Another month is steaming by and my chilli plants are really beginning to take off now. In just the last couple of days all 37 chilli plants are showing surges of growth, with lush green leaves and taller stems.
I’ve had to re-pot two of the plants, two weeks ago (one Aji and one Cayenne), each into 1 liter pots which is much earlier than expected. The rest will need to be potted up in the next week or so.
The other good news is that I’ve still got my one and only heritage chilli plant – Mushroom yellow, that while still pretty tiny in size is finally producing it’s second set of leaves.
After I’ve potted each plant up into 1 liter pots they’ll be ready for their next move.
At the beginning of May I’ll start adding the chilli plants to the outside grow houses to get the used to the new temperatures. They are never allowed to stay in the house all year. I think they would look just fine all growing over the dinning table but the Boss has other ideas about that one ;-)
So they will eventually be housed outside only this year I’ll be sure to keep the front of the grow houses shut at night, something I wasn’t able to do last yr and forgot at other times which caused the chilli plants to slow their growth down completely which in turn made the flowers and then the fruit even later than normal.
Review of growing season so far…
- The coir did as good as compost for sowing the seeds. Where I may have sown seeds a little too deep on my first set, in coir, it was rectified in the compost at the second set of sowing.
- I didn’t even buy proper (finer) potting compost I just used rather more bulky compost when sowing the second set which didn’t seem to cause too many issues either, however there is still the low percentage germination rates which was disappointing so I think the compost may well have had influence on this.
- Next year I would definitely hold off sowing the seeds until end of February beginning of March. I appreciate the plants needs as much growing time as possible but my second sowing (March) was far more successful than the first and I believe this was because I was able to regulate the night time temperatures better with the heated propagator along side the house heating.
37 plants is actually rather manageable, compared to previous years where I’ve had hundreds, but still too many for my sized grow houses so I’ll use as much space as possible and give the rest of the plants away. If you want one (and live in Grimsby), let me know :-)
