Chilli seeds again

Last year's Chilli plants were a disaster. I had too many and they were too big, although I managed to keep the green fly off them. They got too big for the windowsill in the kitchen so they were put outside where they effectively stopped growing due to the cold temperature.

This year I am:

• Going to germinate some seeds in plastic bags in the airing cupboard again (this seems very effective).
• Use my heated propagator (effective also).
• Give away more chilli plants, or just cull the weaker ones.
• Top the plants when they get to about 18 inches tall (3-4 foot high chilli plants are impractical).

I have just put Jalapeno, Bird's Eye chilli and Tomato seeds on damp paper towels, into plastic bags and into the airing cupboard (hot press). So in a few days they will hopefully have germinated and they can go into the heated propagator.

And they are off!

Last weekend I put my first chilli seeds into a damp kitchen towel and plastic bag and placed them in the airing cupboard in order to get them to germinate. This it basically the start of my growing season and a way to take my mind off the weather here in Northern Ireland.

Today all eleven (I meant to do 12, doh!) seeds had tiny roots, so they were gently put into coir start plugs and placed in a unheated propagator on the south facing kitchen windowsill.

Being a little concerned about the night time temperature that the seeds will get on the windowsill I bit the bullet and ordered a Garland triple top windowsill heated propagator. I am not sure what the missus will say when she sees it but I find it is often easier to get forgiveness than permission.

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.