A bumper pepper harvest

Tuesday 24th October 2017
Still mowing
Crazy as it seems, I've been doing a lot of mowing this last week. The weather in our part of the world has been unbelievably mild and dry so the grass is still growing fast.

Wednesday 25th October 2017
A quick trip to the beach
A trip to the beach. With high tide falling mid morning, there was no avoiding it and the limited beach space made for perfect socialising conditions for the dogs. Boris really isn't that bothered. He is completely obsessed with the ball and rolling around in wet sand. Arthur on the other hand is desperate to meet every single dog he sees.
There were children everywhere too as it was half term. At least they are getting out in the fresh air, though we did hear one mother telling her child not to dig in the sand as it was wet and dirty! eh?
We didn't stay in Norfolk too long as it was absolutely packed. With the dogs tired out we returned to the smallholding and ventured into the polytunnel, which has all gone a bit overgrown.

Bumper pepper harvest
I would love to use the polytunnel to hold crops over the winter, but unfortunately I will soon need to clear everything out and thoroughly clean everything to keep the spider mite and blight down next year.
Today's task was to harvest and sort out the pepper plants. They were slow to get going this year and I forgot all about them. But peppers and chillis seem to thrive on neglect and Sue and I had soon collected a bumper crop.
Most notable were the lemon chillis - we will have enough for the next few years! The paprika chilli had done well, but the Jalapeno looked suspiciously like Cayenne - this often happens with chillis.
The sweet peppers had succumbed a little to the mice and slugs - in fact they are both partial to the hot ones too - but fortunately there was enough for everyone.
The Sweet Bananas were especially prolific this year and the long twisty Turkish Corbaci peppers made an attractive change from the more familiar bell peppers.

We cut the dried up angelica stalks too. They are hollow, so they have become the latest addition to the insect hotel, which is gradually getting filled with a rich choice of bug habitats.

The final polytunnel harvest (almost)

Cayenne chillis

Ideally I would grow crops in my polytunnel year round, but realistically the space is best used for the classic covered crops - tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and chillis. I do use it for a few early potatoes, which works well as they occupy the soil before anything else goes in. I also grow carrots in the polytunnel as it's the only way I have any success with them.
A few other more exotic crops have made it in too - melons, watermelon, tomatillos. They do okay but not amazingly. I've never had much luck with aubergines either.

The last of the tomatoes

One crop which does earn its place in the polytunnel, though it does its best to take over the whole place, is butternut squash. They produce well and love the conditions in there. I grow Butternut Waltham.

The last few butternut squashes

I have also been growing some climbing beans in the polytunnel, but have decided that on the whole they do just as well outside. The only exception to this are yardlong beans which need to be undercover.

However, my polytunnel honeymoon period is over now. Pests have found their way in, particularly red spider mite, which is living proof that if lots of individuals achieve a little then the sum of their actions achieves great things. Unfortunately, their efforts go into sucking the life out of my plants! They always take a hold on the beans first and for this reason I am going to give the polytunnel a break from beans. I think it's because the beans grow up above where the sprinklers reach and afford the mites a safe haven, for they like warm, dry conditions.


I did a pretty thorough job of cleaning the polytunnel last winter, but it obviously wasn't enough to prevent a few mites from overwintering. This year, if they come back, I'll have to use biological controls. I have no objections to using these, but they are expensive.

Jalapeno chillis and Paprika

Anyway, getting back to the point, the tunnel is more straightforward to manage if it goes through a period of being pretty much empty. This makes it far easier to conduct basic cleaning and maintenance during the winter. The only crops which will continue in there are celery and a little Swiss Chard. Protected, these crops will last long into the winter and even when they die down, they just sit dormant and spring back into growth in the spring, offering a very early crop before they go to seed in their second year.

Tomatillos

The classic polytunnel crops have completely run out of energy come late November. A few cold nights, dull days and moisture in the air cause everything to suddenly die down. So last week I took one final harvest - the chillis, any peppers left on the plants and a few tomatoes still clinging on.

Red, yellow, green and purple peppers

The tomatoes especially were on their way out, so I roasted them up before passing them through the mouli to make passata, which I then freeze to use in my winter dishes.

Passata in the making

The last job before the big clear out was to collect some fruits for next year's seed. This is not always as easy as just collecting a fruit and taking out the seeds, since many will cross-pollinate all too easily. For this reason, earlier in the year I had tried to isolate some of the chillis and peppers by tying a nylon bag over the flowers after they had set. This wasn't entirely successful - most of them dropped off the plant after about a week. But I did end up with a couple of 'pure' fruits from which to take seeds. 

Next year's seeds

The polytunnel is now pretty much cleared out. I'm careful to remove all old foliage and dying vegetation so that pests, fungi and viruses aren;t harboured in the tunnel.

This winter I'll be reorganising the beds again to make better use of the middle of the tunnel and to make the beds down the side easier to reach. It won't be too long until I'm setting up mini greenhouses ready to raise next year's seedlings in there.

Peppers sweet and hot - Saving the seeds

A redesign of my polytunnel space this year gave me a central bed just ideal for sweet peppers and they have responded admirably. I already have plenty of fruits, though there'll be a wait if I want to eat them red. But just look at this one, appropriately named Purple Beauty.

This year I am growing five varieties of Sweet Pepper. There are:

Lamuyo - an F1 variety, great for chunky green peppers
Hebar - from Reelseeds.co.uk - produces an abundance of very early, pale yellow peppers, turning red later
Yellow Ringo - A long, yellow variety, very sweet
Purple Beauty - from Realseeds.co.uk again - as it's name suggests. Another early cropper, so good for UK
Hungarian Hot Wax - really a chilli, but mild enough to be eaten as a pepper, especially when young and lime-yellow. Slightly hotter when they turn orange and then red, but still won't blow your head off

Hungarian Hot Wax

Lamuyo

.

Hebar

I tried to grow Red Marconi too, a lovely long red pepper, but the cheap seed I bought had clearly lost its viability as two attempts to germinate the measly 8 seeds I received both failed.

And therein lies a problem. For pepper seed (both sweet and hot chilli) does not stay viable for long. It is slow to start, taking up to two months for some of them to germinate, so if it fails you are really pushing it to start over. Having said that, with the aid of the polytunnel I do start my peppers off much later than other people. Many start them in January, when you need at least artificial heat and maybe even artificial light to get them going. I really can't see the point of this. Instead, I start my sweet peppers off in the first week of March and my chillis even later, in the last week of March. I have no trouble getting them to the ripened fruit stage and the seedlings certainly appreciate the extra heat of late spring and early summer.

The chillis that I grow are Jalapeno, Habanero, Scotch Bonnet, Cayenne, Paprika and Tabasco. Nothing special. In fact, I got most of them in a reduced priced packet of mixed chillis from a pound shop!
But all my original purchases of pepper seeds are now rapidly losing their viability. I had to sow plenty more than I needed to take account of this and even then I failed completely on the paprika. Luckily a friend had some to spare.
Not that I am tight, but I don't really want to go out and purchase a dozen packets of seed next year just to use a few from each packet. So the obvious answer is to save my own seed from what I have grown.
But chillis and peppers will readily cross, producing unpredictable offspring. That large sweet pepper could conceal the heat of a Jalapeno and that fiery Scotch Bonnet could be a completely damp squib.
Short of growing them a mile apart, or constructing special net cages for each variety, there has not really been a way to save my own seed.
However, here's where I sing the praises of The Real Seed Collection, a not-for-profit company which aims to actively encourage its customers to save their own seed and not need to keep going back for more. Without getting on my high horse too much, it makes commercial sense for the large seed companies (and some, like Monsanto, are truly global corporations) to discourage this sort of activity. After all, if we all acted like the thrifty gardeners of old and saved our own seed, how would they make their money?
Here's the header from the Real Seed Catalogue:

You'll find no F1 hybrids or genetically modified seed here - just varieties that do really well and taste great when grown by hand on a garden scale.
The name of the catalogue reflects what we are working to provide: real seeds for real gardeners wanting to grow proper vegetables.

Many are rare heirlooms, and because all are open-pollinated (non-hybrid) , you can save your own seed for future years, using the instructions we supply. There's no need to buy new seed every year!

 

The Real Seed Company have lots of great advice about seed saving on their website. They have also come up with a way of saving chilli and pepper seeds by isolating individual flowers on a plant.
Basically you make small bags out of old tights (stockings will do too, though not fishnets as they need to keep the insects out!). They say to sow, but I just tied the ends. You then place this over a flower which is just about to open and use a peg to close the end of the bag. This way nothing can get in or out. More precisely, no insect can transfer pollen from another plant to your chosen subject. Fortunately peppers will readily self-pollinate, so all you are doing is making sure that your chosen pepper develops in this way.


Obviously you want to be choosing a pepper on one of your best plants and it doesn't work on F1 varieties, as if fertile they will not produce true to type, most convenient for the companies which push them so hard. You also want to make sure that you bag your flower early enough in the season for the fruit to eventually ripen properly, otherwise you'll have no seed to collect.

After about 5 days, once the fruit has set, you remove the tights, marking the stem with a plastic twist tie so you know which fruit to eventually collect the seed from.
Once you collect the seed, dry it well and look after it through the winter (more very useful advice on the RealSeeds website). And that's it. The following year you'll have plenty enough seed for you and your friends.
Of course, if you've got an axe to grind with any of them, you could always try to cross a sweet Yellow Ringo with a Scotch Bonnet and give them that seed instead!

Polytunnel Prolifica

Tomatoes, cucumbers, chillies, peppers and beans.
The polytunnel really adds an extra dimension to our food production.

I've got aubergines this year.
The Listada de Gandia are fruiting
much better than the more usual
Black Beauty.



Tigerella and Black Cherry.

Things have moved on quickly in the polytunnel in the last few weeks.
We can now rely on a handful of ripe, tangy tomatoes everyday, red ones, yellow ones, green ones, black(ish) ones, stripy ones, big ones, small ones, round ones, pear-shaped ones. Or, to put it another way... Moneymaker, Sunbaby, Green Zebra, Black Cherry, Black Russian, Tigerella, Marmande, Red Cherry, Gardeners Delight, Ildi, Roma. It's a tad more inspirational than the tomato section of the supermarket!

There's always a slightly longer wait than we'd like for tomatoes and there's a slow build up. The real flood will be another month or so yet, but Sue has already started cooking up sauces and passatas to go in the freezer.








The cucumbers are coming gradually, but are a bit disappointing given the number of plants that I have. Having said that, we're still getting a couple a week, which is plenty. Just not enough to be giving them away or selling them.

Onto more exotic produce and, now that I've stopped the overhead irrigation, the peppers are faring much better. This is very exciting as it's a crop I've never succeeded with before.


Peppers and chillies, mid-August

 

Then there's the chillies, in their numerous forms and levels of heat. These have all done very well this year, but have left Sue and I with a bit of a puzzle.


Peppers and Chillies, early September

Several years ago, we joined a truck tour of East Africa for the summer holidays. Every day we would call in at a local market to stock up on supplies. I well remember rather brashly volunteering to test a rather small, green chilli for heat. I hesitantly nibbled the end, expecting my head to go volcanic, my lips to swell, my brow to sweat and my tongue to go numb. But not a bit of it. These chillies just tasted like watery peppers. We purchased a small bag full and they were duly added to that evening's concoction... which blew everyone's head off! For those inoffensive chillies had suddenly changed their nature and were fiery as hell.

The point of this little tale is that the same has happened again. We nibbled a little of each and every chilli variety in the polytunnel and, without exception, they all just tasty like rather mild peppers. But the minute Sue chopped one up they completely changed, like Jekyll and Hyde. This was made worse by the fact that Sue carelessly rubbed her eye and got chilli in it.








The Borlottis have all been picked now.

I've picked most of the beans now and saved the seeds either for sowing next year or for winter cassoulets. The chickpea crop has been abandoned after our harvest of one chickpea!

But this has left more space for the Butternut Squash plants to ramble. Other squashes, pumpkins and courgettes have performed disappointingly in the polytunnel. I think they are much happier outside. But getting butternuts to ripen is never easy and they seem happier with the tropical conditions in the tunnel.
It looks as if we'll get at least half a dozen fine specimens and the first is well on its way to being ripe.
I've got my eyes on the Fenland Smallholders produce show for a couple of these.

Butternut Squash coming along nicely.