Getting some progress on the growth now, peppers have started coming up, and the tomatoes are growing like some kind of weed. Of note, I did add some tomatoes, btw. We’re doing Red Brandywine tomatoes; first time doing any kind of heirloom tomatoes, so that should be good, but the intertubes make it sound like they behave well in pots, so we’ll see. Sure are sprouting well.

So far we have:

• Carolina Reaper
• Jalapeno
• Scotch Bonnet
• Tomatoes (less spicy)

You’ll notice that there are suspiciously not grow-light looking bulbs in the pictures. Basically, my experiment is to see how well everything will grow with stuff one might have around the house; well, that and I’m cheap. So I’m using Philips Hue bulbs cranked up to 6500k colour temp to put them in line with grow bulbs, and using a simple Python script to schedule the lighting system.

The schedule is: 0600 - 2100 on, leaving 2100-0600 off (obviously) – giving a 15hr light cycle. I might bump that up another hour to 16 just to get more light into em, but it’s going okay so far. I may end up adding another bulb or two since I’m not super into how bright the setup is, I’m afraid they might want more light, and I’d rather they not end up leggy/not growing as much as I’d want.

Said lighting schedule is available on my github: Light Schedule

Currently I’m just leaving that running on my desktop, since it’s always up for Plex and the like anyways. I do need to convert it to a windows service, but I’ll get around to that at some point. It suffices for now, and I’ve kinda hit peak lazy. This week brought to you by the letter “it’ll do.”

Both stay, and grow strong, little peppers… and tomaters.