Most of my plants (and not just the chillis) were damaged in a big hailstorm about a month ago. Many of them lost a lot of leaves at that time, and even the leaves that didn't get ripped off are still showing the effects. This is one of my "Nosferatu" plants, with its leaves riddled with holes:
After the storm, I adminstered a generous dose of "Tomorite" tomato food to anything I though would benefit from it - tomatoes, chillis, peppers, cucumbers - basically all the "fruiting" vegetables. This coupled with some much better weather, including a fair bit of warm sunshine, has brought about a noticeable recovery. Most of the plants have a good number of fresh young leaves.
Unfortunately my plants have been affected by the same weedkiller-contaminated compost as that which has struck my tomato plants. The obvious symptom is distortion or puckering of the leaves.
I'm hoping that the damage is superficial and that the plants will recover from this, but at very least it has retarded their growth.
This is my array of chilli plants now, mostly lined up on the paving-stones around the raised beds. A few of the bigger plants (the ones from last year) are elsewhere.
Some of them are setting fruit now, for instance this "Red Jalapeno":
The fruit pictured here is still tiny, but it is round rather than long and thin as I would expect. I just hope this is not another effect of the weedkiller contamination.
This is "Piment d'Espelette":
And this one with the masses of tiny flowers is the one I nicknamed "Redfeilds Small Red".
If you look really carefully you might just be able to make out one or two tiny fruits forming.
This is Sweet Pepper "King of the North", worryingly small for this stage of the game. The plant is about 25cm tall and so far has only one fruit:
One of the two "Turkish Sweet Pepper" plants has no fruits at all yet, but the other has these two, which are looking fairly satisfactory:
"Ohnivec" is looking the most promising at present:
I have two plants of "Ring of Fire", which I thought would be a fairly safe bet for my "main crop" chillis. Guess which type has yet to set any fruit at all...
