Tag Archives: Chillies

Feeling (extremely) hot, hot, hot

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This year has been the first year we’ve taken growing chilli peppers a little bit more seriously, not that we had to do that much apart from give them a daily watering and a weekly feed of comfrey liquid. Our plants are mainly in pots (which we will bring inside in the winter if possible) except this one planted out in the flowerbed which is doing well.

This evening for the first time we took a good look under the foilage and found these fruits, and from the info on the plant label (this was a plant we were given in a plant swap) we  didn’t know if it was Hot or Pot Yellow. On further reseach could it be this one here? Looks like they turn yellow from green when they reach final maturity and are extremely hot. These may be the ones, 7 pot yellow!

Report from the garden

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It ain’t The Good Life but we’re starting to get some more edibles out of the garden. The shallots are small but we’re getting a lot of them, that’s the first Zuchinni/Courgette (above) and the chillies are really doing well and there are a good few on the plants. As a good gardening friend of ours said a long time ago “Keep picking the fruit and cutting the flowers and more will come”.

As for our anarchic seed sowing style we have a Cardoon up near the house from when we broke open a seed head and just chucked the seeds around the garden. There are better looking Cardoons up the road but we ain’t complaining especially as they’re from free seed.

And as for the Barley Straw in the pond it does now look like it’s working and been working for a while. The fish seem happy and you can actually see them now!

 

 

And they’re off!

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Spring may be springing or maybe not but we’ve got in and sowed some seeds in the propagator on the windowsill. We’ve done some miner’s lettuce, giant sunflowers some tomatoes and some chillies along with some rows sowed outside (we’re pushing our luck but having a try anyway, what we got to lose?)

Years ago we bought some wild garlic bulblets on ebay and they’ve popped up yet again down the shady area behind the pond and are kept safe under the watchful eye of a plastic dalek. And the second lot of the giant garlic we bought is starting to peep through the inch or two of the leaf mulch in the raised bed. We don’t know if it’s the plastic protection on the top that has helped or the the fact that one of the Weeds cats spends a lot of time sleeping on top of it! Who knows but something is working!)

And here’s some spring inspired dubs to get those plants on their way.

Caning it!

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We’ve started early with putting out the sweet peas in the side bed with some wigwam cane arrangements. They were grown from seed and hardened off for a few days outside before going out this afternoon. Well, we’ll give them a try and if they don’t succeed we’ll try (and try) again.

The plants in the raised beds with protection are starting to get going. There’s onions, shallots, chillies, spuds and tomatoes. Can we stick anything else in them? The old window frame we found in a skip donkey’s years ago has some cabbage seeds which have’t germinated yet. And in the foreground remains of the front garden wall that was stripped of its ivy (that was actually holding it up!)

Forest Hill in the spring time

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Well it’s the first day of spring today but it didn’t really feel like it weatherwise. We spent a couple of hours in the garden as the neighbours have put up a new fence so we cleared the bed on the side so we can actually see what plants are called for this year. We need a few shrubs so we’ll be researching them over the next few weeks.

There’s seeds galore on the kitchen windowsill including two types of tomatoes and sweet peas, cut and come again lettuce, chillies and various herbs. It’s all about being prepared as the growing season is going to come around sooner than you think!

There was a load of clearing up going on down the bottom end of the garden too, lots of ivy to be cut back and we found a nice pile of very dry clippings from months ago. So to end a good couple of hours in the garden we christened our fairly newly acquired incinerator, cheers Marc! It’s been a while since we’ve had a fire and we’ve forgotten how nice it is to sit around a burning bright dustbin feeling the warmth. Hands up who loves a garden incinerator!

Easy, take it easy

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We were raring to go Saturday morning, the weather was going to be nice and there was so much to do out in the garden but we were forgetting one thing, it was only a couple of weeks ago we were suffering with sciatica so we had to take it easy.

We had six bags of compost delivered by Shannon’s thinking that’ll be more than enough. It was gone before we knew it and we could have done with six more to be honest. Even lifting one bag of compost was tiring so we really had to take it easy on the Saturday so we tidied up the bed by the dad corner, taking out the odd cabbage and old beetroot and filling up the raised beds to a nice depth of compost (pic above – before we started).

For one of the raised beds last year we used garden soil (we ran out of multipurpose compost) which wasn’t as good as the compost filled ones that you could put your hand in to see if there was any spuds forming on the potato plants there. You can’t do that with our London clay soil. so we dug that out and put compost in.

Today we got up early and started off a few seeds in an old propagator which was collecting leaf mould and soil at the bottom of the garden but after a wash was ready to go and now on the kitchen windowsill. We sowed a couple of different types of chillies, thyme, basil, chamomile, dyers chamomile and Medwyn’s free gift earlier this year, some “Trial seed longest Leeks” (pic below). We’ll keep you posted.

We also stuck some polythene on top of the raised beds (pic above) as we did last year and will give the soil a couple of weeks to warm up before trying a couple of seed potatoes in very early. The season has started for us now. Has anyone else made a start on the garden this weekend? If so let us know and send us some pics.

And for no reason at all, a couple of King Tubby’s dubplate mixes that we’d put up before and no doubt put up again.

Let sleeping chillies lie

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Phill Harmony chilli in hibernationA big shout to our good friend Phil Harmony in Berlin who produces the excellent dub night radio show. Last year we featured his great balcony garden in our “dub gardeners of the world unite” feature here.

This winter Phil brought in his Jolokia Chocolate Chilli plant and here’s a couple of pics of the state of play at the moment. I always thought Chillies were annuals but it was only last year when I was in Shannon’s Garden Centre and they showed us a couple of plants they kept indoors over the winter that I found out they’re short-lived perennials given the right conditions. Over the winter months the plant goes into hibernation mode and can look like it’s a goner but come the spring once the weather improves, the plant will begin to sprout new growth. Phil Harmony chill in hibernation_2There’s some great information about overwintering Chilli plants on the Dartmoor Chilli Farm website here and it mentions there that they’ve had good success overwintering the Jolokia variety.

Thanks to Phil for picking an excellent tune to accompany the pictures from Kabaka Pyramid ft. Protoje called Warrior. Tune!

Nice one Phil, do send us some more pics once the plant gets going.