So I've been a little busy over the summer and so updating the blog's been a bit of a struggle. However, I thought I'd better put up a few of the highlights and lowlights of the last few months.
It's been an awful summer in many respects. May to July was cool and wet, and although I had good growth rates from the plants, flowering was very poor and so was the setting of pods.
In fact, where as I would normally expect to be harvesting from July onwards, not a lot seemed to happen on the pod front until August.
Late September finally started to produce a few ripe pods - certainly enough for my own needs, but nothing like I was hoping to see. The images below show how well things grew, just a shame there weren't any more pods. The lower photo is the fatalii - not a single pod to be seen.
This was the September harvest - heavy on the Marouga Yellow and a few other things, but not exactly the piles of pods I was expecting to see.
October demonstrated that a few of the varieties were doing something, but some were not, so I took out the secateurs and anything that didn't have a pod on it at that point was cut back. The mini-rocotto, despite it's many flowers had no pods, the fatalii similarly and many of the others had a hair cut. it was a shame that such large plants were unproductive, but that's that.
Mid-october also saw the re-introduction of the heating. With a few cooler nights forecasted I set the thermostat to 6 degrees and this seems to have extended the season as usual.
Today (1st November) I've just been down for a tidy up and harvest. There's still much more to do, but hopefully I can spend some time over the next few days getting back on top of things and getting ready for the winter.
Here are the photos from today:
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| PI260560 has been quite prolific later on in the season, producing many medium sized red pods. The plant is quite busy and tangled, so would be best well staked and tied in for better results. |
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| CGN 23258 has produced a good head of small round pods, but only a few have ripened so far. |
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| Probably the most productive of all my wild plants this year, CGN 22871 has produced many pods like these and is continuing to do so. Only issue is that they do not seem to store well - best to dry or freeze these fairly quickly. |
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| Habanero Cristina - small pods trurning creamy yellow as they ripen. Quite productive, but struggling with the poor weather this year. |
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| PI 260504 is covered in these tiny yellow pods. I haven't tried any yet though, but picking could be a tediously slow exercise. |
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| CGN 21500 was billed as a spectacular plant, and I can see that (kind of) but for me it's not been that productive. Maybe next year. |
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| Fatalii red has done quite well this year. Not massively productive, but better than last year. |
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| A few 7 pods have started to ripen. Better than last year, but not amazing. This wont get grown again. |
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| The harvest today (mostly the species shown above with a few Nagas and Marougas thrown in). There's still more to come. |
