Demon Harvest
17 October 2022 07:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI picked the Demon Red chillies -- or at least the red/orange ones. I have left the green ones on the plants for the moment in the hopes that I shall at least be able to tell whether or not they are ripening any further...
I didn't count them, but at a very quick guesstimate there are about eighty chillies there -- plus one 'full size' (actually pretty giant) one for comparison! As I normally use chillies at the rate of fewer than one a week, that is far more than a year's supply (actually a bit awkward, since ideally I need to germinate the saved seed the following spring rather than letting it sit around for several years until I actually want more chillies for cooking purposes). The two lone chillies on the bottom right are the ones I was reserving to take the seeds out of; two in case one of them proved not to be properly ripe, or had something else wrong with it.
I put the whole lot together with the catch-up chillies on a baking tray at the bottom of a slow oven for an hour, and when I checked the tray was barely even warm; one thing about an electric oven is that a very large proportion of its dial (50C-150C) falls into the 'extremely slow oven that is useless for almost all normal purposes' category, but I felt that 25C was probably too low even for drying out chillies :-(
So I have now moved the tray up to the upper shelves instead. At the moment I suspect the oven is using more electricity running its light and fan (obligatory) than it is in actual heating.
However at all costs I mustn't forget about it altogether.
I didn't count them, but at a very quick guesstimate there are about eighty chillies there -- plus one 'full size' (actually pretty giant) one for comparison! As I normally use chillies at the rate of fewer than one a week, that is far more than a year's supply (actually a bit awkward, since ideally I need to germinate the saved seed the following spring rather than letting it sit around for several years until I actually want more chillies for cooking purposes). The two lone chillies on the bottom right are the ones I was reserving to take the seeds out of; two in case one of them proved not to be properly ripe, or had something else wrong with it.
I put the whole lot together with the catch-up chillies on a baking tray at the bottom of a slow oven for an hour, and when I checked the tray was barely even warm; one thing about an electric oven is that a very large proportion of its dial (50C-150C) falls into the 'extremely slow oven that is useless for almost all normal purposes' category, but I felt that 25C was probably too low even for drying out chillies :-(
So I have now moved the tray up to the upper shelves instead. At the moment I suspect the oven is using more electricity running its light and fan (obligatory) than it is in actual heating.
However at all costs I mustn't forget about it altogether.