Late July Chilli update

Everyone knows that I love growing chillis!  Here’s an update on how things are going this year.

The “Nosferatu” plants kept from last year are delivering ripe fruit now:

The difference in colour between the immature and the ripe fruit is really very dramatic, and the ripening process happens very suddenly with this variety. Often a chilli can be partially ripe for a couple of weeks, but these ones seem to go from black to red in not much more than a day.

These are Turkish Sweet Peppers, the first fruits of which are now turning colour.

Last year this variety produced a large number of peppers per plant (I had two), but this year, what with cold spells in the Spring and hail storms etc the number of fruits is much less.

The surface of the first couple of fruits is scarred in a way very reminiscent of the Jalapeno. I’m not sure if this is a good thing or not.

These are “Ohnivec”. I’m tempted to try eating one of the fruits to see what they are like, but I want to see them turn colour first. They will eventually be red.

This is “Piment d’Espelette” – a chilli that thinks it is a pepper,

Or a pepper that thinks it is a chilli maybe?

These next ones are “Ring of Fire”. The fruits on one of my two plants are short and stubby, and those on the other are longer and more wedge-shaped.

“Turkey Small Red” doesn’t so far have any fruits set, possibly as a result of the setback caused by the contaminated compost – whose effects you can clearly see here in the distorted crinkly leaves:

There are plenty of flowers on the plant, so it may yet go on to produce a crop – albeit a late one.

This is “Red Jalapeno”, whose fruits are mostly uncharacteristically round.

The small plant I nicknamed “Redfields Small Red” (possibly “Demon Red”) is setting lots of tiny upward-pointing fruits now.

“Explosive Embers” is a similarly compact plant. It has loads of flowers, but no fruits yet. I have been unable to reproduce the colour of the flowers correctly. You will just have to take it from me that they are a lot less blue and a lot more purple than they appear in my photo to be.

“Bird’s Eye” has made a remarkable recovery from the verge of extinction. It was looking so bad that it came VERY close to being dumped.

Making allowances for that (and ignoring a few brown spots on the leaves), it doesn’t look too bad now, and it even has a few flower buds:

Not illustrated here is “Aji Limon”. At present there is little of interest to show you. Sowing it was a last-minute decision, after the non-germination of a couple of other types. I’m hoping it will be able to produce some fruit before Autumn comes along. Last year it kept on fruiting up till the first frosts.

Anyway, there you go, that’s how my chillis are doing. How are yours?