Over the past year I’ve been spending a lot of my time, like everyone else, at home. So one thing that I have spent time energy and money on was my garden. I’ve written about that quite a bit over on my main blog.
Previously I’d noted how hard it was to get chillies in Ireland and what you could get was severely limited. With my greenhouse setup I tried to fix that situation.
I was able to get a couple of fairly standard chilli plants locally, but in order to get a funkier selection I ended up having to go online.
In the end I was able to get most of the plants to bear fruit, though I suspect that I could have got bigger peppers if I’d done things a bit differently.
Peppers are really really slow to grow. And once they’ve grown into something pepper shaped they’re very slow to ripen. I planted most of my chilli plants at the end of May when they arrived from Germany. Back then they were tiny:
A few months later (nearly November!) I have harvested the last of them and there’s no shortage:
I’ll probably pickle some of these though I’ll be keeping some of the bigger to cook with directly. They should keep for a week or two in the fridge and they’ll be a nice addition to a ragù!
Being able to pick a few chilli peppers directly from the plants and use them in my cooking over the last few weeks has been great. Though not knowing how strong some of them were going to be has been a tad risky!