Give the gift of Chilli

I struggled to choose a gift for a friend last Christmas. It seems my final choice was an actual success because it was a chilli growing kit for a man that not only loves chilli, he now loves chilli plants as well.
I think there were a few casualties on the way to chilli producing plants. Some of the seedlings were scorched in the sun in the spring. Slowly my friend managed to get the idea not over or under watering, etc.

Hmmm, pretty and yummy

It is annoying when you have been doing something and introduce someone else to it and they do better than you do. Especially after I have just dumped the spindly specimens I was growing into the compost bin.

 I took the above picture when I was visiting him for his 40th birthday at the beginning of November and despite the shaky camera work you can see that these are actually quite good looking plants. The chillis are yellow, green, red and purple. We celebrated his birthday weekend eating sliced raw chillies on slices of cheddar cheese. It is the perfect after pub nibble when you want something spicy.

Not a lot been going on

My horticultural activities have been at a minimum for a while as I have been holding off waiting for my new patio to be completed. Unfortunately it seems that we have fallen foul of an attitude that can be common amongst builders. This is not to say they are the same, I have friends that are builders and are very studious (unfortunately they live 500 miles from me).

The work was initially scheduled to be done over Easter. We contacted the builder a few days before and he put us back 2 weeks. Then we chased him again but he didn't answer the phone to us and didn't return any of the answer phone messages we left. Eventually the missus tried dialling his number with a 1471 prefix, and we slipped up and answered the phone. He said that he would be with us in 2 weeks, we gave him an option to back out, if he didn't want to do the job, or he had realised he had priced it wrong. He said he was still up for doing the work and would see us in 2 weeks. Two weeks later he didn't appear, so we had to try to get someone else to do the work.

Fortunately the next guy we found was very good at turning up and has done a fine job, but the patio remains unfinished 3 weeks after he started it. Unfortunately we were unable to get the tiles we wanted from the suppliers. We had to wait until after the suppliers two weeks summer holiday for them to make some more, and when they arrived, about an eighth of the tiles were chipped. So the garden is only nearly finished. All of the veg is sitting down the side of the house feeling dejected, the Chilli plants are still in the house covered in green fly and me, the wife and the kids are without a usable garden.

Home made compost

Yesterday was a nice day so I decided to try and pot up my tomato and Jalapeño plants. The missus and the kids went out with some friends and took our car, so when I realised I needed compost I had no choice but to use my own.

I wasn't really looking forward to doing this because I thought it might be messy and smelly, and although I had got compost from the bin before through the hatch on the front I have never exposed and sorted the whole pile before. I lifted the entire bin of and shovelled the contents onto a tarpaulin on the lawn, I then put the bin back in place and threw any obviously un-composted materials back in the bin. Running the rest through a sieve into a wheel barrow and throwing anything that didn't fit through the sieve back into the bin I ended up with a whole wheel barrow full of free compost. No smell at all even from the semi-composted material. The only slight down side was a wasp had seemed to have taken up residence in the bin which was probably my fault because I hadn't put the hatch back on properly. This wasp seemed to hang around for ages looking for its old home that had probably been sieved and/or sorted.

I decided to add some sharp sand to the mix (about 1 part in 5), a couple of dashes of blood fish and bone I got a box of in a pound shop and some vermiculite. I surprised myself with the look of the mix. It looked really quite good. When I had potted my first Tomato plant up I watered it in the compost seemed a little to clay like. So I decided to mix in a little of my left over B&Q peat free compost which appears to be made up mostly of woody fibres.

All pleased with myself I potted up the rest of the Toms and all four Jalapeños. The 10 Tomato plants will stay outside from now on as they have been spending the daytime all this week on the back step and I simply don't have room for them inside now they are in bigger pots. The Jalapeños will stay inside for a while longer yet (fortunately there is only 4 of them).

Green fly alert!!

I noticed today that one of my Birds eye Chilli seedlings wasn't doing quite as well as the others it was in the same seed tray as. On closer inspection there was what appeared to be a green lump on the side of the stem, then I realised it was a rather plump aphid. I immediately removed the offending creature and treated it to a size 10 on the back step (I wasn't going to take any risks of it getting back in).

A quick google later and it appears aphids are very difficult to shift once they move in. Particularly on tiny seedlings like mine. So I marched back into the kitchen and squeezed the top of the seedling between my 2 fingers as hard as I could (to squash any other hiding greedy green gits) and pulled out the seedling and dumped it into the food recycling bin.

I guess only time and vigilance will show if I have caught things early enough, but I certainly hope so.

Chillitastic

I have mentioned previously that I have tried to grow chilli plants from seeds, well it seems I may have made a mistake. I started by putting 10 seeds from a Birdseye chilli I was using to make chilli scrambled eggs into a seed tray with compost and leaving it on the kitchen window sill. After about 2 weeks of seeing nothing, I decided to use the paper towel method of germinating Birdseye chilli seeds, which after 4 days had germinated all the seeds, so I took these 12 seeds and put those in a seed tray with cells.

Now I am not complaining, but I am wondering what to do with all of the 22 chilli seedlings. I have already given one of my 5 Jalapeño seedlings away and have an idea who will have 2 more but I am not sure I can find homes for rest.

My first year dabbling with veg growing (part 2)

This is the second part of this post, please see the first part here.

I scrabbled around in our garage which had become a dumping ground for (amongst other things) all the plants pots we have ever acquired without their deceased occupants. I found a few pots and in went the rocket and lettuce seeds.

Around this time I also brought a root trainer seed tray that I thought would be good for growing tomatoes from seed. It allows you to kind of split the pot and peak inside to see how the root system is coming along, also handy when potting up. Tomato seed went into this located at the kitchen window and before I new it I had 7 baby tomato plants.

I brought 3 potato planter bags for my seed potatoes, started reading up on what 'chitting' was (it basically means to allow the potatoes to grow sprouts before planting). Fortunately I didn't have to encourage the seed potatoes I had brought, they came with plenty of sprouts already. So I carefully unravelled the potatoes and sprouts and planted them in the potato bags with general purpose peat free compost.

Before long I was out in the garden every weekend finding things to do. Whether it was adding more compost to the potato bags, potting up tomato plants, watering and fertilising or harvesting spinach, rocket and lettuce I realised I must be enjoying it.

The kids were still not that interested so I appealed to their way of thinking by encouraging them to get their hands dirty by helping me pot up the tomato plants. This only really gained interest with my daughter who loves tomatoes.

Tomato plants were certainly one of the most successful attempts of last year. Eventually I put 6 of them into grow bags up against the south facing wall of the house and knocked nails into the wall to support them. This is when I realised that I will be trying bush tomatoes next time, cordons really are a flimsy lot and need a loads of support. Unfortunately the tomato crop never really matured on the plants, it seems the weather wasn't warm enough. So for a while my kitchen window sill and airing cupboard were full of ripening fruit.

Growing your own food is really feast of famine. One minute you are all excited because you have loads of something on had, be it potatoes, spinach, spring onions or tomatoes, the next you are just encouraging seedlings to germinate.

2011 will hopefully be a little bit better planned than last year but I am hopefully going to get a new patio built. This will be a dark colour, which will hopefully catch more heat and allow me to grow things a bit faster or grow some things that I wouldn't normally get away with in Northern Ireland.

Sowing the seeds of grub

Yesterday I managed to engage both of my kids in a bit of seed sowing by ignoring them.

My eldest helped me to sow some beetroot, radish, spring onion (called Scallions in NI) and spinach in a planter I made last year from a left over pallet. I wasn't going to ask him to help, but he saw me going outside with gloves on and asked if he could join in. It seems that they pay more interest if you don't try and engage their enthusiasm as when my daughter saw us we both got shouted at for not involving her in the process. Fortunately I had some bush tomato seeds to sow indoors, and she loves tomatoes more than pretty much anything so I got back in her good books by letting her sow them.

This year I have chosen to grow bush tomatoes because the cordon plants we tried last year grew well and produced a lot of fruit, but mostly didn't ripen before the bad weather set in. We eventually had a lot of green tomatoes sitting on the window sill (however the missus did make some lovely home made tomato soup from them eventually). I am hoping with the bush tomatoes we will start to get fruit earlier and hope for a constant stream for my daughter to enjoy a running buffet.

Seed germination in a plastic bag!

I have been reading some of the excellent articles on http://www.thechilliking.com and surprised by the technique of germinating chilli seeds in a wet paper towel in this article.
It seems all you need to do to germinate chilli seeds is get a damp paper towel, put the seeds on it, put another damp paper towel on top, seal it into a small plastic food bag and put it in a warm place.

My Birdseye chilli seeds planted on Sunday 27th February have yet to show their selves above the compost on the kitchen window sill (probably slowed down by the cold temperature at night). I know it is early days to expect to see any seedlings but it is disappointing when the Jalapeños came up so fast. So I tried this today seeing as I had a load of seeds that I extracted from the Birdseye chillies I used for my Chilli scrambled eggs on toast this morning (if you haven't tried this, I can highly recommend it). I have placed the bag in the airing cupboard (called the "hot press" in Northern Ireland) as it is likely to be significantly warmer in there than the rest of the house.

I am considering buying a heated propagator, I have been looking around and found one at B&Q for less than a tenner, so I may give that a punt.

Chilli seed starter kit

Sunday 13th Feb:
The beginning of this years gardening for me began when I opened the small Jalapeño seed starter kit that the missus brought me back in January (Asda clearance shelf for 50p :). This is a smart move from her as we are getting through more and more shop brought chillies these days.

Following the instructions on the packet I put the supplied soil into the tray (strangely there seemed to be lots of human hair in the compost mix), added 8 seeds, watered and covered with the propagator lid. 12 days later there were seedlings starting to show.

Sunday 27th Feb:
At 2 weeks I had 7 seedlings happily growing in the tray. Doing more reading up I found that I should be potting up the Jalapeño plants when they have 4 true leaves and my seedlings still only had the first 2 seed leaves.

We don't normally get through to many Jalapeño chillies in our kitchen, but we have been eating a lot of Birds Eye Chillies. So I took a chilli from the fridge, cut it open and put the seeds in to a piece of kitchen paper towel. Got a seed tray and filled it with compost, whacked 10 seeds into it, watered it and put it in the kitchen window with the Jalapeño seedlings.

I had no idea if this would work, one of my concerns is that the seeds my need to endure some dormant period before they would germinate. So I then did a bit of surfing and found that it is possible to do grow birds eye chilli plants this way.

Free rocket seeds?

Last weekend I had a tidy up in the garden and found that I had a load of seeds on last years rocket that had bolted (flowered).

I cut off all the stems and brought them inside to have a look. I was able to get maybe 40 seeds that looked like they were in good condition from the seed pods. I have compared the look of these seeds to that of the few I have left over from the last sow and they look exactly the same.

I read somewhere that rocket seeds need to be two months old before they will germinate. I wonder does this mean from the time of picking, or from the time they have finished developing in the seed pod, or when? I have put the seeds in a piece of kitchen paper and left them in the kitchen to dry out for the time being.

My first year dabbling with veg growing (part 1)

Last year I decided that I would get started growing a few vegetables. I hadn't really grown anything of substance. I had a few Bonsai trees I was younger and of course the obligatory Venus Fly trap none of which lasted too long.

Now that I am blessed with 2 healthy kids I am of course concerned they remain healthy and growing a few vegetables in some pots seemed like something I could manage. To say my son is not interested in eating vegetables is an understatement but fortunately my daughter loves most vegetables and adores Tomatoes. So if I can get the kids in the garden and interested in getting their hands dirty, maybe I can convince my son to eat the fruits of his (dirty handed) labour.

When we moved into our house about 3 years ago the garden was lovely due the hard work of the previous owner and I must admit that I let it go rather a bit. This was partly due to avoiding the work and partly due to ignorance. I now had a fair sized problem with running bamboo in the area where I thought I could grow some veg. I started to dig out the bamboo but it was hard going because the bamboo had entwined itself with the heavy duty ground covering and I realised it wasn't going to be practical to grow the veg in that area that season.

I thought that maybe growing veg in pots was a good idea because I can move them around the garden while I am straightening out the mess it had become. I started looking at the cost of garden pots and realised that in general they are not cheap and I felt that kind of goes against the idea of growing your own vegetables. We had a few pots that were sitting around waiting to have something happen to them, but they didn't seem quite big enough. I thought about making my own, I had a wooden pallet waiting to go to the dump. Dusting off my (almost non-existent) woodworking skills I threw together a rectangular wooden pot that was about 30cm (12 inches) deep (as per advice found on Google for DIY veg pots),20cm (8 inches) wide and about 120cm (4 feet) long. Great a free wooden pot, except it would rot fairly quickly with soil in it, so I looked around for a veg plant friendly wood paint. I settled on Cuprinol Heritage Garden Shades.

I had a compost bin in the garden since just after I moved in and had been firing in all sorts of kitchen vegetable waste with plenty of "brown" compost-able waste. It was time to see what nature had made with it. On inspection it wasn't quite what I had hoped, it seems I should have maybe used slightly smaller twigs and crunched up the egg shells and cut up the wine corks. Still I wasn't going to waste this free compost. I chucked that in the bottom of my new pot and topped up with some shop (probably B&Q) brought compost. Googled for easy starter veg and decided on planting shop brought seeds of spinach, scallions (spring onions) and beetroot (I like beetroot but dislike scallions, my missus is the reverse).

With the minimum amount of care, up came the seedlings. Great I thought, I can't wait until I can eat them (well, not the scallions). I read up on some more on easily grown veg, found that you can get quite a few carrots to grow in a pots the size I had sat idle (about 30x30cm, 12x12 inches). So I brought some seed trays and made my first mistake which was to plant the carrots in seed trays. Carrots happily grow in seed trays, but they try to grow deep, quickly. Someone pointed this out to me so I sowed more carrot seeds directly into the other idle pot. When I moved the seedlings from the seed tray into the pots their roots had long since hit the bottom of the seed tray and turned or twisted. The plants seemed fine and indeed they were fine, until I they got big enough, old enough to pull. There was nothing wrong with the taste of these carrots, it was just their hilarious shapes. When you are used to seeing the carrots in your local supermarket all straight and uniform, you cant help smirking when you have double, even treble pronged carrots.

The spinach was the first to be ready for testing, now it is probably a just a trick of the mind, but that first bacon and spinach sandwich (sounded like an odd combination to me as well, but don't knock it until you have tried it) was absolutely heavenly.

After this success I was back out to the shops to get seed potatoes and rocket and lettuce seeds.