other night with the rest of my Poblanos.

I'd normally start my superhots in a couple weeks, but may cancel them next season since I have plenty of sauce and powder. Annuums will get started next month.

Good luck on your grow.

Kevin

Esox07 yes there are quite a few. Seems like everybody has a personal cross that they have come up with with some rediculous name. And to think that just a few years ago I thought that the ghost pepper was the extent of the world of super hots lol.

Brennan, yes, exactly. The Hot Pepper growing hobby is growing at leaps and bounds. With it, we find a lot of "growing pains" so to speak. I think that many of the "varieties" of peppers that people rattle off are either simple crosses that will soon fade out without proper precautions to isolate the variations. Others are just a renaming of an existing and documented strain.

I have mentioned it before, but it like fish. Up north we catch Sun Fish, down south, they are called Brim or Bream. Same fish, just different names. Then, even up North, they are misnamed quite often. People tend to lump Strawberry Bass, Rock Bass, Green Sunfish, Bluegill, Pumpkinseed, Redear Sunfish, Redbreast Sunfish, Longear Sunfish, Warmouth all in one pot and call them SUNFISH. They are however distinct species of fish.

I think that is what is happening to hot peppers lately. Nagas are routinely called Ghost Peppers or Bhut Jolokias. The first one is different from the last two and the last two are simply two different names for the same pepper. Throw into that a bunch of accidental crosses and you have 40 different Nagas, 40 different 7Pots, 40 different Scorpions, etc... It is a mess and I have since quit trying to keep up and just deal with the established and verified varieties.

Exactly. I just wade through it all and try to keep my feet dry. Getting hard though.

Oh, and it doesn't help when you have all the jerk offs on Ebay and Amazon selling Jalapeno seeds as Ghost Pepper or Carolina Reaper seeds. Then all the newbies that grow them out, think they have some cool smooth skinned green Ghost Peppers and call them as such.

I could really care less what they really are to an extent. If it's a good tasting pepper with good heat I could care less whether it's a bhut jolokia or a "7 pot chocolate bleeding ghost reaper zombie strain" lol. If they look cool that's just a bonus. And I agree about the bhut/naga issue. I thought they were the same forever because both chiles are marketed under the name "ghost pepper" even though the naga isn't really a ghost pepper by any standards aside from common use of the term.

To me, Bhut Jolokia and Naga Morich are the exact same pepper when it comes to flavor/aroma. Where they differ is many of the other traits--- pod shape, skin thickness and texture, heat level(though not discernible, but Nagas are a tad hotter on the scoville scale), days to maturity, and last but not least, production---(IME, because of the shorter DTM(more harvests per season), pod thickness, and overall pod production, Nagas are a far better performer.

Kevin

Kevin, is DTM days to maturity? What is IME?

"Days To Maturity" and "In My Experience." These internet acronyms are nuts too, hahaha. I'm only 35, and I can barely keep up

I'm 22 so I should be on top of my internet acronym game but I'm not lol.

Try being 55. But I did learn BFF and LOL a week or so ago, so I feel like I am clipping along just fine.

What Mike said.

LMAO. Mike, I'm 52 and the only reason why I use internet slang is for the younger crowd and the fact that my typing sucks. More often than not, I actually type out my words as I would in a letter to somebody with punctuation and grammar and such. One reason why I still don't like using cell phones is I want to type out full messages but my fingers are too fat for the 3" X 1" keyboard!

woohoo: I am with you all the way. In fact, I have a texting program on my computer that lets me send text messages over my phone texting system using my computer and regular keyboard.

Bad enough I have to learn all these "current" acronyms there's all the pepper ones!

Acronym List @ THP

Had a few more seedlings pop up. Upgraded my lighting some and started moving to bigger doubled cups.

My season is in full swing, and my cayenne is just starting to get ripe:

(Photo from yesterday, Jan 1)

Plenty of Tobago chilies left, and my old orange Habanero still producing.

Lots of Chocolate Habanero chilies left on the plants, and I probably need to harvest a bunch of these this week and make some more sauce.

It's hard to get motivated to plant more seeds at this time of year, but I do plan to order a few more seed packets and try to start them in February. I do not know how much longer my Chocolate Habanero plants will keep growing, but some of them have started putting out new growth from the bottom, and so I will probably prune off the tops of those plants. I also think they need larger pots.

The Cayenne is on the far side of my back yard, furthest from my kitchen, and the chilies on this plant often dry on the plant, and then I just save them as dried chilies.

Lars: Where do you live that your season is in full swing this time of year? I'm jealous of that cayenne. It's one of my favorite pep Era to eat straight and mine quit producing a couple months ago and didn't produce much at all even at the height of the season.

Here's a little update on my indoor grow. New plants all working on second and third sets of true leaves and the reaper is covered with buds. I'll have a ton of peppers in a month or so!

You guys really make this time of year hard to deal with. I am still six to seven weeks away from my start date.

Brennan, you must have a huge yard for that many chilies! Are you growing them commercially? BTW, I live in Los Angeles (Westchester neighborhood), less than three miles from the beach, in a frost-free microclimate. Typically, it will not get below 42° in the winter, and so the chilies grow quite well here during the winter. It can be in the 80s in January.

I have another chili plant that I thought was a cayenne, and it has a bunch of chilies on it now, but they are much larger than cayenne, although similar in shape and color. However, they are quite a bit hotter than cayenne, and the plant I have is a volunteer, and so I'm not sure where it came from. I'll try to take a photo of it so that someone may be able to identify it, but I think it is a hybrid. I've had more than one hybrid cayenne, and they tend to get very hot, and so I think they are hybridizing with the regular orange Habaneros that I have been growing for a while.

Maybe I can save some seeds from some of my cayenne plants, as the ones I've had are prolific producers, and send some to you.

ETA: Here's how the hybrid cayenne looked in August

It is still producing large chilies like this, and they are very hot, and so I do not pick very many of them.

My yard isn't all that big but about half of it is dedicated to becoming a pepper forest. I don't grow commercially.