A new season

It's that time of year again, time to start thinking about the new season and what to plant.

The hotter varieties, such as Habanneros can be quite slow growing and therefore benefit from a longer season. 

With the addition of the new grow room and a heated propagator it's the perfect excuse to make an early start to the season.  I've chosen a variety of sees this year to give me a crop for all occasions.

1. Chocolate Habanero - Very hot and full of flavour, I first grew these a few years back and although the plants flourished, they bore no fruit (except for the plants that I gave away). Determined not to be beaten, I'm given them a second try.

2. Yellow Seven Pot Habanero. This year's volcanic choice. Superhot and flavoursome, I'm looking forward to growing these gnarly pods.

3. Pimentos de Padron. I collected these seeds from our family that we visited in Galicia in northern Spain earlier this year, within just a few miles of the town of Padron itself. These randomly spicy tapas peppers are delicious when fried in olive oil and liberally scattered in salt.

4. Black Tongued Scorpion. A new one for me, these chillies resemble black scotch bonnets but with less heat. How could I possibly resist a chilli with a name like a death metal band.

5. Joe's Long Cayenne. This is our chilli challenge for this year so I felt it prudent to plant a few extra seeds for those who join the challenge late.

For planting I used a mixture of a sifted potting compost and plenty of vermiculite. Hopefully this light mix should promote good healthy roots and make the seedlings easy to pot on into a hydroponic system should I choose to do so. Here the planted seed trays are floated in water to dampen the compost. Using this technique rather than watering the compost is less likely to over-compact it.

Once soaked the trays were topped with vermiculite and placed in the heated propagator. This propagator isn't thermostat controlled I've added a thermometer so I can keep track on the temperature. For germination 25-28 C is ideal, once the seeds start sprouting then the temperature can be dropped a little. 

The heater in the chilli room is working well, rigged up to a thermostat it's keeping a steady temperature as shown by this maximum and minimum thermometer which has barely wavered in the month it's been running.

Despite the relatively low temperatures and the limited artificial light, the chillies that I've overwintered are not only coping but positively thriving. The Aji Lemon Drop that grew so prolifically during the summer has refused to stop and despite the severe haircut I gave it, is throwing out new growth already. I've cut back on the hours of light they're receiving to ensure that they're not too monstrous by the time spring comes. 

Potting On

The seedlings on the windowsills have been doing well and it was time to pot them. This was the second batch of seedlings, planted to replace the plants I lost back at Easter. I'd planted multiple seeds into small pots and used a large amount of vermiculite in the mix. The seedlings had developed fantastic root systems, helped along by the open light mix of the compost.  I gently separated them and planted them into their own pots with a compost mix containing Perlite to help keep the air and moisture into the soil.

The root systems on these little seedlings are really impressive.

The scotch Bonnet seedlings all potted on into the obligatory plastic cups.

The new chilli house is working well and even on an overcast and rainy day is at a comfortable 20 c. I'll have to add some shelving onto the back wall to take some of the smaller pots and maximise the use of the space.

The new chilli house is packed full

Having tried my had at chilli burgers a while back and been a bit disappointed by the lack of spice, I decided to try again with a little more kick in the new batch.

The recipe was simple, a kilo of lean minced beef, half a dozen garlic cloves, salt, pepper and four of the largest red Habaneros I could find.  All blitzed and mixed, it made 8 burgers (I treated myself to a Lakeland Burger Press) and we cooked them over a good old-fashioned charcoal barbecue.

The huge Habs ready to go into the burgers

The Habanero burgers were a big hit.

The burgers were spot on for heat, having enough chilli in them to get the lips tingling and with a bit of lasting burn but without being too hot for those not used to the heat.

We popped into Cheltenham food festival the other day to sample all the fantastic produce on display.  I love food festivals, trying all the samples and talking to the actual producers of the food makes a pleasant change from the supermarket shop.

The haul of chilli produces from Cheltenham Food Festival

I took the opportunity to restock with Upton Cheyney's fantastic Chipotle sauce and we got some more of the Chilli Peanut butter from Fire Foods, having used most of the last jar to make a superb satay sauce for chicken.

I do realise that I have quite a few chilli sauces now, perhaps it's about time I started using some up before buying any more...

There are a few unusual hazards to growing chillies but I never thought cats would be one.  However, this is the sight that greeted me this morning when I went into the garden. One of the many cats in the neighbourhood (all of whom treat our garden fence as a highway) had jumped onto the roof of the small chilli house and gone straight through. Somebody needs to cut down on the Whiskas.

Time for a new roof

Fixing the roof with a sturdier sheet of polycarbonate wasn't too hard, the same can't be said for the poor Friar's Hat chilli that was underneath it at the time - a rather extreme case of pinching out.

The battered Friar's Hat

Snakebite!

The grow-room is looking a bit more organised after a tidy up of the trays.

When I started growing chillies I did make a rule that I wouldn't bother growing any of the super-hot chillies, anything that was so insanely hot that I wouldn't be able to cook with it without the aid of an Biological warfare suit and a trained paramedic on standby.  However, over time most rules become guidelines and guidelines have a tendency to become suggestions.

Enter the Black Naga chilli...

Now whether it was the added difficulty and challenge of growing super-hots, the instability of the strain (you may end up with no dark fruit at all) or just the amazingly cool name, I decided that this chilli had to be my first attempt at growing a superhot. A relation of the fearsome Bhut Jolokia (some claim just a Chocolate Bhut rather than a new strain in it's own right) this sinister and ugly pod rocks in at a mere 800,000 SHU, so that's roughly 250 times hotter than a Jalapeno.

So for this very important chilli I decided to take a little more care with my planting. I'd read that when planting seeds it would be useful to add vermiculite to the compost as this retains nutrients and stops the compost drying out.  Likewise, adding perlite when potting on seedlings would help drainage and improve aeration.  I also decided to test out some small peat pots to see if they were an improvement on my homemade toilet tissue pots - just like the cardboard pots, when roots start growing through the pot you plant the whole thing on into a larger pot, avoiding disturbing the fragile roots.

From left to right: The empty pots, the perlite mix, the vermiculite mix with seed on top and the final planted pot.

So for this experiment I've filled the top half of the pot with a compost/vermiculite mix for the seed to grow in, and the lower half of the pot with a perlite/compost mix for the seedling's roots to develop in.  Seems something of an effort but we'll have to judge from the results to see if it's worth the extra time and trouble. The seeds were placed on top of the vermiculite mix and a thin layer of the same mixture sprinkled over the top.  They were then gently watered, to avoid disturbing the seeds, and placed over the warmest part of the aquarium propagator.

I await with keen interest to see, firstly if the peat pots and vermiculite mix make a huge difference, and secondly, to see if the Naga does actually bear any of the dark brown/black fruit that it's rumoured to produce. Roll on the summer!