Hot Padron

So I’ve been growing the Pimientos de Padron for some time now and with the novelty of sunshine (plus a little judicious pollinating via a paintbrush) I’ve got a number of chillies slowly growing.

Now the thing is with Pimientos is that approximately one in ten is hot whilst the rest maintain a refreshing sweetness.  When I’ve eaten them before I’ve been somewhat disappointed to only once or twice catch a hot one.  So how did the home-grown ones fare? The small batch that I gave to Claudio back at Christmas all turned out to be hot (really quite fiercely hot at that!) so I had high hopes for this second wave.

We cooked them up last night in plenty of scalding olive oil and with a generous seasoning of crunchy sea salt, patted them dry on kitchen roll and tucked in. They were all hot!  Every last one of them was hotter than any Padrons I’ve had before.  They were of course delicious as well with a lovely fresh sweetness alongside the heat.

So why, of the dozen I’ve grown so far, have they all been hot?  They’ve certainly been grown in a hot environment and with a lack of sunlight they’ve taken a long time to mature so maybe slow growing helps as well?  We’ll have to see how hot subsequent batches are to determine what the key factors are.

In the meantime, I can’t wait for the next bundle to mature…

Summer already?

Hungarian Hot Wax on the office windowsill

Well, not really but it certainly felt like it earlier with the sun streaming through the windows at work.  The reception area (a.k.a. the Greenhouse) was sweltering and the poor chilli plants certainly felt it. Interestingly enough, with the Padron and Orozco wilting under the relentless heat, the Friar's Hat seemed more than happy.  Well they better get used to the heat, after all, it's only February and come the summer we'll be growing some of the most stressed (and subsequently hottest) chillies in the neighbourhood.

Orozco feeling the effects of the heat.

A somewhat wilted Pimientos de Padron.

Meanwhile, back at home the chillies are progressing nicely.  The larger of the plants sown in December are now large enough to need support (wooden kebab skewers do the job perfectly) and even the slower-growing hot varieties are doing well.

Black Naga seedlings

Gino chillies

The mysterious seeds given to me at work (dubbed Gino Chilli) are also growing well.  Can't wait until they fruit so I can have a stab at identifying the variety.  Sadly the second batch of Cherry Chillies haven't sprouted yet either, which is a shame as I had some stuffed with goat's cheese on the weekend and they were delicious.  Also a bit slow on the uptake is the Pasillia Bajio chillies, a variety used in Mexican mole sauces, which I'm also very keen to grow.  I have faith that they will come eventually, I'm just not very good at being patient.

The younger seedlings thrive under the grow light. Once they get older they're moved to a windowsill.

Chilli Chutney

Following the success of the Friar's Hat chilli jam (unofficially dubbed 'Frisky Friar') I decided to have another go at making a chilli preserve, this time aiming for something a bit more like a chutney but with a fruity flavour.

I rooted around for ingredients and put together what I though would be a winning concoction (actually it was just what I had left in the cupboard).

1 large sweet pepper.
1 ripe mango.
4 small onions.
8 cloves of garlic.
Juice of 1 lime
500g jam sugar
500ml cider vinegar
2 tomatoes (de-seeded)
8 Thai chillies
A handful of coriander
A tablespoon of grated ginger

The expertly chopped mango (not by me I must add)

The ingredients ready for the blitzer

The fruit and veg were thrown into the food processor and given a quick blitzing. Meanwhile the sugar was dissolved in the vinegar over a low heat.

The blitzed ingredients

The mixture was thrown into the vinegar and bought to a rolling boil.  The heat was then turned down and the mixture left to simmer until the quantity had reduced by half.

After an hour of boiling vinegar the house was quite fragrant...

Finally, after being allowed to cool the mixture was ladled into sterilised jam jars.

As for flavour, it's got a mild spicy heat from the chillies and a tang of coriander.  Meanwhile the ginger adds a lovely tickle of heat at the back of the throat.  It'll be unveiled to the (selected) public this weekend at a cheese and wine party so we'll get their verdict then. With the Frisky Friar I was so keen to share the jam I ended up giving most of it away to friends and family. With only four jars of this new concoction, then it's quite a limited edition. I may have to limit my generosity to just those with the highest bribes...

A chilli by any other name...

Well as the forest continues its relentless growth and windowsill space becomes more valuable than Manhattan real estate there have been some encouraging successes along the way.  The eight Black Naga seeds planted have all sprouted and are looking healthy. They did take a long time to appear but I understand that this is not unusual with the hotter varieties.

The Black Naga chilli seedlings

Likewise, nearly all the yellow scotch bonnet chillies have sprouted.  These were seeds collected from a chilli that I bought from Sainsbury's and rescued before the rest of it was consigned to a particularly tasty Levi Roots' curry. The fact that so many have grown is encouraging, particularly considering that the cost of two scotch bonnet chillies wasn't a great deal more than the cost of a packet of seeds.

I have had one failure, of the five Red Cherry seeds I planted, not one has reared its head. It may have been a duff packet of seeds or poor planting conditions, too hot, too cold, to damp or dry etc..  Thankfully I do have some spare seeds so I'll give them another try. If that fails then I may sulk a little and pretend I never wanted them in the first place.

The hall of shame, labels from some of the seeds that failed to sprout

With so many varieties on the go it's been something of a challenge keeping tabs on them all. It's cost a fortune in plant labels but, fingers crossed, all the chillies are correctly named and will remain so.  The traditional plant labels and waterproof marker are an easy and cost-effective way of marking up plants but it's hard to find them attractive and for the full grown plants I want something more aesthetically pleasing that won't wash off in the rain or fade in the sun.

The finished stamped copper plant labels.

Once again I've managed to find the most complicated method of doing it but I'm happy with the results.  I've obtained some thin copper plant labels from the local garden centre and a letter-punch set from Screwfix.  It's tedious and fiddly work and my first few attempts were very amateurish, but the labels will last and once the copper obtains a nice verdigris they should mellow into the garden nicely.

Hot Wax & cold weather

In order to stop the house being swamped by the rapidly growing forest of chillies I’ve snuck a few more into work.

The Pimientos de Padron have been in the reception at work for some time now, basking (and on occasion baking) in the sunshine that pours through the 20ft high south facing windows.  I’ve now added to them the three chillies that I overwintered, a Friar’s Hat, an Orozco and a Cayenne.

Pimientos de Padron in the work reception.

The Friar’s Hat and the Orozco have both recovered well from their pre-Christmas pruning and are putting out plenty of new shoots and leave.  The Cayenne was somewhat slower off the mark but is now showing signs of recovery and hopefully the extra sunshine and fresh compost it’s now sitting in will encourage further growth.

Padron and Friar's Hat Chilli plants enjoying the winter sun.

Back at the end of the summer I was given some Hungarian Hot Wax Chilli fruit by my parents. Before condemning them to the frying pan I collected a mass of seed and tried planting some in November.

Nothing., nada, zero, zilch.  Not a single seedling came up so in frustration I planted the rest in a couple of small trays, maybe 80 odd seeds in all.  Of course, sod’s law, plenty of the seed sprouted this time.  Even after thinning-out I was left with over forty healthy seedlings. 

The Hungarian Hot wax is a really useful chilli, plenty of sweet flesh when green with enough heat for chutneys or pickles when ripe. Even bearing this in mind, 40 plants is still a little excessive for my small garden. I suspect that the local school fete’s plant stall will benefit from any spares but in the meantime I need to house them somewhere until they mature. With the more valuable chilli seedlings staying safely under the grow lamp, the poor old Hot Waxes have been relegated to the somewhat draftier office windowsill. Tragically this exodus has coincided with the arrival of the coldest weather this winter. We'll have to hope that they can survive, I suppose it's just as well I've grown so many now...

Hungarian Hot Wax seedlings on the windowsill.

Come on spring...

The forest of seedlings thriving in the grow room.

With all the chillies rapidly growing I've found it something of a struggle this week to keep up with them and find space for them all.  I shouldn't complain, I've been quite amazed by the speed with which some of the seedlings have grown.

The Chocolate Habaneros have been particularly active - bearing in mind they were planted on the 18th December you can see from the photo quite how much they've grown in just a little under six weeks.

Chocolate Habanero seedlings, 40 days old.

As for the mysterious chilli seeds I was given by a colleague, well they've sprouted and growing at a rate of knots.  Until they can be identified they'll be known as Gino's Chillies.

As for the rest of the seedlings, I've been gradually moving the larger ones away from the light and heat of the grow room and onto window-ledges to harden them off a little.  Hopefully, with the days getting brighter it won't be long before they start to appreciate the extra sunshine and shoot away.  Of the older seedlings both the Tabasco and Loco seedlings seem to be doing particularly well, which is just as well since I already have a couple of people waiting for Tabasco plants.

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!