Posted: March 30th, 2009 | Author: mtc | Filed under: growing | No Comments »
Germination is happening in the indoor chile garden. The first tray of seeds I planted were a gift from Lev and Catherine that they brought back from Hatch, NM. Of the 72 plugs planted I think I’ve got over 80% germination rate within 10 days. Now I’ve got another tray of de arbol seeds planted that I saved myself, and a third tray of chiltepins that Wilder and I planted yesterday. Where am I going to put all of these plants once they get big?
Posted: March 12th, 2009 | Author: mtc | Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »
Thanks to Hali Lee for inviting me to the annual benefit for the Asian American Women’s Giving Circle. Brooklyn Chiles was part of the “bazaar” and it was my first experience giving the oil to strangers. It was more of a cocktail party than a farmer’s market, so most people didn’t seem in a buying mood, but it was still a good opportunity to develop a rap and see how people responded to the product. My feeling at the end of the night is that people continue to really like the product, but it’s time to raise the level of my game to more professional production.
Posted: March 6th, 2009 | Author: mtc | Filed under: growing | No Comments »
More than a week in plugs for the first of the seedlings and the baby tray is looking pretty good. About 9 or 10 transplants have keeled over but the other 60 are doing fine. I replaced the dropouts with Tarahumara seeds. No heat mat under the tray right now. We’ll see if anything happens.
Posted: March 2nd, 2009 | Author: mtc | Filed under: growing | 1 Comment »
Chile sprouts, late February 2009.
There’s new life in the chile grow room, or at least more organized life. One of the Tarahumara chiltepins for reasons unknown has tons of volunteer sprouts. I’ve been eyeballing them hopefully for a while now but only recently got the whole apparatus together for tabletop seedlings. So I’m slowly loosen a bit of soil around the base of the sprout with a dull letter opener while pulling upward on one of the leaves. The root is prone to break if soil isn’t loosened completely and the stems are amazingly delicate. But the leaves are stronger stuff and they basically don’t matter anyway. So then I generally dip the sproutroot into rooting gel, then try to slip it into a pre-dug hole in a peat plug. Getting it in there is the dicey part – sometimes it breaks, sometimes it coils, sometimes it goes right in – hard to know how they’re all going to survive.