Gardening and growing some of the aspects of you own food. Damn how fun can this be.! I am not the best or the biggest one in these, but when you see a multi months project succeed, that just gives a damn lot of satisfaction.
Today the tale from the Reaper-x pepper and his history!
I have a pepper lover here in the house. I am already quite a spicy eater, but the mister here really has some love for next level heat in the food. A heat that I can't real deal with, but still I like going on for the challenge.
Last year we already made an attempt on growing some peppers at home, but just when the fruits started to come in, we neglected them a bit too much and were actually too late in the season to start with.
This year was different. I think I planted these seeds in Januari / Febuari first the first phases and that seemed a bit better timingwise.
The thing is with growing peppers in their sprouting phase is that they need a lot of heat. They need a constant heat of around 25 degrees Celsius to actually go from seed to sproud. Well, in mid winter in Holland this isn't the easiest thing to do actually.
So you need a growing box which keeps the heat inside and what I did is I put the box on the floor. I saw this as an advice from someone who was also growing peppers that they gave as advice to put the box on your internet modem, because it is always producing heat to cool off.
Nice advice, but I like the function of the modem actually cooling off, and not locking the heat in causing it to melt. So I searched the house on hot spots on the floor and found where the heating pipes run and where the floor is warmer, and so put the box on there.
Here they are back on the table again, because during the day I would put them in the place where the most sunlight was for extra heat. Yes, it sounds like a hassle and it also was. But they excellerated in growing and that was the end goal!
When they reached a second layer of leaves that was the time to replant them into a bigger house with more soil. Peppers have the tendecy to be very sensitive to changes so initially the plants didn't like this, but they came back better after a couple of days. At this time the plants were still indoors.
Around May I put the plants outside to make them catch more sun and this was a challenge. At first it turned colder and I took them back inside and find all kinds of little flies in there, so I took them back outside. Then a couple of weeks later I was on the road and Spring in Holland was just extremely wet as well which nearly drowned them.
I didn't have the best of hope anymore for these plants, but they did start to develop some flowers in there which was a good sign.
Again I ignored them for a couple of weeks and all of a sudden I saw a lot more leaves in there which later on turned out to be green peppers.
It worked and there were fruits which later on started to turn red. Yay!
Now we knew it started to go in the right direction and it was taking a lot of patience to leave them hanging there to develop more flavour. Because that is when they even get more spicey. On the tree. And so we waited.
Today was harvesting time for the first one to enter the food. Pumpkin soup with 'some extra spice' as we would call it here.
But the fact is, these guys are just damn hot and loaded and exactly what you hoped for with needing some milk on the side!
There are actually loads more in turning red at the moment so there will be some moments of choices coming up what to do with them. Using them more in some food, making a good hotsauce out of them (I hate the vinegar flavor in a lot of hotsauces which is used to preserve the sauce, so need a different recipe for this), and keeping some of the seeds for a next batch next year seems like the best options to go honestly.
That would be cool right? If buying some seeds from these guys would give an endless stream of heat the years afterwards. A little greenhouse would surely help in making the plants bigger and getting them to produce more fruits, but maybe that will be a next step.
For now, cheers to this successstory of heat! Firreeeeee