Saturday 2 April 2011

Time to pot

First off, this is going to be a quite image heavy post, the plants are starting to look good so best to get a few good pictures.

The shoots are coming along well and most have sprouted their second set of leaves, the 'adult leaves' now so it's time to pot them so they can grow. The biggest plants here are still only about 4cm tall (about 1.5 inches) to give you an idea of scale.



You might notice that a couple of them look different to the others. 1 of these is my fault! The Christmas Bell chillies sprouted quite quickly and couldn't shed the seed case, it stayed pretty firmly clamped to the starter leaves. I tried to remove them as gently as I could but ended up pinching off the tips of the leaves.
I didn't want them to grow too tall and spindly or they'd be weak plants and that's exactly what will happen if they don't get enough light when they first sprout.



The other ones are the Trinidad Perfumes, these were the ones which sprouted with 3 starter leaves, not 2 like every other chilli (and in fact any plant at all) that I've ever grown from seed.
Now they're looking quite squat and dense, I imagine they'll be quite bushy plants rather than tall and slender.



As mentioned before, you should think about potting them on when the roots start to show out the bottom of the peat discs you start them off in. This actually happened last weekend but the weather was pretty bad and I wanted to pot them on a day where they could get loads of sun.



So the first thing I did today was write up labels for the pots, it's for the same reason I'd drawn up the plan when I planted them, to keep the varieties separate.

Once this was done I put a few stones in the bottom of each pot. You only really need 2 or 3 stones, go for some around the size of a large grape. These will do 2 things, they'll help with water drainage and they'll give the roots something to wrap around which will make the plants stronger (a necessity if you're planning to move them outside later on).



Once that's done, fill them about half way with compost and sit the shoot, still in it's peat disc on top and fill in the edges. Don't worry about giving the shoots the odd knock while you're doing this, they're a lot hardier than you might give them credit for.




Finally give them all a watering, this will encourage the roots to take to the new compost and will help the peat disc to break down into the surrounding compost.

I actually gave them all a small amount of plant food too. 
Ideally you want to use either one specific for chillies or one for tomatoes (made to a 1/4 of the suggested dilution) but I've only got an all purpose one currently. I've literally given them a small squeeze of plant food each, just enough to give them a boost. Too much and the plants will grow like crazy but not necessarily healthily, you don't want a lanky weak plant, you're much better off with a stocky plant.



As an added bonus, I checked the remaining seeds which haven't sprouted and have a single Thai Bird Eye shoot. I'll leave it under cover for a few days in the warmth before I bring it out but glad to know that I have at least 1 of every variety growing now.

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