It’s always exciting when the first seed of the year germinates…
look closely… it’s there!
All posts tagged Capsicum
Shoot #1
Posted by The Snail of Happiness on January 19, 2016
https://thesnailofhappiness.com/2016/01/19/shoot-1/
June Bloom
Mixed weather so far this June, but I’m delighted to report that we have some very welcome flowers starting to appear.
These ones mean that there are potatoes developing underground:
Potato flower
And this bodes well for a harvest of peppers:
Pepper and flower
And this is the first of the runner bean flowers:
Bean flower
And this means we might have limes in the winter:
Lime flower
Just waiting for squash and courgette flowers now. Currently, our main crops are lettuce and rhubarb.
What’s doing well in your garden right now?
Posted by The Snail of Happiness on June 6, 2014
https://thesnailofhappiness.com/2014/06/06/june-bloom/
Parade of peppers
One of my favourite crops to grow is peppers… partly because they require no garden, so anyone with a windowsill can manage them, and partly because they were my very first growing success.
Pepper plants in the sun
After I completed my degree, I stayed on at university to work towards my PhD. I moved into a little flat on the sea front in Aberystwyth (in the 1980s, before it had been ripped apart by storms). It was on the back of the house, so I didn’t get a sea view, but I did look out on my landlady’s tiny garden, which was filled with roses and an enormous ivy growing up one wall. There was no space for me to grow anything outdoors, but I had a hankering to produce some sort of fruit or vegetables and so I settled on peppers. I found a dwarf variety that claimed to be suitable for growing in pots on the windowsill and planted some seeds. The variety I chose was Redskin and it turned out to be a great success. Such a success, in fact, that I didn’t have room for all of them in my flat and I transferred some of them into the bay window in the big storage room in the house, where they flourished. My landlady did not mind a bit – she was a lovely lady.
These days, 25 years down the line, I wouldn’t choose Redskin as it is an F1 hybrid and my preference now is to grow open pollinated and heritage varieties. However, the F1 hybrids are consistent and, whilst success is not guaranteed, there is a good chance that you will get uniform results. As a complete novice, Redskin was probably a good choice and it certainly encouraged me to continue growing peppers… in fact I think I have grown some every year since that first attempt.
A parade of potted peppers
This year, the varieties I have chosen are more varied: Lipstick (a favourite now from The Real Seed Catalogue) and Nova (also from Real Seeds, but a variety I have not tried before), plus the plants from a mixed pack of Australian Peppers from Kate (Tall Tales from Chiconia). In addition, as I have developed a liking for spicy food, I grow chillies. I’m quite boring with my choice of these and now only grow Lemon Drop and Alberto’s Locoto, but both of these do well in my greenhouse, and sometimes will overwinter.
Despite having given some pepper seedlings to my sister and another friend, when I came to do my potting up yesterday, I discovered I had rather a lot of plants. I haven’t counted them up, but I think that (weather permitting) this year might be a really good year for capsicums. If so, I’m planning to make pepper passata as a way of storing them.
In the greenhouse
Posted by The Snail of Happiness on May 18, 2014
https://thesnailofhappiness.com/2014/05/18/parade-of-peppers/
Green shoots
For the past four days we have had sunshine and no rain! It’s cloudy now, but the forecast is for more sunshine over the next few days. This is great news because the winter of 2012/13 has, so far, been very gloomy. Every day we record the amount of electricity that our solar panels generate, so we have a ready means of comparing sunshine between years. These past few months have been rather darker than the equivalent periods in the past two years, so the recent weather has been particularly welcome.
Some rather puny leeks!
It’s not just us people who have been suffering from the dark – the winter vegetables have been struggling. Our leeks, purple and white sprouting broccoli and oriental greens are much smaller than we had hoped and I don’t even want to think about the kale. Fingers crossed that they will put on a spurt of growth as a result of all the recent photosynthesis. To be fair, the white sprouting broccoli is supposed to be a very late variety, so I wouldn’t expect much from it yet, but the purple is described as ‘early’. The sunshine does seem to have encouraged some growth from the garlic and onion sets that were planted some time ago… I was beginning to think that they might have drowned!
Sweet peppers
However, there is a whole growing season to look forward to in 2013. The first batch of seeds that I planted earlier this month have started to germinate, and this is always a good feeling. I use an electric propagator to get peppers and chillies started early in the year. In my experience, they need a long growing season and do best if sown in January or February. Most capsicums germinate best in the UK if they have some gentle heat applied, otherwise they simply don’t do anything or even just rot. I gather that the optimum temperature is in the range 20-30°C (68-86°F), but my experience is to aim for the upper end of this. The only things I have sown so far are the capsicums (hot and sweet), basil (for an early crop grown indoors) and tomato and tomatillo.
One year I sowed courgettes and squashes in February, but I just ended up with leggy plants that I couldn’t transplant outside because there was still a risk of frost. In the end my crop was relatively poor because by the time I could put them in to soil they were too tender and thus prone to slug attack. Mind you, that was in the days before the chickens when our slug problem was much worse. Anyhow, the curcurbits will wait a while before sowing… I will just have to enjoy watching the things I have up and running and getting some “Wizard” field beans in soon now it appears they won’t either rot or float away!
Posted by The Snail of Happiness on February 20, 2013
https://thesnailofhappiness.com/2013/02/20/green-shoots/
Chilli festival
In this strange year for crops it appears that we are about to enjoy a bumper crop of chillies – a visit to the greenhouse reveals a veritable chilli forest, including healthy plants with flowers and fruit in abundance. None are ripe yet, but they are starting to change colour.
Mainly Lemon drop – you can see the green unripe fruit amongst the leaves
I have been trialling varieties for a number of years now, and have finally identified ones that do well in my greenhouse here in west Wales. I only grow two*, both from The Real Seed Catalogue. The first is Lemon Drop – a slender fruit that ripens to a beautiful lemon yellow colour and has a reasonable amount of heat and a slightly citrus flavour. This variety is good for drying for use over the winter.
A forest of chillies – purple flowers on Alberto’s Locoto
The second is not, in fact, a different variety but a different species, it’s called Alberto’s Locoto (not sure of the scientific name). Alberto’s Locoto is a great plant – it’s a perennial and so you can keep it going for a number of years. When you do need more you can simply save seeds yourself – because it is a separate species, it doesn’t cross with any of the other capsicums and so it breeds true. It is a lovely plant – hairy leaves, purple flowers and bright red fruit when ripe. And finally, the chillies are good to eat – they reliably have a decent amount of heat, unlike some chillies I have grown in the past.
Which reminds me… it’s worth noting that all capsicums/peppers/chillies are perennial and, with a little care, they will survive over the winter. Like many vegetables, we treat them as annuals and replant each year, but I have had some very successful crops of peppers in a second or even third year. You can either keep them in the greenhouse (as long as it doesn’t get too cold) or bring them into the house or conservatory (if you have one). Just keeping a couple going is worthwhile if you don’t have much indoor space, as they will crop earlier the following year than newly planted individuals.
-oOo-
*In fact it’s not entirely true that we only have the two varieties; we also have the Hungarian Wax peppers, which we are now referring to as Russian Roulette peppers. We were given the seed and will never grow them again, because their flavour is so unpredictable. I had been led to believe that they started sweet and got hot as they ripened up. This is a lie. Some are hot, some are sweet, the age, colour and plant of origin are not correlated with the flavour at all. As a result Mr Snail-of-happiness and I had the hottest risotto (possibly the hottest dish) I have ever made last week because I naively put two green Hungarian Wax peppers into it without tasting them first. It was impossible to taste any of the other ingredients and we needed some chilled Sauvignon to help us recover! (what an excuse)
Posted by The Snail of Happiness on September 15, 2012
https://thesnailofhappiness.com/2012/09/15/chilli-festival/
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