Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

That said, I do have a couple of good 'Fried Green Tomato' recipes here: one traditional, one is more healthy.

Rick

Going to post them?

Gotta dig out a book, don't want to get it wrong!

They're in the (extremely specifically) local gardening guide that I carried around for over a year. About everything in there turned out to be right. Just like how most of the good advice in Northern, or Southern or Western, or even Texan, gardening books just does not quite apply in the Houston climate... Thick as a phone book and worth thrice the price paid.

I don't know if anyone has ever actually made the 'healthier' recipe though...

So I got four rooted cuttings of the bhut jolokia, aka Ghost Chile, from my brother. He's known in the chile-head world as Doc Pepr.
I plugged them into the 300-gallon growbed after frost season. They flowered a little in spring but no fruit set until night-time temperatures came back down in fall. They just grew bigger and bigger!
I saw a lot of flowers and some pods, but knowing my pH is pretty high, I added some powdered chelated iron to help them set fruit. I believe it helped.

That red one will get sliced toothpick-thin and used for stuffed olives.
Need to figure out something special to do with the placenta. (munitions?)

Peppers will root from cuttings? I didn't know that. Are they easy to get to root?

Does you brother like your peppers? Do they taste the same as non-AP peppers to him?

The capsicum is in the nightshade family, as are tomatoes and eggplants.
I don't think peppers cut/root nearly as easily as tomatoes, but you can do a couple of things to increase your luck:
Make a scar or scrape on a branch and then wrap it with some peat moss or coco coir, something you can keep moist. Scrapes will develop a "callus" and you're halfway home; the callus is where roots will emerge easily. Since the branch is still attached you can take your time and wait until you get roots peeking thru the moss. Google "Air Layering."
Then strip off all leaves but the ones at the far end. Cut off your cutting, below the roots of course. Then plug it in to your AP system, deep, up to those leaves. Roots will form all up and down the buried stem and the started roots will keep it alive while they develop.

This is an important way to preserve valuable or rare genetic material. Or to multiply some plants that you know you like, either to share or to make sure the genetic line is preserved.
We were after both these goals when my brother gave me these. The original plants were grown from seed from the official USA source, the University of New Mexico.

What he did, because he could, was just slice off a little tip of several branches, dipped them in a 'rooting hormone' powder, and plugged each one into some fibrous media in an extremely aerated water bath. When they had a little root, they could travel. I kept them close to a fluorescent light but not having bubbles, just added aerated water every couple of days.

With tomatoes, they are easier. You can just pull off a "sucker" that grows from a junction, jam it down into your media, and it will usually take off on its own.

Some enthusiasts have little "Clean Room" boxes where they can take tiny amounts of leaf material and grow then in Petri Dishes, just like mad scientists cloning their monsters.
Muwah hah hah hah hah!

Rick

{Edit Edit} - OK I take back some of that - these plants were not from cuttings but were seedlings. They were treated with care because this variety does not make many seeds to begin with, and the seeds take so long to germinate that they often get mold or fungus problems.

But the tutorial on cuttings, and the fact you can do cuttings of peppers, I stand by all that. Smin

We don't know, no one has tasted my ghost chiles. And my aquaponic monsters have beat his greenhouse and in-ground plants to fruiting.
He says even his 5-foot-tall plants, the biggest ones, are half the width of the AP Bhut Jolokia trees.

My AP friends, this is saying something. My bro is the real master gardener of the family, I inherited three brown thumbs and have the rare ability to kill basil by looking at it.
Until I stumbled upon BYAP and learned the way that even I can grow nice plants.

Rick

It is not an exaggeration! I had people look at me funny and say, "you have trouble growing... grapes? Seriously? Try basil, you can't mess that u- oh you have? Ummm..."

Aquaponics: It works, bitches!

LOL

Love chilies, but met my match at candied habaneros.

I ate the red one last night. Sliced into some Pho (soup) and so let the heat disperse into the broth, and ate the flesh with meat & noodles & at the end ate some pepper by itself.
Very nice flavor, this is going to be one of my favorites. Yes the heat is at least 2x the habs, subjectively. Compared to an hab the "fruitiness" component of the flavor is more citrus-y than the apricot vibe of the orange hab.
Waiting for more of them to ripen, there will be plenty to play with!

Rick

A lot of the catfish in there are big enough now I think...
Anyone know how to cut 'n' gut a catfish for grilling (all I find are "filleting" instructions)?

Anyone know how to CATCH a pond catfish?

Rick

Happy Yoo Near Everbody!!