Chilly outside now but hot come summer
Early birds catch worms, early gardeners sow seeds – of all sorts. So even though it’s chilly outside, now is the ideal time to get to work raising plants for this summer, and chillies are high on the list.
For the best and hottest peppers, the growing season begins indoors in January – the hottest varieties often need the longest growing period.
Sow the seeds on the surface of a moist, free-draining, seed compost and cover them with a fine sprinkling of compost or vermiculite. Place them somewhere warm (between 80 and 90F) until they germinate, which can take as much as five weeks, though some varieties can take as little as seven days.
As soon as the majority of the seeds have formed two leaves, transfer them into individual 3in pots, lifting the tiny plants by their leaves, not the stems. Move them to a sunny windowsill or a heated greenhouse. Keep the compost evenly moist but take care not to let it get soaking wet.
When the plants have five pairs of leaves they should be potted on again – growing bags or two-litre containers are ideal.
Water chilli pepper plants regularly throughout the growing season and, once the first fruits have set, feed weekly with a high potash tomato fertiliser. Pinch out the growing tip of the first flowering shoots to promote more branching and increase your harvest.
Chillies require warmth and long sunny days to ripen properly. In some parts of the UK they can do that outdoors, but those spots are few and far between so you may need to keep the fruiting plants indoors and let them ripen on a warm sunny windowsill.
As to how you like your chillies... the Scoville Scale, a measure of the “hotness” of a chilli pepper, gives a sweet pepper that contains no capsaicin (the stuff that makes it feel so hot in your mouth) a rating of zero whereas the Carolina Reaper has a rating of over two million. That’s hot.