Thursday, July 19, 2012

growing seeds from grocery store peppers

homegrown peppers from grocery store
Homegrown peppers - second generation from Trader Joe's.
Also, I'm bringing back The Doily.
Everyone who sees these peppers thinks they're spicy. They're not - they're more like tiny sweet bell peppers. These were actually started from seeds harvested from Trader Joe's peppers - those cute mini tricolor pepper-ettes.


It's a bit of a risk trying to grow from commercial seeds (and illegal if the seeds are from Monsanto):  most commercial vegetables are hybridized so that they may not produce, and if they do, the vegetables will be a different variety. But since we'd already bought the peppers, we took a chance, planting a few of seeds from each color pepper (yellow, orange, and red).

Apparently when mini bell peppers are grown commercially, each color is grown separately - they're three distinct seeds with similar size, flavor and shape. As you can see, we got none of the lovely colors from any of the seeds, but we were lucky to get peppers at all, since it turns out store-bought bell pepper seeds are usually infertile.

Have you ever grown anything from the grocery store? A few gardening forums I checked out seemed to indicate decent success growing hot peppers (red chili, habaneros), since heirloom varieties are sold more commonly.

5 comments:

  1. I've grown peppers from store-bought peppers as well! :~)

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  2. laughing so hard... I remember many morning coffee-clutching moments together. I'm a little nervous about what happens when I marry MY early-bird farmer.

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  3. Plant mortality is highest at the seed to seedling stage. Every seed is really a structure that embodies and protects the baby plant or embryo, plus a certain amount of food to tide it over the early stages of germination and growth.

    Steam Shower

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  4. You want to start your own organic garden. You have chosen a suitable site and prepared the soil accordingly using natural, organic fertilisers and compost. Now the time has come for one of the exciting parts for the new gardener - actually planting the first seeds.

    Flower Bed Design

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  5. They would probably have ripened to another colour if you let them stay longer on the plant.

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