Hi Well firstly, I had my first setup in a fish bowl, I dont like them things. You say you have a cover for it and it gets good sun. If your fish bowl terrarium is getting actual hot sun the plants will infact cook in there. If you want them out in the sun, then a terrarium is not the thing to have. You can either put them in something like your gator room with the correct soil (peat moss/perlite) and good fluorecent lighting, or you could try to harden them off and put them out in the sun with no terrarium. I dont know how low your humidity is there in new mexico but here in Salt Lake city its at about 30-40% most times. It does shoot up now and then with all the rain we are having though, anyhow, my VFT's are growing very well in 30% humidity with no problems. They have a 50/50 peat/perlite soil mix, and are in 6" pots. You can harden off a plant (adapt it) as follows: 1) have a cover over your plant and have it in a brightly lit area that does not get harsh sun (fluorecent lighting would be good if availble though) 2) Lift one side of this cover or dome 1" and leave for about a week (3-4 days should be fine) 3) lift a second side and leave for the same period of time 4) lift the last 2 sides (so all 4 are now raised) and leave for the same amount of time. 5) Remove the cover. Your plant should now be adapted to your humidity (if you just remove a plant from a high humidity terrarium it will go into shock) Next up, i you want your plant to get full sunlight you need to adapt it to the suns UV rays. Place the plant in an area that gets morning sun but is shaded from the harsh afternoon sun. Slowly move the plant into the full sun over a period of a week. As long as you are using good distilled water and good soil mix, your plants should do well. hope this helps Sheldon

Mark, You're welcome. I can't say if the small habanero peppers on your plants are likely to ripen before frost because there's no way to know when your first frost will occur. In the 12 years we've lived in southern OK, our first frost has occurred as early as Sept. 29th (I think that was in either 1999 or 2000) and as late as December 17th or 18th around 2005 or so. However, the first frost is normally in early November for much of the state, so your peppers have a chance of maturing. There are a couple of ways to give the green habs a chance to mature if a frost or freeze is forecast for your area and you are pretty sure your plants are about to die: (1) You can pull up the plants, roots and all, and hang them upside down in a non-freezing location, like in a closet, a tornado shelter or a well-insulated outbuilding like a barn or garage. The plants likely will drop leaves, but the peppers often stay on the plant and color up/finish maturing over a period of several weeks. (This often works with tomato plants that have small bite-sized tomatoes too.) (2) You can harvest all the peppers, placing them in a single layer on a cookie sheet or small cardboard box (like the flat boxes cases of bottled water come in, for example) lined with newspaper. They can be very close to one another but not touching one another to allow good air flow. Place in a cool, dry location where humidity does not fluctuate wildly, and they often will mature and color up over a period of days, but generally won't last as long as peppers on a plant treated as described in item (1) above. (3) You can dig up the plants, place in a pot with a high-quality soilless potting mix and bring them inside the house or place them in a warm sunny location like a patio where they can continue to receive sunlight and heat during the day and can be carried inside at night to avoid freezing weather. With peppers, I've been doing a little experimentation with overwintering them in pots in my insulated but unheated garage to see if I get earlier production from plants that are more than 1 year old. So far, it seems I do. Last year, a potted red sweet bell pepper overwintered successfully despite dropping all its leaves following a night when the lows dropped into the single digits either in late Dec. or early January. It began leafing out again within a few days of the leaf drop, bloomed and had formed small fruit by latest January or earliest February. I began harvesting those red sweet bells beginning in late April, which I think is before I even had my new pepper plants in the ground. All I did was keep it in our large barn-style garage, dragging it out into the sunlight on warm days and leaving it inside the garage on cold days and cold nights. I pretty much took it inside on all nights even if they weren't forecast to drop down into freezing temps because I knew the deer would eat the potted pepper plants if I left them out at night. I have some pepper plants that are now 3 years old in pots and they produce very early harvests----generally producing mature peppers before Memorial Day. So far I've done this with ornamental peppers of all kinds, jalapeno peppers, fish pepper (a variegated hot pepper that's great for a fermented pepper sauce) and several kinds of sweet bell and non-bell peppers. This year I intend to overwinter some habanero peppers if I manage to dig them up and pot them up before our first frost. I am not sure why your habaneros were so slow to produce this year. I planted my orange habanero plants in May (I am sure it was not earlier than May because we had a temp of 39 degrees and patchy frost on May 3, 2010, for about the 3rd or 4th year in a row, so I no longer set out pepper plants before about May 5th thru 10th at the earliest) and was harvesting ripe, orange habaneros in July. I was, in fact, a little shocked that they matured so early, but suspect the beastly heat/drought/heat indices in June pushed them to mature quickly. You know what, as I was typing that I did have a thought on pepper production. Hot peppers are not affected negatively by high heat as sweet peppers often are, but they are negatively affected by high humidity. That could explain late pollination/fertilization/fruit set. If I were you and I wanted habs this year, I'd carefully dig up the plants soon, put them in pots with good soil and put them in a sunny location that stays hot. In my particular case, I'd put them on the concrete apron alongside the south-facing garage wall so they could soak up heat and light not only from the sun but also reflected heat/sunlight from the south-facing wall and the concrete apron. If cold threatens, carry them inside to protect them. Often, you know, we'll have a cold night or two in Oct. or Nov., and then it will be followed by another 4 to 6 weeks of decent gardening weather. You also could leave the plants in the ground and cover them up REALLY well anytime forecast lows are expected to drop below 40 degrees. When I want to cover up a plant under those conditions, I put a 5 gallon or larger bucket over it and then put a big sleeping bag or old comforter over the bucket. You have to remember to uncover them in the morning though, or they can roast in the heat once the sun comes up. Dawn

I use a peanut wreath style feeder. I bought it with the hope of slowing down the BJs. They haven't tried too hard to figure it out, yet. The woodpeckers are the only ones that use it, which is fine with me. I put out whole corn kernels that the jays take. I also put out a hand full of whole peanuts every couple of days, which they take and cache as fast as they can. Basically the Jays are on a schedule, they come by every morning and check for peanuts. If there are no peanuts, they have a couple kernels of corn and move on. But I hear them every morning at about 7:45 looking around. If I cut off the easy food they may spend more time to figure out the wreath. Although, most of the time the woodpeckers, break them open in the wreath, rather than pull a whole peanut out. I'll probably move the wreath to a quiet location away from the other feeders so the woodpeckers can enjoy it more.All my feeders have squirrel baffles, so they dont bother them. I also feed our one squirrel and trying to get him on a schedule. The squirrel lives in a box I provided and defends the area from other squirrels. Here is a link that might be useful: peanut wreath

worth a try right Dawn? If nothing else, it may thicken up a bit..You'll probably have to reheat it with maybe a bit of stock to thin? Here is a link that might be useful: scroll down a bit~guess you can this blogger does