I was visiting my grandmother and her caretaker around the holidays in 2024, back in my birth country. There, we eat a popular pepper called 'Locoto' which is a small pepper that can range in color from green to red and ranges in spiciness as well. You can google it but basically it's like a very small habanero with about 1/3 the spiciness. It's used in all kinds of dishes and even eaten together with bread or raw on the side of a warm dish.
We also really love a fruit called 'Chirimoya' - Cherimoya for the anglos out there - and my grandmother's caretaker had a bunch of seeds that she extracted from the day-to-day eating of both the Locotos and the Chirimoya. She sent me home with a ziploc baggie full of all kinds of seeds. I kept that baggie until I moved to my new place, which has a lovely garden space which already grows Tomatoes, Green Onions, Strawberries, Celery, and other delicious edibles! It's not the most productive garden ever - not like some of the youtube homesteads you'd find - but it is very nice to have a fresh strawberry or tomato every few weeks when the seasons hit right. The last maintainer of the garden had such a green thumb that plants have grown in it just from him burrying vegetable or fruit scraps. There's also some citrus trees! It's very wonderful, even if a lot of work, to take care of.
But back to my seeds. I found a little container meant for seed starting that even included an LED growlight and decided to try my hand at growing Locoto and Chirimoya plants. I planted them with some standard potting soil and put 3 seeds in each of the squares. I placed the whole thing with the LED growlight in the warmest part of the house, the networking closet with the router and other home-theatre devices. After 2-3 weeks, I saw that about 1/3 of all the Locoto seeds had sprouted!
From the cells you can see that I stuck a little blank tag on one side. Those 3 cells on that side are the ones that received a single chirimoya seed in each. At this stage I was a little sad because I didn't see any growth from any of them.
However, after 2 more weeks I noticed one of the seeds had somehow moved towards the top of the dirt, and a few days later it had also sprouted!
After about 5 total weeks since planting, and a phonecall with my grandmother where she very sternly told me I needed to "put them in the earth before they were no longer viable", I decided to plant them. I wanted to conduct an experiment, since I had never really done this before. We have a raised garden bed in the garden which I hoped would become the home for these sprouts but I feared it was simply too big and that the weather is too hot for them to survive without higher moisture brought on by being inside or by the plastic cover they had grown under. So I took the strongest looking Locoto sprouts and the Chirimoya sprout and put them in small plastic pots with potting soil.
The other two locoto sprouts I planted in the raised garden bed and put a plastic cover over, hoping it would hold the temperature more steady.
Putting the plastic cover over the plants in the raised bed was a massive mistake. After one day they were fine, but after one other particularly sunny and hot day, I came outside to find they had both wilted almost completely. I believe that the plastic cover, while it did retain moisture, overheated the plants as it did not allow enough air to cycle, so the plants died due to too much heat. I am really dissapointed in myself and should have just trusted what my grandmother said about putting them directly in dirt and not fussing over them too much. I have since removed the cover and watered the garden bed thoroughly in the hopes that one will bounce back from the brink. Thankfully, I still have the one that's in the pot.
For the potted plants, I read somewhere that introducing them to outdoor conditions needs to be gradual, so I initially left them outside from 7am-noon (I wake up at 6 every day for work anyways) and I put them in the shade from noon to around whenever I remember to move them back to their original spot - usually once the sun is no longer at peak. I am going to reduce this activity in the next few days and simply leave them all day in one of the partially-shaded parts of the garden. Having lost all my 'backup sprouts' im really hoping they don't die in a single overnight cold snap or something. They seem resilient now.
If you have any gardening advice for me, please share!
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kagumail.uselessly535@passinbox.com
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