2018 Container Garden-Tijuana, México

[Gerardo]

There's no escaping thrips and their gifts. Although I've controlled their numbers with Capt Jack's Dead Bug brew, the massive number of blooms on both citrus trees and the fact they're continually opening makes it tough to eradicate my enemy.

Dousing the open blooms every 5 days with Spinosad has paid dividends, and instead of seeing a ton of thrips on every single bloom, I now see 1-2 on every 6th or 7th bloom inspected, which is marked improvement.

I figure as long as I can keep the numbers down they won't descend like a barbarian horde onto my new tomatoes, and that's about as good as it gets.

I overwintered a bunch of superhots and regular hot peppers. After soil changes and hand-holding throughout the winter, their new growth bears the yellow Cheetara look. Hail Mary was a shot of copper, and it did not improve things. So there was no escaping it, death by blade to two dozen fairly large pepper plants.

One Trinidad Scorpion Chocolate was by itself in a Gro Pro NC-20, and was a monster. It hurt to put it down.

Fortunately, I pooled a bunch of really hot yellows and a bunch of really hot reds, and mass planted them in 1 gallon pots. Superhot bingo sampling will be fun.