Short Growing Seasons

Vermont's one if those places that's difficult to grow things because of our short growing season. the one exception is the Banana Belt up in Grand Isle County. While the rest of northern Vermont has to struggle with zone 4 and zone 3, South Hero actually has about a 1 square mile area of zone 5a. The soil there needs a lot of work, but I was able to grow 100+ Habanero plants outside in containers, from the last week April through the first week in November.

It took a lot of work and ingenuity to grow something in any part of Vermont that takes 110 days to produce fruit. But it was a successful experiment that I should share with other people. What I did, was get some old ag bags that the farmer up the road was throwing in the trash. You know, the big plastic bags they put their silage in that are white on one side black on the other.

So I made a big square in the backyard with the white side up, and weighed it down with concrete blocks and some rocks. This reflected a lot of light back up into the plants for growth, though it did kill all the grass underneath. It worked out well though, because this is where I spread wildflower seed the following year. So I lined up all the containers in rows by size, using a soil mix of 1/3 sand, 1/3 peat moss, and 1/3 compost/soil. The key to peppers is sulphur and I had saved some rolled sulphur to grind into powder from my days as hazardous waste operator. Truth is paper matchbooks, 1 per plant work just as well.

Now because I was experimenting, I did half the peppers organic, and the other half with chemical fertilizer. The organic ones received crushed clam shells from the lake, fossilized seabird guano, greensand, and crushed rock phosphate. All the way up to blossoming, I weekly gave the organic batch liquid fish emulsion fertilizer. The chemical batch I mixed Green Mountain 10-10-10 into the soil, and fed weekly with Peters liquid 10-30-10. I put s sprinkler in the middle of all and daily waterings were at dawn and dusk.

All through the growing season the chemical plants had deeper green growth, but all plants maintained roughly the same size. It was blossom time that things became apparent, the organic plants outbloomed the chemical almost 2 to 1. This is where things got confusing for me though. I ended with about twice as many organic to chemical peppers, The difference was the organics had thicker walls, and were smaller. The chemical had thinner cell walls but were larger. As these were hot peppers though, that's where the real test was. My perception was the organics were hotter, but after the sample, honestly, who really knows!!