I planted the seeds in the rockwool on 2/14. It has new been 3 weeks.

In my experience peppers take a while to germinate (seeds crack open and begin growing). In the past I planted all of my crops (lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers) at the same time and the peppers always were 3 weeks behind others. If things were cramped the lettuce and cucumbers would be hogging all of the light and the peppers would suffer. This year I put the peppers in 3 weeks earlier to give them a head start.

It has been a pretty boring three weeks with everything looking unchanged. Basically there were just a bunch of soggy rockwool cubes sitting in containers to look at. I checked them once a week (or so) to make sure that the water hadn’t evaporated and when it did I put in a fresh quarter inch of tap water and tucked them back on top of the fridge.

Today I noticed that the seeds have cracked and have started their first root… most of the roots are digging down into the rockwool as desired. There always seem to be a few that are confused and the root is coming up instead of down. I used to use tweezers and flip them but usually they figure things out and do a U turn in a few days. At the moment I’m going to just let them be.

So while there isn’t much to see (unless you look very closely) I put them back up on the fridge. In a couple weeks the roots should be able to pop out of the bottom of the rockwool cubes and the first set of leaves will develop. Everything is on autopilot right now and there’s no need to change anything like nutrients, sunlight or anything else. I just need to make sure that everything stays moist.

If I didn’t have nutrients and net pots ordered I would be doing that now. I’d also want to be thinking about where I’m going to put the plants as they go from sprouts to young plants. There will be an upcoming post on that topic.