End-of-season Chillis

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With the Autumn having been unusually mild, many of my chilli plants have survived longer than normal this year. Some of the luckier ones were brought inside in early October, and have continued to grow and produce fruit. Others, having finished fruiting, have been heavily pruned to try and keep them dormant for the Winter.

It seems odd to be picking ripe chillis in late November, but that’s exactly what I’m doing. Here are photos of some of these late-developers:

The first 3 photos are of “Devil’s Tongue, Chocolate”, a very hot Habanero type (Capsicum Chinense). Most of the big fruits have been picked now, and I’m down to the last few small ones.

This is “Cheiro Roxa”, with its Flying Saucer-shaped fruits, now mostly a sort of pinkish-purple colour.

This plant was one of the last to set fruit this year, and while I had it outside it really didn’t look like being able to ripen any, but when it came indoors that soon changed.

This next one is probably the most significant one for me. My first-ever ripe “Jay’s Peach”, grown from seeds kindly sent to me by fellow chilli enthusiast Enrico, from Italy.

That ripe chilli is very tiny, but I’m pleased to see it nonetheless. I grew its parent plant from seed last year, and although it produced some flowers it did not set any fruit. I kept it over Winter, and this year it grew outside most of the time, along with all my other chilli plants. By the beginning of October there were flowers again, but still no fruit. Bringing it indoors did the trick though – almost immediately some fruits set, and they ripened very rapidly. There are now 4 ripe fruits, though 3 of them look far too small to have seeds inside them. This one might be the exception…

Two of the plants I brought indoors are “Turkey, Small, Red” ones. One of these is still lush and green and producing more fruits. The other died naturally. It produced a final flush of red fruits before withering away. All the leaves fell off, and the stems gradually went yellow, then brown and dry. The last fruits had very thin flesh, and lots of seeds – a typical last effort to reproduce. This is the plant in question:

Pods like that are not so nice for eating, and I have lots of juicier ones already, so this last batch is currently being dried to give me a good stock of seeds so that I can give them to any friends who ask for them. If you live in the UK, I’m happy to give you some of these seeds. You can contact me via my Profile, which appears in the sidebar of my blog page.

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