Bell and chilli peppers - Madras, celica, apache, topeppo rosso, minimix

One of my little wrinkly peppers from last year, misshapen but perfectly
tasty, I just didn't eat many 

Lets talk peppers.  Actually no lets talk heat.  We British are mocked incessently for talking about the weather.  This is because we talk incessantly about the weather.  And today, today it is hot.  30+ degree kind of hot. Way too hot for me. Im off to Hampton Court flower show on Friday, I have serious concerns all the flowers will have wilted by the time I get there!

Amongst those who I hope are enjoying basking in these glorious rays are my peppers.  Yes, my vegetable buying did not stop at just tomatoes.

I had two pepper plants last year, both shop bought as my efforts to grow from seed fell flat.  And they produced peppers, which is obviously good.  However these peppers never turned red and they were funny little gnarled things so I often left them to shrivel in the bottom of the fridge, which is bad.  This year I am determined to actively use my crop, as there should be a considerable one.  A dislike for the produce has not stopped me investing in a solid stock.

I didn't have a bad crop, but these little green peppers never went red, which is annoying

The first pepper that caught my attention was Madras.  I have totally been sucked in by the colour.  This bell pepper purports to be very very dark purple, which is cool.  However, like all normal peppers it should turn red as it ripens.  Only none of mine did last year so actually I might get to eat black peppers.  I don't believe there is anything else that exciting about this, there is only so exciting a pepper can be after all.

The second variety I picked out is sweet pepper Celica.  Looking it up on the internet I have read that it is "a vast improvement for plant and fruit quality compared to the popular Bell Boy," which is great, because Bell boy is one of the varieties that I neglected to properly use last year.

The last plant I purchased is seriously different for me.  I bought a chilli pepper, an apache.  I have never grown one before.  Its a slightly unusual purchase because for one, I don't really like chilli peppers, and two I have no idea what I am going to do with them when I have got some.  But I thought it would be fun, and I have so many pots to water now one more is hardly gong to make much of a difference.

I have more peppers, but these I grew myself.  I think the fact that I bought peppers hints at the level of faith I had in my ability to keep pepper seedlings from the slugs.  Turns out the garage is a fairly slug-less place, although I did find cheeky beggar in there which was swiftly removed.

My little seed grown peppers, they are only small at the moment but I have high hopes for these little plants 

I have two varieties, topeppo rosso, which is one of those that has lovely squished fruits that look very Italian.  I have noticed that the packet says "thick fleshed" which im not sure if is good or not.  I have two of these.  I have four sweet minimix, which are thumb-sized, tiny, red yellow and orange peppers.  Hopefully both of these will be a worthwhile addition to the crop because I have yet to pot these up.

I will keep you all posted with the pepper progress.  I only did one post on peppers last year, and for months it was my best read post, so apparently people can't get enough of peppers, and who am I not to oblige.

My week in sowing 4 - Peas, carrots and peppers

Home grown produce, can't wait!

This week for me has been all about the vegetables.  My garage windowsill is still stuffed and nothing shows any sign of wishing to move out any time soon, so this week I again am focussing on more hardy souls, like peas.

Sugar Snap Peas - Jessy.  I didn't sow my own sugar snaps last year, I cheated and bought them from the garden centre.  This did not turn out as well as you might have imagined.  The peas are sowed commercially more than one to a cell, and I didn't get them planted out quick enough so by the time I did I couldn't get them separated.  I was pretty brutal with them, but in the end had to plant them in clusters. This did not aid picking as I couldn't see the things amongst the thicket of vines.  This year Im doing it myself.  Im going to have a lot less plants to work with, but they will hopefully not be such an unruly bunch.  Currently I have sown 15 peas, but I might do a second crop to keep the peas rolling in during the summer.  I think peas are fairly unfussy, so I sowed them in normal compost in one of my segmented plastic trays.  They like to go in two inches deep, but the cells are not much deeper, so they have to make do with an inch and a half.

Pea - Kelvedon Wonder. I did grow these last year, and they were a roaring success; big, juicy, succulant.  Or at least the slugs thought so.  They dived in promptly the moment the leaves had appeared.  I saved most of them, but this year I will be on it right from the start.  Being only a different type of pea I sowed them in exactly the same way as the sugar snaps.  Both are outside braving it, protected by some fleece at night.

Small and perfectly formed, Bugs Bunny would be proud.  Ok maybe I wouldn't mind them a tad bigger

Carrot - Chanteray Red Cored 2.  I loved growing carrots last year, can't remember exactly eating a huge amount, but thats hardly the point!  Its all about the growing in my book, especially as carrots take so little effort.  I do not have the right soil for carrots, they like it sandy I believe, and thats the last thing I have.  Thick and heavy solid clay is all my garden beds can provide.  Therefore I grow carrots in pots.     I mix some fresh compost with some old compost garden soil mix, with a good couple of trowel-fulls of sand.  The good thing about stocking up on garden essentials last year, such a great big old bag of horticultural sand, means that when you get up one morning and decide to sow carrots, you don't first have to make a trip to the local garden centre.  Hopefully my little orange friends will enjoy my soil recipe.  The seeds are just sprinkled on the top of the soil, et voila! C'est fini.  Leave till summer.

I know I thought my compost was poor last year, but looking back its terrible!  Seems to be mainly composed of wood rather than soil.  None of these seedlings survived the great slug outbreak of 2014

Pepper - Sweet minimix and sweet topepo rosso.  Ah the peppers.  We had a tumultuous time, my peppers and I, last year.  I sowed them, they grew, I had a beautiful tray of seedlings, and then a slug invited itself to dinner.  One, just one little seedling was left after that first feast, and then he snuck back and polished that one as well.  So my peppers were exclusively provided by shop bought plants.  Weirdly, my all time most read post is one in which I admit that I neglected to eat most of the peppers I grew last year.  Despite being popular, I plan to not repeat this post again this year.  As the seeds are from last year I didn't stint.  I sowed ten-ish seeds in two pots, one variety in each.  They are currently snug on my kitchen windowsill, but they will have to elbow themselves some room the moment the pop up.  Seed compost, quarter of an inch deep, if your interested.

Who named this plant?! How can such as thing of beauty be called a toad lily? So spotty

Tricyrtis - hirta. Ok so its not all vegetables.  This is another new seed purchase.  Shouldn't have admitted that, the other half will not be happy! I bought these at Kew Gardens because I saw these at a garden I visited last year and was completely entranced by them.  Getting hold of one myself has been a different matter.  I have not been able to get my hands on this elusive seed anywhere, so when I saw it in Kew, it was clearly going to be mine.  These are a lily-type of flower, which hopefully means they will not be poisonous to my cat.  Their common name is the toad lily, which I love.  What an unattractive  name for a lovely flower.

Sweet Peas - Yes more sweet peas, remember I wish to hand them out in the street to strangers in the summer.  I actually sowed these last week but I forgot.  I sowed one of each of the varieties I sowed originally.  They have the challenge of germinating outside which none of my sweet peas so far have had to do.  I can't promise this will be my last batch.

Bell Peppers- Theoretically Red and Orange, in reality green

Considering during the Spring I had an almost continuous stakeout at a seedling tray praying to the Gods of germination and growth to aid me in this difficult time of pepper seedling production, and the slug debacle?  Remember that? Read it here if not, when every seedling was devoured and I did something in revenge that I am not proud of.  Considering slugs died in this cause, considering all of that, I have been remarkably unmoved by the continuous quiet production of peppers all summer by the two plants I bought, sat by the wall making little fuss.

I think the reason for this is, truth be told, I don't particularly like peppers.  Yes I enjoy green ones in a rather nice black bean stir fry I make occasionally, but other than that quite honestly they have a tendency to make me burp.

I actually rather like pepper flowers, very sweet and simple but with really open wide middles (technical term there) where the mini pepper starts swelling out from

So when every so often I pluck a nice little green pepper off a plant, for despite having both red and orange varieties every single pepper has remained resolutely green without so much as a blush of colour, I am left thinking; now what.  Some have made it to the table and were delicious, if faintly windy.  Others Im sad to admit I found mouldering weeks later in the bottom of the fridge, shrivelled like a mummified body and well past edible stage.  Even now there is a perfectly nice pepper sat on the side, my last as all flowers are over and I have no desire to eat it at all.

I finally turfed the plants out of their pots and into the compost at the weekend.  It may be a warmer than usual October but it was time to get real about continuing pepper prospects.  I was quite surprised to find extensive root systems in the pots, almost at the point of being root bound.  This would suggest that maybe peppers would prefer slightly larger living accommodation.  Good job I didn't wedge two in each pot as I had originally planned!

Good and shiny, but also rather worryingly always with a small hole in
as well, never a resident in the pepper but somebody has passed through

So will I be growing peppers again as I take such disinterest in their produce?  Probably.  Although possibly in bigger pots.  Unfortunately the thrill is in the growing not necessarily the produce so I doubt I will be able to resist trying from seed again next year.  I will just have to make stir fry more regularly in the future.