Misty mornings and a continuous fire means winter is well on its way. This is our first winter on the land, and we have semi-prepared.
November has been an interesting month in the garden, bringing us great crops! we harvested the remainder of our chilli and sweet pepper plants and had a huge amount of fruit, many are unripe but we got to get them all before the frost does!
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Varieties we grew
Cayenne Diane chilli, pretty hot! grew very nicely, not much attention given. started off in trays on the windowsill in February, planted out into the greenhouse in May. I had so many young plants I decided to grow some in pots for the comparison. overall plants put in the ground grew much bigger, healthier, bearing more fruit than those in pots. However, late September I was able to move those in pots into the polytunnel in an attempt to get even more out of them! They are still going and have a good crop of healthy red chillies just waiting to be picked. I will
Nigels Outdoor green chilli, sweet refreshing flavour but no heat. The seeds came from The Real Seed Company, easy to grow, little support and bear lots of fruit! These seeds are a variety that grows well in the UK climate which is great as I can’t handle the heat anyway!
Spaghetti chilli, nicely mild spicy! grows massive and bears a huge amount of fruit! does need some support but easy and well worth it!
Scotch bonnet, too far.
Sweet Peppers
We also had a decent harvest of Sweet Peppers which were started from seed indoors back in February and March.
California Wonder is a great green bell pepper, they grew easily in the greenhouse, and gave us a great yield! The slugs and snails love these fruits so you do have to keep on eye on, as they have no mercy.
Lipstick pepper was another, full of flavour and ready before the others, it’s smaller fruits do ripen to red however we were a bit eager…
What I learnt?!
Cut back big leaves to allow sunlight to reach the fruits or they will not ripen fully! Also remove the lower leaves that give access to slugs and snails or they will go straight for the fruit!
