As those who know me well are aware, I love spicy hot foods. So when my friend Dan provided me with a connection to the
ghost pepper, I was super excited. It is the world's hottest pepper, and I enjoy savoring the heat in a nice Asian meal. However, when he gave me this last batch, I decided that it was time to do more than just eat them all. I planted several of the seeds, and low and behold, a sprout! What is just a little mysterious is that despite squeezing the seed contents of an entire pepper into the soil, at the moment only a single sprout has emerged.
Meanwhile, another pepper plant has been actively producing offspring. The Hawaiian chili pepper plant that we love had become a bit difficult to maintain when birds began feeding on it. A solution was to cover some of the ripening peppers with paper. This turned out to work well for preserving a few peppers past the peak of ripeness to the peak of sprout-ability. However, just as one problem was solved, another one arose.
I had the Hawaiian chili pepper sprouts in my small red planter, but every evening they were being eaten by a slug. I lost more than just the chili sprouts, including an orchid sprout, and I knew it was time to take action. I moved the sprouts that may have been still in the soil, and put them into a larger ceramic planter. I then covered that with plastic wrap with holes poked in it to form a safe greenhouse of sorts. We left town for a lovely spring break trip to Florida, and when we returned, we were greeted to a ton of Hawaiian chili pepper sprouts that had burst through the plastic and survived any slugs.
They are now in individual planters, and growing every day, as is the solitary ghost. I now keep all the smallest sprouts together in a large lidless tupperware on the top step so that the slugs are less likely to eat them.
