Sunday 4 May 2008

More to come

Spent the day putting up the greenhouse, photo's to follow shortly! Plants are doing really well, will also get some photo's of those up soon as well.

Tommorow is sauce day. Sainsburys had fresh Jalapeno's in so I'll be making sauces and pickling some of them. I plan to make a hot as hell sauce for Jim using a handful of scotch bonnets and birds eye chillis. Can't wait to try that!

And with that in mind I'm off to watch Indiana Jones on TV!

Thursday 1 May 2008

In the beginning...

So, I thought it was about time I actually created a blog to make note of my Chilli growing season here in the UK. As we don't get much sun I started sowing my initial batch of seeds in late January. I must have sown over 40 seeds of approximately 20 varieties during that month. Tragically I got a bit over keen and took them into the garage to transplant into larger containers in the middle of February and I killed 95% of them through shock. So a lesson learnt there, don't pot on into cold soil in a cold climate! I also think it was to do with my handling of the seedlings as I was man handling them by the stem and not the leaf.

Anyway, I managed to save 2 plants from that culling and they are now doing really well. At that time I then sowed a few more varieties which I've managed to transplant successfully. So this year I'm growing:

Cayenne (could be either red, golden or violet)
Orange Habanero
Habanero White Giant
Purple Prince
Trinidad Scorpion
Serrano Tampiqueno
Mushroom Red
Thai Orange
Apache F1 Hybrid
Safi
Prairie Fire

All of the plants are doing really well. The Orange Hab, White Giant Hab and Trinidad Scorpion are all doing amazingly well. The leafs on them are absolutely huge considering that I grow my plants in an airing cupboard and then onto a south facing windowsill. Below are pictures taken on 14th April 2008, so the plants are approximately 2 and a bit months old.

White Giant Habanero


Habanero Orange


Serrano Tampiqueno

Trinidad Scorpion

Purple Prince

These photo's are 3 weeks old now (shows how long ago I should have started doing this) and the the growth on the plants is amazing considering the amount of rain we've had. The Serrano had the tips pinched out on the day that this photo was taken and the difference between this photo and it's current state just shows how well pinching out works (will upload new photo's soon). As you can see these varieties I am only growing one of for each type, where as the rest of the plants I have I am growing multiple plants (average is 5). Here are photo's of the rest of the plants that I'm currently growing.

Apache and Thai Orange

Cayenne, Mushroom Red and Safi

So all that's left to do now is to keep this page updated every couple of weeks so that I can use it as a reference for next years growing. Here's hoping that we get a good summer and that I get a bumper crop of chillis!