2006 Growing Season
Below is a diary of our 2006 efforts at growing our own chillies!
Click 2007 Growing Season to see our chilli growing experiments in 2007!
This is a diary of our growing experiments with chilli and other peppers and there are some pictures of our plants!
We began growing chilli peppers in February 2006 using seeds taken from last year's supplies from the Chilli Farms. We have germinated some varieties on the top of the fridge and they have now moved to a sunny lounge floor while we await the shiny new greenhouse.
The picture to the right shows one of our pepper plants around the end of July - they are starting to produce lots of fruits - all green at the minute. As you can see we have plenty to go at! See the bottom of this page for other fruits in progress!
February 2006
Our seeds were planted in small seed trays, about 5mm deep, with approximately 3 - 4 seeds of the same variety per pot [as different chillies take varying times to germinate you should keep to one type of chilli per pot]. We left our trays on top of the fridge to germinate and sprayed regularly with water when they looked dry, using a spray bottle [they don't like to be too wet so surface-watering is all that is required].
April 2006
A lot of our seeds had germinated and the seedlings had 2 well-formed leaves. We potted them on to larger pots and moved them to the floor in a lounge where there was plenty of sunlight coming in from the patio doors.
At this point we had a good number of seedlings for the following varieties - Cherry Bomb, Cayenne and a few others that are now unknown chillies [our labels have been sprayed with water to the point of being unreadable and the keeper of our chillies is not organised enough to have relabelled them!].
Our Habenero, Scotch Bonnets and Twilights have not germinated as yet - but this is expected as these normally take longer.
We also have 1 Pepperoncini and 1 Golden Treasure seedling at this point.
May 2006
Our seedlings have been potted out again [our chilli keeper is a little zealous] but are still on his lounge floor and are serving as a great excuse for him not to clean up properly as they are in the way. He also put them in the garage for a week while we were away last month [so they would not get too dry and hot] and they survived!
Unfortunately we then lost a few to some hungry snails/slugs as the plants had a spell outside under a cold frame while our chilli keeper cleaned the house!
Our Habeneros, Twilights and Scotch Bonnets have not germinated still - we think they are not going to do anything so that is a bit of a shame. However we soldier on with our other varieties.
We are awaiting the arrival of the new greenhouse so that we can settle our chillies into it to flourish into the massive harvest that we are expecting! More pictures will be added as soon as the chillies move into their new home.
June 2006
Our chilli plants have now got flowers and are varying in size according to type. We are dying for the fruits to appear so we can identify them properly again. On several occasions we have had to sponge the plants down with washing up liquid and water to get rid of an infestation of tiny white bugs.
The chillies are now in their lovely new home and our chilli keeper is watering them daily and opening the window to ventilate them when it is hot.
July 2006
HURRAH! The fruits are here! It's all very exciting now as there are recognicable chilli fruits appearing on the plants. We definitely have Cherry Bombs and Espelette Chilli Peppers and we think the others that are prolific are Cayennes. Looks like there is a Peperoncini plant among the crowd and I'm still hoping to find a rogue Golden Treasure if it survived!
August 2006
Some of the chillies are now ripening - mainly Cherry Bombs and Cayenne but also Espelette peppers and some Hot Caribbean varieties. We have started tasting!
As our labels got bleached in the sun and wet when we sprayed the chillies we are having to guess what some of the peppers are by taste. We have now identified some New Mexico chillies and a solitary peperoncini plant too.
Seems a lot of Stuffed Cherry Bombs will be on the agenda soon as we have a good crop of these.
September 2006
We have harvested some of our chillies and used them in making chilli sauce and sweet chilli sauce for flavouring home-made burgers for our BBQs.
We also frequently splash out on half a kilo of crevettes and marinate them in garlic, chillies, herbs and olive oil before throwing them on the grill for a few minutes - a fantastic appetiser while we wait for other meat to cook!
So - how are we using our glut of chillies? - A recent BBQ featured our marinated crevettes followed by chilli sauce flavoured burgers and 2 types of marinated chicken. One set of chicken kebabs was flavoured with garlic, olive oil, basil and a Dorset Naga Chilli [not grown by us unfortunately but bought from Peppers By Post at The West Dean Chilli Fiesta]. The other chicken kebabs were marinated in a Caribbean Jerk recipe using our own home-grown Cayennes and Cherry Bombs.
The plans is now to leave the remainder of our chillies to ripen and store the ones we have picked in the fridge until I get a minute to use them. I am planning to make a jar of sweet chilli sauce using Cherry Bombs and another with our New Mexicos - as this is a great dipping sauce and can also be used to flavour stir-fries or burgers if we are in a hurry. Otherwise we will just use a selection to flavour curries and casseroles at random - it usually produces good results and our dishes are never the same twice!
Don't forget you can puree your chillies if you are over run with fruits - I do this with a little water and pop them into ice cube trays and freeze them until required. Pop the cubes out into bags once frozen and mark the bags ith the variety and then get a cube out as required in your cooking.
