Before sowing pepper, you need to prepare nutritious soil for plants. You can mix garden humus with a small amount of wood ash and sand (on a humus bucket 1-2 cups of additives) or use ready-made purchased top dressing.
It is also necessary to ensure that the plant receives enough light. Usually boxes with seedlings are placed in a room that overlooks the sunny side. If the sowing of pepper seeds occurs on a small area, then you do not need to strive to get as many seedlings as possible. When the plants begin to form, it will become crowded, they will oppress and obscure each other, which will necessarily worsen the quality of seedlings.
Daylight hours for seedlings should last 12-13 hours. But in February and in cloudy weather this is impossible to achieve. Therefore, fluorescent lamps with a power of 40-80 kW are used to increase daylight hours, which are suspended above seedlings at a distance of 10 cm and are turned on from 8 am to 8 pm. You can get even more light by using foil. If plants are located at the window, foil is placed behind them and reflects sunlight. With artificial lighting, it is fixed above the lamps. To prevent plants from stretching in the direction of light, seedling boxes need to be rotated periodically. When daylight hours increase, you should cover the seedlings from 19-20 pm. To do this, you can make covers of dark paper or material.
It should be remembered that the timing of sowing pepper depends on the plant variety. The timing of planting seedlings in open ground also plays a role: for the middle lane this is the first decade of February, for the southern regions - the beginning of March. If you are going to plant a vegetable in a greenhouse, then sowing pepper for seedlings should begin in the second decade of February. You can sow pepper in March, but in this case, additional lighting will be needed for about a month - from the moment the shoots appear and before the dive seedlings.
Seedlings are grown in boxes or in special cassettes. The soil mixture is poured with a layer of about 10 cm, leveled and slightly compacted. If the sowing of pepper occurs in a box, then you need to make grooves with a distance of 5-7 cm from each other and pour with a fertilizer solution. Then, grooves of 0.5-1 cm are made in the grooves every 2-3 cm, seeds are laid and covered with a soil mixture. Some gardeners, to speed up germination, fill the seeds with hot water (approximately 60 ° C), and most of them immediately sprout.
After sowing the pepper is done, it is better to cover the box with seedlings with a film, creating a kind of greenhouse. Seedlings are watered once a week with warm, settled water, avoiding excessive watering and excess moisture. The air temperature in the greenhouse should be in the range of 25-27 ° C, then in a week or two shoots will appear. At a temperature of 20 ° C, sprouts can be seen after 18-20 days, and at 16 ° C - only after a month. With the advent of seedlings, the film is removed and the box is placed in a sunny place. In the first three days, the temperature must be reduced to 17-18 ° C, so that the root system of plants develops well, and then again raise the temperature to 24-25 ° C.
When the first two leaves appear in the seedlings, and this happens in about a month, they will be ready for a dive. A few hours before transplanting, plants need to be watered, because seedlings can only be selected from moist soil. Dry does not stay on the roots and can leave them without food.
Seedlings dive into small containers 10X10 or less in size: plastic cups, pots, juice or milk sachets. The soil should have the same composition as it was when planting the seeds. Filled containers are watered with a nutrient solution (for 3 liters of water take 1 tbsp.spoon of sodium humate and 1 tsp of wood ash or potassium sulfate). Then the sprouts are carefully dug up and taken out with a clod of earth. It is very important not to damage the roots, as they recover for quite some time. In the middle of the new tank they make a deepening and plant seedlings up to cotyledon leaves. After a dive, the plants must be watered and put in the shade for several days. Watering seedlings is carried out every 5-6 days, combining with top dressing - for one pot spend half a teaspoon of ash.