Chilli census
23 November 2025 11:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI finally cut down and harvested from this year's chilli plants -- and counted how many dried chillies I still have left from the crop of 2022, which is 40 red ones (meaning that I have used thirty in the past year!) and 62 green ones, despite my increasingly desperate attempts at using them up, including putting them two at a time whole into soups (gives merely a slight spicy effect unless you are foolish enough to chew down on the rehydrated chilli -- and since they are only about half an inch long and green/brown in colour this is quite easily done without noticing!)
This year's crop has been quite exceptional in that almost every single full-size chilli has fully ripened; the orange and green ones are almost all undersized, and the green ones are such tiny little immature buds that they are not worth keeping. (I chewed up a couple, and they are barely hot at all -- unlike the full-sized dried green chillies from the previous harvest, which may not be ripe enough to grow but are definitely vicious.) Compare with last year, where I had just nineteen ripe ones to a ratio of a hundred or so yellow/orange/green:
This year the count comes in at two hundred large full-size outdoor-grown red-hot chillies, after what was a quite exceptionally successful chilli-growing year. I'm not quite sure why; presumably it was hot at the right time and wet at the right time. The tomatoes stopped cropping altogether for a month or so, otherwise they would presumably have done better -- I did get a second late flush of fruit, some of which ripened and most of which had to be picked underripe as the plants simply died and left it dangling. But the chillies were just extremely successful.
Final figures: 210 red chillies, 45 orange chillies and 24 pathetic green stubs. I'm not even going to bother keeping anything bar the red chillis (which are now in the oven drying out).
This year's crop has been quite exceptional in that almost every single full-size chilli has fully ripened; the orange and green ones are almost all undersized, and the green ones are such tiny little immature buds that they are not worth keeping. (I chewed up a couple, and they are barely hot at all -- unlike the full-sized dried green chillies from the previous harvest, which may not be ripe enough to grow but are definitely vicious.) Compare with last year, where I had just nineteen ripe ones to a ratio of a hundred or so yellow/orange/green:
This year the count comes in at two hundred large full-size outdoor-grown red-hot chillies, after what was a quite exceptionally successful chilli-growing year. I'm not quite sure why; presumably it was hot at the right time and wet at the right time. The tomatoes stopped cropping altogether for a month or so, otherwise they would presumably have done better -- I did get a second late flush of fruit, some of which ripened and most of which had to be picked underripe as the plants simply died and left it dangling. But the chillies were just extremely successful.
Final figures: 210 red chillies, 45 orange chillies and 24 pathetic green stubs. I'm not even going to bother keeping anything bar the red chillis (which are now in the oven drying out).