[Arid_gardener] Peppers

[olin miller]

Sweet peppers usually germinate pretty uniformly but hot peppers, especially 
chiltipines, take longer.  It helps to soak in water  over night.  Some 
people add salt peter (potassium nitrate) to the water to help with 
scarification but I never knew how much to use.  Besides it has become 
pretty hard to find in local pharmacies ever since it was used to trigger 
than ammonium nitrate bombs that blew up the Morrow Building in Okla City - 
may even now be illegal.  Saltpeter is also one of the active ingredients in 
toothpastes recommended for for sensitive teeth which may help explain why 
the recommendation on the tube is "do not use this product for more than 
four weeks unless recommended by  a dentist or physician".  Mechanical 
scarification methods by rubbing on sandpaper also work but it's not real 
easy with pepper seeds.

Commercially, seeds are also scarified with sulfuric acid but I will stay 
with water.  One method is to heat a small about of water to about five 
times the volume of the seeds to boiling, then removing from the heat, then 
soak the seeds in the gradually cooling water for 12-24 hours.  The swollen 
seeds should be planted right away and the others either discarded or 
subjected to some other treatment.  This method is from my propagation text, 
"Plant Propagation", by Hartmann and Kester.  I often use this method on old 
seeds and small hard-shelled seeds.  I did not use it on the chiltepines but 
now wish I had

Olin

----- Original Message ----- From: "Ellen Stobaugh" <lnrosy2000 at yahoo.com>
Sent: Thursday, January 18, 2007 9:00 PM

> ... definitely right about the peppers taking
> longer to germinate than the tomatoes. I have one or
> two that I am still waiting for to come up. I'll give
> them a few more days before I start poking around to
> see if the seed is okay..