Thursday 24 July 2014

Late July Chilli update

Everyone knows that I love growing chillis!  Here's an update on how things are going this year.

The "Nosferatu" plants kept from last year are delivering ripe fruit now:


The difference in colour between the immature and the ripe fruit is really very dramatic, and the ripening process happens very suddenly with this variety. Often a chilli can be partially ripe for a couple of weeks, but these ones seem to go from black to red in not much more than a day.

These are Turkish Sweet Peppers, the first fruits of which are now turning colour.


Last year this variety produced a large number of peppers per plant (I had two), but this year, what with cold spells in the Spring and hail storms etc the number of fruits is much less.

The surface of the first couple of fruits is scarred in a way very reminiscent of the Jalapeno. I'm not sure if this is a good thing or not.


These are "Ohnivec". I'm tempted to try eating one of the fruits to see what they are like, but I want to see them turn colour first. They will eventually be red.


This is "Piment d'Espelette" - a chilli that thinks it is a pepper,


Or a pepper that thinks it is a chilli maybe?


These next ones are "Ring of Fire". The fruits on one of my two plants are short and stubby, and those on the other are longer and more wedge-shaped.

"Ring of Fire No.1"

"Ring of Fire No.2"
"Turkey Small Red" doesn't so far have any fruits set, possibly as a result of the setback caused by the contaminated compost - whose effects you can clearly see here in the distorted crinkly leaves:


There are plenty of flowers on the plant, so it may yet go on to produce a crop - albeit a late one.

This is "Red Jalapeno", whose fruits are mostly uncharacteristically round.



The small plant I nicknamed "Redfields Small Red" (possibly "Demon Red") is setting lots of tiny upward-pointing fruits now.


"Explosive Embers" is a similarly compact plant. It has loads of flowers, but no fruits yet. I have been unable to reproduce the colour of the flowers correctly. You will just have to take it from me that they are a lot less blue and a lot more purple than they appear in my photo to be.


"Bird's Eye" has made a remarkable recovery from the verge of extinction. It was looking so bad that it came VERY close to being dumped.


Making allowances for that (and ignoring a few brown spots on the leaves), it doesn't look too bad now, and it even has a few flower buds:


Not illustrated here is "Aji Limon". At present there is little of interest to show you. Sowing it was a last-minute decision, after the non-germination of a couple of other types. I'm hoping it will be able to produce some fruit before Autumn comes along. Last year it kept on fruiting up till the first frosts.

Anyway, there you go, that's how my chillis are doing. How are yours?

10 comments:

  1. Lots of variety there, and they seem to have come through the compost contamination ok. I'm not growing any chillis or peppers this year.

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  2. Nosferatu always look like it is poisonous to me. And not just because all of them are to me.

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  3. Nice variety in peppers...Nosferatu is most interesting!

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  4. My peppers are not as far along as yours, they are just setting fruit. I always start mine a bit late compared to most gardeners because we generally have very cool early summers but our autumns are long and warm, so I plan on harvesting peppers in September through November. Of course this year we had heat waves in May so an early start might have paid off.

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  5. I can see why growing chillis is popular if only to try out to see how hot the various varieties are

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  6. I saw Nosferatu chillies first on your blog and I knew I just had to grow them myself. This year I have 3 plants and they are wonderful! I just wish they would stay that very dark purple/black. Who knows what you inspire to have me grow next year!

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  7. This is my first year growing peppers with any measure of success & am surprised how well the hot peppers do compared to the sweet peppers. My Hungarian hot wax are putting out lots of fruits but my King of the North sweet peppers have only one or at the most two peppers on each plant so far.

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  8. I am in the USA in northern Pennsylvania. Our jalapeños are very slow to produce-they have just started in the past week, which is very late. Our poblano has one small pepper on it and our bell peppers very tiny peppers-I hope they have time to develop before the frost comes in! Thank you for your blog posts-we have used some of your ideas for help in our own garden.

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    1. Hi Kathleen Marie; I'm glad you like my blog..! Some of my peppers are much smaller this year than I would have expected, so it's not just you that has this problem. I suppose the variable weather conditions can make a big difference.

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