This years Chillies

I love growing chillies, they truly are beautiful plants to grow. To me they're just as pretty as growing flowers. 

 This year I had a nice selection, left to right - Korean Gochugaru (for making kimchi in the future), Bulgarian carrot, Lemon drop, Chinese Chaotian, Cayenne purple, Alberto's Locoto. 

Skinny Chilli

Over the years I've grown many chillies here, we don't use that many but they look so beautiful as plants. I tend to dry them or make them into jam. 

This year I only want a few plants to grow on the bedroom windowsill. I wanted small compact plants that were almost topiary in appearance. tony, at the seed swap, brought a pot of tiny chillies labelled as "Skinny Chillies". He said the plant stays small and will be perfect for what I want. 

 Breaking the seeds out of some naturally dried chillies is a sheer joy.

What's not sheer joy is forgetting you've done that then rubbing your eye an hour later! Pain! 

I've got these on my heated propagator and I'm hoping they germinate. 

What is your favourite chilli to grow?

Sowing Chillies Before Breakfast & Grow Lamp

The urge to grow is just too much after Christmas. I'm sure we've all done it and started too early at times. We sowed our onions a few days after Christmas, as many do but I wanted to get the chillies in as well.

 I'm always frustrated by our chillies and peppers, get a harvest normally but its pretty late in the season. When I go to a garden centre in the spring it drives me mad to see chillies with fruits forming while mine haven't even considered flowering!

Chilli's Ripening - Recipes Please!

I have a good selection of chilli peppers ripening at the moment. I think I planted about 10 different varieties with different degrees hotness so I'm looking forward to trying them all out, maybe I'll get some friends to play a chilli roulette! 

One thing I have been loving this year is a hot sauce to add to stirfrys, chips, pizzas and anything else that takes a sauce. By adding some once it's cooked it means that the children (and wife) can have it quite mild and I can ramp up the heat a bit more.

What I'm really after is a good recipe that I can preserve my harvest with, I want a good shelf life - and I don't mind canning it. I'm already planning on sweet pickling some like I have done in previous years but doing each jar with a mixture of different chillies in it this time.

What's your favourite chilli preserve recipe?

More Planting Through Plastic

Down at the bottom of the garden, there's a surprise waiting for you. 

It's called weeds! 

Not quite ground force but we can get a lot done between us! 

The veg garden is looking pretty good at the moment but where the 16 beds ends it turns, rather abruptly, into a jungle of weeds. It's not something I'm proud of and it's certainly on my list of things to do! 

On Sunday the girls and I decided to tackle a very small part of it. We dug out a strip for a new bed. Pulling out all the nettle and reed roots that had taken hold and made a big pile of them. This took some time, and for the girls a complete change of clothes - well it was rather muddy! Fair play to them though they stayed for ages and worked hard, we frequently had to stop and look at worms and bugs, but I didn't mind that!  

Singing was optional! 

I've decided to make these beds narrow than my others. The main garden has beds divided into 4ft strips, the idea being that you can reach the middle from both sides. The trouble with this is you find yourself stretching all the time. Narrowing the bed down to about 30" means I can reach to the other side crouched on one side of the path. 

 I laid the slabs on the bare earth so I now had a new 10ft by 30" bed marked out, with hopefully most of the perennial weeds removed. I then added a couple wheel barrow loads of well rotted sheep muck and mixed it in before covering the whole thing with weed membrane.

A few nights later ( a dry few minutes) I got the blow torch out again (like I did here) and burnt in holes for plant to be planted. 

It's a bit of a mixed bed with some plants I'm experimenting with. 

In it is some Vietnamese  coriander, (which I bough again at Hellens Festival at the weekend as my other didn't make it through winter or go to seed last year), some quillqina (a mexican herb I'm trying to grow), some Peruvian Black mint (another herb I'm experimenting with), a giant Achocha (just to see how it does out of the greenhouse - this will need some support though!) and four chilli pepper plants (just to see how they perform outside as well. 

Hopefully planting them in this way will give me some low effort herbs and flavourings, whilst keeping the weeds at bay and reclaiming some more of the veg garden. 

I've started on another bed below this one last night in which I intend to plant my chickpeas in much the same way. I then think the area below that I will just cover over to suppress the weeds for a few months then sow a green manure for over the winter. 

Anyone else growing though plastic? Anyone else have much luck with growing things that are traditionally greenhouse crops outside in a UK type climate, like chilli's?

Windowsill Gardening

The growing season here can be pretty short, we aren't really frost free until the second week in June, although it can be much earlier than that, anything before is a risk. So to extend the season I start most tender plants off in the greenhouse or in the house.

Pepper plants and other seedlings coming along, melons and cucumbers mainly as well as more strawberries.

 This year I've been using the windowsill to their full potential, starting lots of seeds in my heated propagator as well as potting on tomatoes and letting them grow on in the house. I've still got lots growing in the greenhouse but this way I'm hedging my bets encase it freezes hard one night and I don't realise in time. 

Chilli Pepper plants in the living room

 So all my south facing windows are full, there's about nine varieties of chilli peppers, three types of tomatoes (with another 6 types in the greenhouse)  and then some Minnesota melon seedlings, heritage cucumber and a Mexican herb I've forgotten the name of spread all round the house. The only room I've haven't put plants in is my girls bedroom as it has a blackout blind and I'd rather go without tomatoes than that in the summer, as it makes them sleep past sunrise! 

Some leggy Tomatoes, they should be okay but it shows that starting them too early can be a bad thing. Some are just forming their first truss.  

Who else has a house that's filling up with plants desperate to go outside?

Spring Is So Close I Can Almost Smell It!

The weather is changing, with cold mornings and winter sunshine it really warms the soul. 

I worked from home yesterday making a door for a customer, so I took advantage of the sunshine spent a bit of time in the garden, planting some early seeds. 

I know I'm late getting my chillies in but I find it doesn't make huge amounts of difference if you haven't got a grow lamp anyway, sometimes they can get too leggy if you sow them too early. I also got some tomatoes in as well, but I'll sow plenty more of them later.

They're all sat quite happily on our bedroom window sill, germinating slowly.

Does anyone on here graft tomatoes or chillies or buy plants that have been grafted? I'd like to try my hand at it but need to buy the root stock seed to try it (and the grafting clips). 

Buying Chilli Seed

Last year I grew quite a few different chilli plants and I've realised that my tastes are getting slowly hotter. A cayenne would have been far to hot for me a few years ago, now I want a whole one chopped up on a few slices of pizza, loving the kick it gives me! 

So the other day I decided to buy some new seeds and add to what I already grow. It came as a package from a Devon chilli farm and included:

Jamaican Red Saina

Apache

Space Chilli

Naranga

Orange Jalapeno

Tabasco

Pencil Cayenne

Thai Bird's eye

Not sure if I'll plant them all yet or not but the idea of growing some Thai chillies really takes my fancy as I'm hoping I can make some spicy dipping sauce of my own. 

This year I want to be much better at separating them off to ensure they've not cross pollinated for seed saving, I'm thinking about using different windowsills in the house for different varieties but we'll see how that goes, I'm not great with house plants for some reason! 

I think I'll dig out my heated propagator and maybe sow them this weekend to get he longest growing season possible from them. 

When does everyone else sow their chilli seeds? 

Do you use grow lamps early in the year to speed them along?

What's your favourite type to grow?

Harvesting Chillies

I just love the colours of the chillies I've been harvesting lately. The harvest hasn't been as big as I hoped but nothing as done as well in the greenhouse this year. The cayennes have been great on my pizzas for the  last few months though! 

I'm thinking about drying most of these as I haven't got enough to pickle this year. Although I am tempted to make some spicy chutney if anyone has a good recipe for me to try? 

How does everyone else preserve their chilli harvest? I also like the idea I saw on Jamie Oliver where he keeps some in the freezer and just grates it on his food! 

Sweet Pickled Peppers - Result!

I know it's not even been a month since I pickled the chilli peppers but I couldn't resist trying them as I've got a load more chillies ripening and I want to know what to do with the them.

 I cracked the jar open at a friends house on Thursday and we all tucked in. They tasted just like a certain brand that you find on supermarket shelves. A little longer in the pickle needed to soften the skins maybe, but a definite hit in our house (and our friends!). They're pretty mild but that's a good thing with a family full of little ones.

Our friends daughter tucking into them

Ev loved them

So next week I'll be pickling the rest of the chillies and going through the same process again. We use these peppers all the time, in sandwiches with cream cheese, chopped up in salads or each fitted with a chunk of feta and eaten as a great snack, but it'll be great to be using our own rather than expensive shop brought ones.

The seeds form these chillies will be in the Seed Swap so if you want some let me know. Next year I'll try and find a similar shaped chilli that's hotter to do some spicier ones for adults only. Anyone recommend a good medium heat chilli that would pickle well? Even better if you've got some seeds to swap with!

Seed Saving

With my "Blogging Seed Swap" still in my mind I want to make sure I'm saving plenty of seeds this year. I've never been great at it, either leaving it too late or not storing them correctly, so this year I'm making a real effort.

Pepper seeds

On my window sill I currently have lots of pepper seeds drying. Some from my chilli pepper "Cherry Bomb" and the others from either yellow or red "Mini Bell Peppers". These are then being labled up and stored in old cod liver oil tablets containers to keep them dry.

My tiny sweet peppers - perfect for UK growing!

I've also got lots of fennel seeds to collect to use as a spice in the kitchen and some salad seeds to use as micro greens through the winter. 

How does everyone else go about saving seeds and how good are you at it?

Does anyone save seeds from biannual plants and how do you go about keeping plants separate to prevent cross pollination?

Don't forget if you want to be part of the seed swap then start saving your seeds now and in a couple of months we can start to share them out!

Sweet Pickling Peppers

One of the goals I set myself this year was to try to grow some chilli peppers and preserve them in a way similar to my favourite band of pickled peppers, who will remain nameless. I could eat a jar of those peppers a week!

 So this year I went for broke and grew some chillies I had been told were quite similar, Cherry Bomb. They've grown well and each plant has loads of shiny red peppers on, they're not as hot as I would have liked, you can pop a whole one in your month and not feel it too much, but they certainly look the part.

Trawling through the Internet back in June I came across Dani and her amazing blog Eco Footprints - South Africa as she had a recipe for making what I was after.

 The recipe is really simple and can be found on her blog here. The pickling liquid is a mix of vinegar and sugar so it should preserve them for a long time!

Left to soak in salt water over night before the pickling!

Four jars full, they look a little too good - I can't see them lasting long!

I can't wait to try these out! they look just as good as the ones you buy in a shop. My only disapointment is how many peppers you need to fill a jar. To get enough for me to have them every day I'd need hundreds of plants. These four jars are ripe chillies off ten plants! 

Anyone else ever used a really sweet pickle?

Ripening peppers

Every year I grow chilli peppers and I always do well with them. Sweet peppers on the other hand normally elude me. I can grow the plants but the peppers never ripen properly, the skin is too thin and they don't change colour very well.

"Cherry Bomb" chilli peppers - meant to be like peppadews, I'll let you know when I've pickled them

This year I decided to try to tackle the problem because we eat a lot of peppers. I decided to just grow a variety that's meant to have small peppers that are quick and easy to ripen due to it's small size. These "Mini Bell" peppers have been growing well in the greenhouses this year and we've had one ripen so far with loads nearly ready (I feel a gult coming on). We ate the first one straight off the bush, I don't think I've ever eaten one so sweet in all my life, it was delicious!

My small sweet peppers "mini bell"

So if anyone else struggles with peppers like I did then I can recommend growing a smaller variety to try to get them to ripen quicker and have thicker flesh. 

Unless anyone has got any tips on getting peppers to ripen faster or grow better?