Healthy Kids Day 

How to grow your pepper

Thank you for coming and visiting us at Healthy Kids Day and planting a pepper! I'd like to share a few tips with you so your little pepper plant can grow nice and big, and most importantly, produce delicious red peppers!

 

Okay, so today you planted a small pepper plant. Those have been growing in my greenhouse for two weeks. They like to germinate when it's really warm, so we kept them in a special place that was 88 degrees! But don't worry, now that it has germinated, you don't need to keep it that warm. But you do need to find a nice sunny spot in your home to let it live for one month. Be sure to put a little plate underneath it so when you water it, it doesn't ruin what's underneath.

 

It is important to give this little pepper plant enough water, but not too much water. Just make sure the soil doesn't go dry, and make sure that it's not too wet. A good rule of thumb, if you could squeeze the soil (hypothetically) like a sponge and water would come out, it's too wet!

 

Feel free to take this little plant out of the container and put it into a bigger container with more soil, more soil means you have to water it less.

 

Alright, so once you have a strong transplant after a month, it's ready to plant outside in a garden or outside in a big container. Dig a hole the size of the container your pepper plant is in, take your pepper plant outside of the container and put it in the hole, and then firm up the soil around your transplant. That's it!

 

It takes a long time for this pepper plant to produce a pepper, or what us farmers call, a fruit. First it's going to produce little buds that turn into flowers. Make sure there are some bees around to pollinate this flower! If the flower gets pollinated (the pollen from a different pepper flower is transferred to the stamen of that pepper flower), it will loose it's petals and slowly grow into a pepper fruit. First it will be small, but don't worry, it will grow. When it's grown to the size it wants, it will still be green. The final thing this pepper plant will do is turn red! When the whole pepper is red, it's ready to eat!

 

This pepper plant is a variey called "Lipstick". It's my favorite pepper variety we grow at Seeds Farm. It's sweet, I like to eat it like an apple.

 

If you have questions along the way, please e-mail me at seedsfarm@gmail.com and I'll try my best to help you out.

 

If you take photos of your pepper plant growing, you get to name a pig and visit it out at the farm!