The Chilli Experiment

[caption id="attachment_18" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Chilli Fruit"][/caption]

We're currently in the process of building a set of raised planters for next years growing season. Growing your own veg seems like a lot of effort (and sometimes it is) and sometimes it's not worth it (potatoes, take up too much space and not enough return) but there are situations when it's a good use of your time. Have you tried home grown courgette (zucchini for the Americans)? They actually have a flavour! I never knew that until the inlaws started growing them and we were inundated with them. A single courgette is about 60p from the supermarket. The seeds are 5p each and you get more than one fruit per plant. You can grow them in bags and courgette tastes just as good frozen. I punch those numbers into my calculator and it makes a happy face.

But you can't grown courgettes in September in England so more on that subject will have to wait til next year.

I was surprised to find that a pack of three large red chillies cost up to a £1 from the local big name supermarkets. That's 33p per chilli! And they're not even the fancy burn-your-face-off varieties, these are just generic medium hot chillies. We cook 90% of our meals with chilli in some form or another. Those numbers did not make a happy face. So I decided to grow my own.

You can do this, even in England in September, provided you have a nice sunny windowsill. Our kitchen window gets full sun from 1pm til sunset every day so it's perfect. If you live in a very cold climate I'd move the plant into your warmest room over winter, but we've previously grown chilli plants successfully during winter in a single glazed house without any heating, so you'll probably be fine.

Here's what you'll need-

• 1 shop bought chilli (choose the variety you use most)


• all purpose compost


• 3 pots per plant - small, medium, large (yogurt pots and plastic coffee jars work fine, you don't need to buy any!)


• cling film / saran wrap


• water


• crop safe plant food (optional)

[caption id="attachment_19" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Ten Days After Sowing"][/caption]

Next time you cook with chillies scrap the seeds out of one chilli and put them on a dry dish in the window to dry out. You'll probably get about 20-30 seeds, you don't need all of them but you can keep any spares to grow later on. Leave the seeds for 3 or 4 days.

Now you'll plant the seeds into your small pots. If you're using a recycled yogurt pot or similar, make sure to punch a few holes in the bottom first! I find it easiest to plant them one per pot as it avoids damaging the roots when you repot them later. If you do plant them together put them 2 inches apart. Don't plant more seeds than you can fit on your windowsill (our fruiting chilli is currently about a foot and half wide and approaching two feet tall). We only planted two seeds this time around and both have germinated.

Plant the seeds into wet soil and cover with a thin layer of compost. Cover the top of the pot with cling film (or scrap clear plastic).

Wait two weeks making sure to keep the pots moist and in a sunny location.

[caption id="attachment_20" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Chilli (Left) Two Weeks After Sprouting"][/caption]

Most standard varieties seem to sprout within 14 days. Once the first leaves are out of the soil you can remove the plastic cover. Now you just need to keep the plants watered, and move them into larger pots when they need it (usually when you can see the roots peeking out the holes in the bottom of the pots). You can give them plant foodd if you like (crop or tomato food seems to be the best), it's not that expensive and the liquid stuff goes a long way.

How quickly they'll fruit depends on the variety. The one in the picture above took about two months to flower, at which point we brushed all the flowers with a dry paintbrush to make sure they pollinated. Any unpollinated flowers will drop off whole, whereas the pollinated ones will shrivel up before they start to swell into fruit. You can harvest your chillies when they're green or let them turn red, you'll get a different flavour with each. (We've got about 22 chillies on our plant right now and it's not done flowering yet, that's £7 saved on chillies already!)

Once they're harvested we usually take any chillies we aren't going to cook with immediately and dry them on the windowsill for a week, then chop them and freeze them for use throughout the year.

Once all your chillies are off the plant trim it back to a few branches and look after like a houseplant until next year. Our plants usually last for three or four crops, but if you kept your seeds from the original chilli then it's not going to cost you anything to start over if you don't look after it!

Note: We don't have any major pollen allergies and as far as I know chillies don't usually trigger a reaction, but check with your medical professional first if you're concerned. We grow our chillies in a room that our cat cannot access (since she ate an entire aloe vera she's not allowed near plants any more), and they don't seem to be on the dangerous for pets list, but I'd recommend keeping them away from your pets. Let's face it, eaten plants are annoying and messy, and the result of eating that much chilli might bot be pleasant even if it's not poisonous. If you can't separate them then research your plants before you start, and always check your plant food is non-toxic too!