I'm about to try starting some Piper nigrum from seeds. I see this thread keeps popping up on the topic. I ordered some seeds online. I halfway expected red berry like seeds (ripened seeds, not fully dehydrated). What arrived was something that looked identical to black peppercorns from the spice bottle from the grocery store. The seller of these seeds says they are viable, so I'll give them a try. Other than warmth and humidity, are there any special requirements. I plan to soak them overnight before planting them. Is that a good idea or not? Then I plan to put them in small peat-pots with seed starting mix. I was thinking maybe mix in a bit of sand as well, and cover the seeds with a very light layer of just sand (about 1/8 inch or so, just covering the seeds). I'll keep those peat pots in a small plastic "seed starting greenhouse" that I have. To keep the humidity high in that, I was going to put some gravel on the bottom, and put a bit of water in the bottom. I don't want the seed pot sitting in water, because I'm guessing it wants drained soil/starting mix, but I also want the humidity high. I have a heating pad to keep the thing warm (about 80F, which should be fine, right?), and I'll have it under red/blue (mostly red) LED grow lights on a timer. How long do Piper nigrum seeds take to germinate? days? weeks? months?

I wouldn't give up and I would try not to get too discouraged. After all, the last two years have had horrendous heat and long periods of drought that have left even life-long gardeners who've gardened successfully for decades shaking their heads and wondering if things possibly could get any worse. Sometimes you can do everything right and things just don't work out. Gardening is not an instant gratification type of activity. To get the results you want, you have to be as persistent as the most persistent of plants, like bermuda grass or ragweed. Plants sometimes die, seeds don't sprout, a neighbor's herbicide drifts through the air and kills your plants....hail smashes your seedlings that you've grown from seed and carefully nurtured or maybe a tornado hits or hail falls...or pests eat your seeds or deer and rabbits devour your plants and the birds and squirrels eat your nut and fruit crops, etc. There are no guarantees and even the folks with the greenest thumbs around lose their share of plants. It happens. I never decide that a plant "won't" or "can't" grow here at our place until I personally have grown it and killed it three times. Even then, I sometimes come back a couple of years later and try again, feeling like the plant that won't/can't grow for me is just a riddle to be explored and solved. The key is to learn from each experience and adjust your processes accordingly. That is how we humans (sometimes ever so slowly) turn our black thumbs into green thumbs. If you have trouble keeping purchased plants in containers alive, you should examine your watering practices. Most people who have this sort of issue are watering their plants too much, a phenomenon known as "loving your plants to death". If you feel like you may be watering too much, purchase a little hand-held moisture meter. You can find them in big box stores, especially in spring time, often near the seeds and seed-starting supplies. You stick the probe of the moisture meter into the soil and you do not water if it shows the soil is moist. Or, use the good old finger method....stick your finger 2 or 3" down into the soil in the container and do not water if you feel moist soil. Sometimes new gardeners over-water because they touch the surface of the soil and it is dry. The plant roots are not on the surface...they are down deeper....so that is the area you need to check for moisture. If your plants are fine while in containers, but die after being put into the ground, examine closely the timing of their planting. Even plants raised from seed in containers or purchased from a store have a time that is best for them to be put into the ground. If you are transplanting them at a time that is either too early and too cold, or too late and too hot for each type of plant, that may be the problem. With seeds, are you wanting a list of some you can start indoors now in flats? Or outdoors in the ground? Let me know and I'll suggest some that meet your needs. When attempting to grow anything, it all starts with the soil. I cannot emphasize that strongly enough. If you are having trouble getting new plants to grow outdoors in the ground, something likely is wrong with the soil. My best guess is that you either have very sandy or silty soil that is low in nutrients and doesn't hold moisture well, so that whatever you plant is too hungry and too dry to grow, or you have heavy clay soil that is dense and compacted and won't allow root growth. Either of these types of soil can be fixed. You also might merely have sandy or silty soil that is highly compacted, which is almost as bad as clay, but much each easier to fix in terms of drainage but harder to fix in terms of nutrition. That fact that you have some established plants growing tells you that something will grow in your soil. However, many ornamentals grown from bulbs and seeds need a looser, more friable soil than shrubs and trees will grow in. At our house, we have many trees and shrubs growing in our dense, heavily-compacted red clay, but I'd never attempt to grow any sort of flowering ornamental in that soil without first doing massive amounts of amendment. Turning the soil you have into the soil you want so that you can grow the plants you want can take time. With the dense red clay soil in front of our house, I amended it for seven years and planted only annual flowers there until I felt it was well-amended enough for me to plant shrubs into it. It was sort of ridiculous to spend that long, but I saw what that clay was like when the house was being constructed and it wasn't pretty. I lost plenty of annual flowers in that area over the years...in wet years some kinds died, in dry years other ones did, but as the soil got better and better every year, less and less died. When the soil finally arrived at the place that I knew it was 'fixed' and ready for anything I wanted to plant there within reason, I planted shrubs, perennials and annuals and, nowadays, I can plant pretty much anything I choose in that location, as long as I choose plants that tolerate our summer heat and drought. Seven years is a long time to experiment and a long time to work to fix soil, but it paid off. I could have fixed it faster and planted in one year, but I was dealing with establishing several different planting areas on different parts of the property and I wanted to fix the soil right so I never had to come back and replace shrubs and trees because they wouldn't grow where they were planted (and I haven't had to do that either). To me, the fact that the trees and shrubs in this area survived the last two drought years with almost no irrigation is evidence that the slow, steady, long-term approach to soil improvement paid off. Please note that I am not saying it will take you seven years to turn the soil you have into the soil you want--just that with the worst soil on our property, that is how long it took me. If you haven't already done the soil jar test for soil texture and composition that I'm going to link below, I'd suggest it is a good starting point. I did this test for the soil in every separate area of our property where I intended to plant something during our first few years here. Our soil varies strongly, changing at times every few feet, so just because I have dense red clay in one spot doesn't mean I have it everywhere. In some spots I found some pretty nice clay with some sand mixed with it, and in other spots I found hideous sandy-stuff which drained so quickly that everything I planted in it the first 3 or 4 years died within its first year. That was another area that required massive soil amendment to make it hold enough moisture to sustain plant life in the summer months. Once you know what sort of soil you have, you can figure out what to do to make it more receptive to good plant growth. As for relatively fool-proof plants, I have a list of plants about which I say "they won't die and you cannot kill them". The list varies, though, depending on what sort of soil you have. Generally cannas, which traditionally are grown from tubers (but now can be grown from seed that will give you blooms a few months after you sow the seed) are on this list, although they can die in the winter in dense, slow-draining soil that holds too much moisture. Morning glories are another plant that is easy from seed, but they'll need a fence or trellis to climb. It may not be your soil. It may be watering practices or something else, or it may be an issue of timing. Zinnias grow great in warm weather, but the seed or even young seedlings can rot and die if planted too early into cold soil, for example. The fact that your lantana died makes me think you might have dense clay that drains slowly. I can grow lantana here only in areas with well-drained soil, and mine still don't get as big as my friends' lantanas get in their really sandy, really well-draining soil, but then, they have issues with tomatoes not growing in that soil because it drains too fast and is prone to nematodes, while tomatoes grow like mad in my amended clay. We all have soil types in which some things will thrive but others will not. The trick is to match up the type of soil you have with the type of plants that grow in it. My brother had white limestone caliche clay soil in Texas and you wouldn't have thought much would grow in it, but we worked and found trees, shrubs and flowers that did well in it. To grow fruit and veggies, we had to remove thousands of rocks and haul in a purchased topsoil/compost mix, but after that, he could grow anything. So, I'm confident that you can find something that will grow in the soil you have, and if you have to amend it to make that possible, then that's what you have to do. Some "die-hard" plants that have grown well for me in the years when I was amending soil and improving it for future years included daffodils, cannas, daylilies, hollyhocks, coral honeysuckle, alliums, dutch iris, dutch hyacinths, verbena bonariensis, four o'clocks, scabiosa, zinnias, morning glories, chamomile (a delightfully-scented herb with small white daisy-like flowers), Texas hummingbird sage, cosmos, malva sylvestris 'Zebrina', and pink evening primrose (horrifically invasive in good soil, but will grow in any soil on our property no matter how poor it is so I planted a lot of it in the early years here), poppies, Laura Bush petunias (not a standard petunia, a petunia derived from native petunias, making it heat-tolerant), and larkspur. All of these are easily grown when directly sown and for, most of them reseed and come back every year on their own with no help from me at all. Be sure you are sowing the seeds properly. Some tiny seeds need to be surface sowed and lightly pressed into the soil and left uncovered because they need light to sprout. I mist those lightly with a hand-held misting bottle because watering them with a hose will wash the seeds away before they can sprout. I also try to sow them and get them to sprout when heavy rain is not forecast because heavy rainfall can wash away the tiny seeds before they sprout. Some of the things you listed with which you experienced poor results really don't care much for our climate. I love the appearance of foxgloves, but they are not well-suited to our hot summers, for example. Elephant ears are tropicals and can fail if planted while soil is still too cold. With everything that's given you trouble, I can think of a reason that you might have had problems, but without knowing for sure exactly what the conditions were at the time they were planted or transplanted, I'd just be guessing. Please keep trying and do not give up. Instead of trying dozens of different plants from seed in a given season, pick out 5 or 6 that you really want to grow, and focus on succeeding with them. Then, every year, add a few more that are new to you. The orange daisies that you planted are a clue about what will grow for you, but to figure it out, you need to know what they are. Since you say they smell bad, I'm wondering if you're talking about marigolds. Marigolds are pretty easy to grow and often reseed themselves. I grow French marigolds, but don't usually plant the larger African marigolds. When I have a problem area where nothing seems to thrive, I deliberately plant something there that is known to be highly invasive....like mint. I'll buy a mint plant and put it in that spot and see how it goes. If mint won't grow there, I try sowing pink evening primrose or larkspur seed there.. There's almost nowhere on our property where I cannot grow either mint or pink evening primrose as both wlll grow in sand/siltyy fast-draining soil (though mint may not survive summer drought in really fast-draining soil unless you water it a lot) and both tolerate dense clay, though the pink evening primrose tolerate it better than the mint will. Poppies and larkspur perform great in my red clay, even unimproved red clay, in all but the wettest of years. In a very wet year, though, they rot off right above the ground. Sometimes we just want to grow something that we love, even though our soil may not be suitable for that plant. I love Texas bluebonnets and have tried and tried and tried to grow them here. The issue is that our clay soil tends to stay too wet in winter for them, except in the driest of winters, and our sandy-silty soil where I grow some flowers is too shady for them. I have had luck with them only in the area right alongside the gravel driveway, where they thrive in the gravel. In dry years we have a lot of them in bloom in April and May, and in wet years, there's a lot less and sometimes practically none. I've accepted I'll never have a wildflower meadow full of Texas bluebonnets, but I'll never give up on having at least a few of them in bloom every year. This is our fifthteenth year here and it is the first time that we have more bluebonnet plants sprouting alongside the driveway than I can count. Some years we've had so few that I could count them on the fingers of two hands. Last year, I counted 86 plants. This year, I stopped counting at 120. Still, if we were to start having a lot of rain that kept their area waterlogged, some or even all of them would drown and rot before they could bloom. That just makes me appreciate them all the more in the year when the weather and soil allow them to live long enough to bloom and set seed. If growing from seed is vexing, buy the kinds of plants you want to grow in six-packs in the spring months when they are easy to find and relatively inexpensive. Transplant them and nurture them. Once you've succeeded in keeping them alive from purchased transplants, then the following year, try growing them from seed. Many perennials are slow to grow from seed and often require cold scarification or even more complicated cold-wet or alternating-temperature scarification in order to get the seed from sprout. These are great candidates for winter sowing (see the wintersowing forum or wintersown.org for info on winter sowing) or you can just purchase them as transplants. When I want to try a perennial I haven't grown here before, I usually buy one transplant and plant it as a test plant. If it does well, then the following year I either buy more or raise them from seed. There are many beautiful perennials that grow very well in many parts of the country with cooler, milder weather but are very difficult if not impossible to grow here in our climate and soils. To find perennials that grow well here, look for the Proven Winners plant labels in nurseries or garden centers. You can google Oklahoma Proven Winners to find the website with these plants to get ideas for what to look for. One more thing. Be sure you are not using a weed and feed product on your lawn areas. The herbicides in those products, if they get into your flower-growing areas, can kill your flowers or prevent them from growing in the first place. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Soil Jar Test

Orchidguyftl Can you post some pictures of a small flower bud just as it starts to form? I would like to compare it to plant #1. Would also like to see some flowers and fruit if you could. What looks like a flower starts to form on the last node just after a new leaf starts to form then dries up and dies, may be due to low humidity. Heathen Plant 1 grows well with our low humidity and high desert conditions as long as I dont let it dry out. Plant 2 has never taken off as well but still grows. Below are excerpts from some e mails I received about piper. Steve Lucas was a great help. See the recipe for a recommended soil mix below. It reads from the bottom up. What do you all think about Steves ideas? Just as I suspected, TROPICOS says there are two variations to this species: Piper nigrum var. macrostachyum C. DC. and Piper nigrum var. nigrum I cannot find anything to explain what the differences are of the variations. For that you'd need to find a good botanical journal that discusses the species. TROPICOS lists a couple but I'm not sure how you would find them unless you live near a large library that has access to botanical scientific databases. Botanical scientists and most large libraries can link into those websites but individuals are not permitted to do so. You might also try GRIN which is a service of the USDA. They sometimes will give you more detailed information if you write an email to them. Steve Lucas www.ExoticRainforest.com I'm not aware of any sites that specifically talk about that species with the exception of TROPICOS and the International Plant Names Index (IPNI). Both are scientific sites and can easily be found on the net. You can also find them on the links page of my website along with several other scientific sources. My links page can be found at the bottom of the homepage. When you go to TROPICOS just type in the scientific name and it will take you to the page that explains if there are different species and/or names. Your photos appear to match the photos on TROPICOS. But I can assure you the plants would need to have significant differences other than size to be different species. I have 4 verfified variations of P. hederaceum in my atrium and the only major difference is size. One does not have as deep burgundy undersides to the blade but is still verified as P. hederaceum. Size and blade color are often confusing factors to non-botanists but make little difference to a botanist unless there are other major factors such as vein pattern, length of internodes, differences in flowers if a plant flowers, and other technical factors. Steve Thanks for the info. I will try the soil mix. It will probably work better than what I use. My biggest question is verifying that these are both piper nigrum and if so what kind if that is possible to determine. The only other thing I would like would be some web sites with tropical plant cultivation and propagation. Thanks again Dustin -----Original Message----- From: ExoticRainforest [mailto:Steve@ExoticRainforest.com] This is one I don't grow but I looked it up in several source books. The plant is from India, Madagascar, SE Asia and now has been introduced into Brazil. What all the countries have in common is they are tropical, humid, wet climates much of the year. India has a dry season that lasts from roughly November to March but the rest of the year it is quite wet. Tropical species tend to flourish better if you attempt to give them similar conditions to what they receive in nature. In order to do that you will need to prepare a "tropical" soil mixture. That is easily done by starting with something like Miracle Grow Moisture Control mix and adding some extras in roughly this mixture: 50% Miracle Grow, 20% Peat, 20% Perlite, 10% hard wood orchid potting media such as Schultz. Mix this well. Once you pot the plants keep the soil mixture damp at all times, not soaking wet. You can allow the mixture to dry a bit in the season you wish to simulate the dry season but since you have a dry humidity you should not allow the soil to dry completely. Misting the specimens will also help. A trick one grower in Vista, California uses to simulate the humidity of the tropics is to create a shallow dish of gravel about 3 inches deep. Fill it with water almost to the top and then grow your plants sitting on top of the gravel. The constant humidity evaporating around the leaves will make them believe they are in the tropics. When you water the plant the extra water will simply drain into the rocks. Another trick that works well in dry climates is to buy a large attractive globe and cover the plants as they sit in their pot above the gravel and water. The humidity inside the container will stay quite high and the plants will feel much more like they are in the tropics. Now, as for your variations. I can find references to numerous similar but un-scientifically identified species found in nature. You may have one or more of these variations. More likely you simply have plants that are natural variations. Here's an example to illustrate: Asian people don't look just like Americans. Indians don't look just like Asians. Africans don't look just like Hawaiians. Mexicans don't look just like people from France. But all are the same species. We all are only one species, we are just variants of that species. Some are tall, some are short, some are plump, some are thin, some have darker or lighter skin. Plants are the exact same way. For some odd reason people expect every plant with a slightly different leaf shape or size to have a different scientific name. For many years botanists believed the same thing. That's why you can find many plants such as Philodendron hederaceum with up to 20 different scientific names. Most botanists today understand variants and as a result have combined many synonym names into a single basionym. You very like just have variations of one species. As Dr. Tom Croat from the Missouri Botanical Garden once told me when I asked about two plants with identical leaves of different sizes, "My brother is larger than I am, but we are the same species!". Hope this helps. If not, feel free to ask for any clarifications. Good luck growing them! Steve Lucas www.ExoticRainforest.com ----- Original Message ----- From: Dustin A few years back I got two piper nigrum, (black pepper) plants from two different trades. They look similar but have some differences. Both have the same general look, leafs look same, both produce rubbery balls on the back of the leaf. The stick next to the plants is a one foot ruler for reference. Plant one grows faster, branches without pinching, has smaller leafs and stems (1/8 inch). When the soil dries it starts growing were it left off. Never suckers. Plant two has larger leaf and stems (1/4 inch), grows slower, when dried out the current growth stops. Upon rewatering it sends out new suckers and never branches at the stem. Since I sometimes forget to keep it wet and we live in the high and dry desert it does not grow so well. These plants may not be the same plant piper nigrum, if so I would like to id what they are. http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v258/DustinFreeman1/piper1c.jpg http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v258/DustinFreeman1/piper1b.jpg The box is above what may be a flower bud, not sure. It grows about ¼ inch long just after a leaf forms then dries up. Maybe too dry here. http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v258/DustinFreeman1/piperflower.jpg blow up of flower? http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v258/DustinFreeman1/piper1b.jpg http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v258/DustinFreeman1/piper1a.jpg http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v258/DustinFreeman1/piper2a.jpg If you are unable to help can you recommend sources for information? Also can you recommend sites that will have detailed information on growing this plant? I have had a hard time finding much that is not geared towards cooking with pepper. If there is anything I missed let me know. Thanks for looking. Dustin

Hi, parupudi! : ) Houston is generally considered zone 9a, but I've put a link below that will let you enter your zip code, so you can make sure of your zone exactly where you are. I have a handful of little things to tell you; others here will have amazing advise they will chime up with (this is an amazing group of people)... AZALEAS--Feed them when they're done blooming. HIBISCUS--The danger of frost has passed, so it is safe to prune these. Cut one of the branches and have a good look--do you see any green? If so, it is alive! If not, it might be anyway--some of my hibiscus only had brown and white in the middle, but they are putting on new growth. I'd say give them another month before you really start to worry. My tropicals are waking up now and starting to grow, but they were looking pretty twiggy for a while! There is very little you need to do for hibiscus here, other than keeping them mulched and pruning them to help them be bushy and not leggy. OLEANDERS look very ugly after the winter's over--all grey and dead-seeming like a plant in a Tim Burton movie--but they come back. I pruned mine a couple weeks ago and they've got buds on them now. Oleanders are very dramatic about cold weather, but they usually come back in Houston without any problems. ROSES: We prune roses on Valentine's Day in Houston (just because mid-Feb. is the right time here, and doing it on V-Day makes it easy to remember). For your spring pruning, I recommend having three good thick stems coming out of the baseroots (let these be a couple feet high) and cutting off the rest--cut off anything thinner than a pencil, anything that is diseased or dead, any branches that are getting in the way of each other (we need good air circulation for roses here, or they get bad blackspot), etc. I have made the mistake of not pruning heavily, and I had very leggy, weak rose bushes that year. If your roses are well established, they can take being cut back hard like this. But don't forget that climbing roses bloom on old growth, so be sparing when you prune those, and try to keep the canes as close as you can to horizontal for good blooms. Here is a WONDERFUL site for how to grow roses in Houston: http://www.burger.com/roseindx.htm MANDEVILLA: If they're established, cut them back now that all danger of frost is over. They'll return from their roots. : ) Here is a link that might be useful: GW zone finder by zip code