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Planning the season

One of the most important considerations when growing Chillies is how much time you have to grow them. By that, I don’t mean how much time you have to care for your Chillies, but rather, the amount of time that is left in the Chilli growing season once seeds have been started.  After germination, the plants will need to mature, set fruit, and for the pods to ripen before harvest. With a short growing season (particularly in countries like the United Kingdom), this can be challenging

After all, you can spend as much time as you like looking after your Chillies, but if they have been planted too late, that is another issue. It can create complications.

Nothing is more disheartening in growing Chillies than spending months caring for plants and then not being able to make a harvest. Last year, that happened to me. I left it too late to start my seeds, and before I knew it, I was facing a ripening problem. My plants had produced plenty of chillies, only I hadn’t allowed enough time for the fruit to ripen. The season was drawing to a close  and I had a lot of unripe fruit on my hands. If I had been more careful with the varieties I planted, I wouldn’t have needed to face this problem. Planting faster growing varieties would have meant they would have matured more quickly, set fruit earlier, and I would have had ample time for them to ripen and  make a harvest.

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What I am overwintering

While we regard Chillies as annuals in the UK, they are perennials in their natural environments. In these environments, it rarely reaches freezing the way it does here during winter. As a result, most Chillies subjected to the freezing conditions during winter in the United Kingdom will die. Full stop. A few varieties are cold weather resistant (to a certain extent), but none can cope with frost.

So, if we want them (or a selected few at least) to survive wintry conditions, the plants need to be brought indoors or kept in a protected environment outdoors. This process is called overwintering.

This year, I am overwintering twelve plants. Two of these (yellow Scotch bonnets) are in their second overwintering. I overwintered them for the first time last year. The remaining plants are four Satans kisses, an Aji Crystal, an Apache, three Barak Chillies and two unknowns (somehow, I managed to lose their markers). In time, once they flower again, I will attempt to identify them

Usually, I cut plants back for overwintering. I also always keep them in the warmest room in our house, out of direct sunlight. Under most circumstances, this means placing the plants in an area next to our fireplace in our lounge.

While I keep them in the lounge as I usually do, I didn’t prune any of these plants this year, as I might have done in previous years. I took the view that except for the Aji Crystal, my Scotch bonnets, and one bigger Satan’s kiss, my smaller plants could be considered to be ornamentals. They are, on average, only about twelve inches tall. They were also exceptionally pretty Chillies and had aesthetic appeal. With this in mind, I resolved to treat the smaller plants as house plants. For the larger plants, I decided to wait for them to lose their leaves before I pruned them back.

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