I've always been a fan of spicy food, sometimes to my dismay. I've eaten ghost pepper products a few times in spicy food challenges, but never the raw pepper. So I decided to grow some.
Unfortunately, the climate and weather of San Francisco isn't exactly conductive to growing them, so I decided to grow them indoors in our spare bedroom. So I bought some seeds and set off on this adventure.
I was pretty worried about germination because I read that ghost pepper
seeds are difficult to germinate and can take a month. So I ended up using
the paper towel method and a Raspberry Pi Zero with a temperature sensor,
combined with a space heater connected to a smart plug to regulate the
tempature to the 80-90F that I read was required for germination. At this
point, light wasn't important, so I didn't have any real lights other than
the one in the closet.
Once they were growing too big for the paper bags, I transferred them to
these small seed starters that I got from home depot and bought a 40w grow
light to encourage them to grow more. This worked great until they outgrew
the seed starters. I then got a plastic container from Ikea and some cups
for the next stage of growth. I've been keeping them with 12 hours of
light a day, and still regulating the temperature of the closet they are
in to a nice 75-80f.
From the looks of things it looks like I'll need to get another, bigger
container soon.
With fertilizer, they've been going strong for a while now. I got a new
~200-300w led bulb and moved them to a bigger closet. They are just
starting to bud.
A few plants bore fruit. I lost a pull-up competition at work and had to
eat a piece of one. Stomach didn't feel that hot for some time after that.