Peppers, peppers, peppers!

Welcome to the second week of March gardening friends. 

This week is the week, I think.

I have never pruned my seedlings before and it’s monumentally terrifying. Josh and I potted up the second week of February sown peppers yesterday, and the little plants flying through the air with their tiny roots dangling totally stressed him out. What if I drop them? What if I crush, or snap or squish or wreck them?

Dear friends, this is inevitable. 

Repeat after me: I will annihilate at least one seedling, most likely more. 

I WILL annihilate at least one. 

Or the wind will do it for you like my poor melons last year. 

Fortunately all the little peppers survived the potting up and are doing quite nicely. 

The Brazillian Starfish and the first batch of peppers are getting reasonably big with lots of big, beautiful leaves. As I wrote about in The Pepper Project: Pruning there are a couple different ways people seem to like to prune. 

Sidenote: Seeing as March is when most gardeners in Zone 5 Ontario start sowing their seeds check out the Week 5/21 post about how to start your pepper seeds indoors. 

I’m considering trialing the two different pruning techniques with my two of each seedlings. Most people seem to suggest the pinch back at four inches, but I thought the other option: to wait until they’re about pencil size, and then snip a good size portion of the top off and root it for a whole nother plant was pretty cool. 

I had fully intended to sow some early broccoli and cabbage March 1 but I got distracted by Lepidoptera and food webs and pileated woodpeckers so I need to rein myself in and get to seed starting. I want the brunt of my brassicas to be ready in fall but I’d like some early in the summer if at all possible. I’ll start them and try and get them out under cover early enough for them to get settled. Hopefully that way they actually produce florets and a head before the heat of summer. 

Also this week, we’re going to head into the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Lowlands Forest to learn a bit more about the treed area of our surroundings and to visit Woody.