Bringing the Heat

Some time ago I wrote about growing chillies as the starting point of a small “side hustle” which will soon lead to me trying my hand at creating chilli related products, selling chilli seeds online, and more than likely selling chilli plants locally within my home town.

I’m pleased to say that the forest of spicy fruit grows, despite there being some serious teething issues along the way.

There’s a lot to learn when growing chillies. And a lot of rookie mistakes to make along the way as well.

One of my first rookie mistakes was to think that my recently potted up chillies would be fine in the harsh Australian sun. I was very wrong. We had a heat wave a couple of months ago while I was travelling for work. My wife kept the water on my chillies, however I suspect that the black pots absorbed the heat and baked the root systems of my plants. I ended up losing about half of my plants.

After putting my plants in a sheltered position, they are fairing quite well. And the remaining plants are growing rapidly, with some even in flower for the first time.

Some time ago I saved the seeds from a Habanero chilli that I was using in a seafood dish. The chilli had a lot of seeds so I wasn’t willing to lose an opportunity to propagate some of my own Habaneros. I put these seeds in some seed growing mix quite recently. And the image below is the resulting crop of seedlings.

I honestly wasn’t expecting such a huge amount of seedlings to grow. However I am not complaining. After two weeks the seedlings were ready for potting up, which gave me a chance to trial a different planting technique that I had recently read about.

Plant them deep

When I potted up my first chilli seedlings I only planted them just above the roots, so that a reasonable amount of the stem was above the soil. Apparently this approach leads to long and spindly plants, and these plants may be easily damaged in strong winds or with a heavy crop of chillies.

As you can see in the image above, my chilli plants are indeed looking long and spindly. Which worries me a little.

For my Habanero seedlings, I’ve actually buried the seedlings right to the leaves. So it’s pretty much just the leaves that are above the soil. This apparently has a couple of benefits:

• the chilli plants will grow low and bushy
• the stems themselves will sprout roots which aids in building a strong root system
• the seedlings are less prone to damage in their early life.

It looks a little strange to see these chillies planted so deep in the soil, however after a few days they seem to be establishing well.

Where to from here?

At present, I have roughly 50 chilli plants in various stages of maturity with roughly half of these chillies being Habaneros. In the coming days I’ll be potting some up into their final pot size, and propagating a large number Jalapeños, which are one of my favourite species of chilli.

I don’t expect to have much in the way of a crop this year, however I will have a very large number of plants in preparation for a bumper crop next year. This is exciting, and it gives me a great chance to try out some recipe ideas that I have in the mean time.

I also need to build somewhere to store my plants over Winter. But that will be another post in itself.