Chillies

[igenlode]

A few more of my chillies blew down overnight (I have been using the windfalls in cooking), so as a lot of them already had dried-out stems ready for picking I decided to take my scissors and harvest the lot.



Not a bad crop when you consider that all this came from the purchase of a single fruit -- I don't know if it will last me a year. As you can see [bottom left], I've been using the windfalls half or a quarter at a time, since the individual chillies are about four times the size of the ones we've grown at home previously, so that equates to about 60–120 helpings of chilli spice: probably ample!

I currently have them in the oven to dry out, but that will have to be done over several sessions.

Comments

[sallymn]

That is a good crop from one fruit to start! We had a couple of plants a year or so ago, and they had fruits which were very pretty but absolutely tiny...

[igenlode]

I would actually have preferred the tiny ones; you get a much larger crop per plant, and they're more flexible to use, more potent for their size, and easier to store. Like the tomatoes -- when you only have room for a couple of pots, growing cherry tomatoes is far preferable to trying to grow full-sized fruit. The year I did that I think I only got three tomatoes from my one plant!

Unfortunately I think I may have spoilt this year's crop while attempting to dry them. I shall have to make a curry using the blackened flakes and see :-(

[watervole]

We need to grow chillies again next year.

[igenlode]

Unfortunately I think I frizzled them when drying (I was trying to economise by having them on the bottom of the oven while baking a slow cake). By the time the cake came out they were almost black instead of red; I was waiting for the large ones to collapse, and indeed those definitely weren't ready, but they were still a lot darker than the successfully dried ones I've been using from three or four years ago :-(