Growing Chillies

There is something great about growing chillies. There is such variety in size, flavour, colour, strength and shape. They are challenging to grow well too. I usually end up growing far too many and end up giving away lots of plants and lots of chillies too when they come through. 

I won't give too many tips here on how to succeed on growing them... there are far better people than me to give those tips, like my good friend Andrew Brooks at Gower Chillies who also runs a damn fine Chilli Festival each year - this photo is of me helping out at the first festival he ran in 2013.

There is a lot of information about chillies on the web. I like this Periodic table of chillies - you can click on each chilli for more information. There is some more good information on growing here , and here from Sarah Raven. And this site shows a great list of chillies, scoville scale, description and pictures; it's a really good resource.

I shall tell you about my favourite chillies though. 

• Padron - (about 2,000 scovilles) best to pick green and to fry whole in olive oil, then sprinkle with sea salt. These are the ones that are supposed to be mild, but one in ten is hot. 
• Cherry bombs - about the same heat as the Padron, maybe a bit more, but have a great round shape.
• Jalapeno - this well known chilli is great for pickling.
• Bulgarian Carrot - unusual orange chilli, great taste and about 30,000 on the scoville scale.
• Ring Of Fire - grows fast, produces lots of long red chillies, but is great picked green too.
• Lemon Drop - I found a bit tricky to grow, but the citrus flavour is worth the effort.
• Cayenne - very easy to grow, widely available and pretty hot. A good hot starter chilli.
• Thai Dragon - produces lots of hot small chillies on a compact bushy plant.
• Hot Wax are easy to grow, fruit abundantly and produce big fat chillies. Not too hot, either.
• Golden Habanero - very hot, lovely lantern shape. Needs a lot of constant heat to grow well; the usual rule is that chillies are harder to grow and need more heat, the hotter the eventual chilli should be.
• Chocolate Habanero - I managed to grow one of these and they were lovely, brown, smokey chillies. VERY hot, great once it got going. 

I grow my chillies in my greenhouse. I also germinate them in the greenhouse; this means I get them through later than if you start them earlier indoors in heated propogation units, but it is less trouble. Then they stay in the greenhouse the whole time in their 8 inch pots, which seems big enough for a single season plant, and they are fed with tomato feed once they start to fruit.

Remember that most chillies are not H1 hybrids, they are 'true', which means you can buy a chilli to eat and if you like it you can collect the seeds from inside it and grow your own from those seeds. Just dry them out and keep them in a cool dark place until you want to try germinating them. Free plants! You can do this with most tomatoes too, although many more tomatoes are H1 hybrids, so the tomato you get on the plant may not be that same as the one you bought... but it usually works.