Everything about homegrowing stuff is something that takes time. There is realy no quick solution once you put something in the ground, and also the results are not really guarantees. Luckily I am doing this in a hobby kind of way and everything that ends up being eadible is just a pure win.
This time around is that the first of the hot peppers is ready. And this is not one pepper, this is a whole stash! Bring in the fire!
How it started
Remember a couple months ago when I went to the 'Dutch chili fest' and I bought some small pepper plants from all different kinds. I wrote about the whole experience back in the time in this blog.
At that time I bought three different plants from this cute little stand which had a large variety in plants. And for $3 per piece, this is not a bad deal is you are just an easy pepper lover like I am.
See that they have all of those nice little name labels? Small disclaimer on this that when you leave those labels out in the sun and in the rain that they turn vague. That means I have no idea one what peppers these are now anymore.
All of these three plants have turned into mystery pepper bushes and we decided to see what happens.
I started with growing them inside for the first month and a half. The weather sucked and it was way too wet outside, and I decided to let them grow behond glass. They had a couple of bulbs already and I also did some pollination inside with a cotton swab. You just brush the cotton swab through different flowers that are open already and go on to the next. The pollen will be distributed over the flowers like this.
Once outside
After I took them outside since the beginning of June it was clearly noticable that the plant started in a sprint to grow a lot faster than inside. The amount of hours of sun was larger and also because of the amunt of bees and little flies from the blackberry bush the pollination process took a pace up.
The bush was producing a ton of little purple flowers and all of those went growing into little peppers. Yay!
And yes, the bush also needed some support from whatever piece of wood that was lying around. The main stem is still not that gigantic and you could see what the wind was giving it some issues when it was blowing big.
When you look closely you can see peppers, purple flowers and also some peppers just starting to grow.
And then the question starts to rise....
What kind of pepper is this? Because when you taste it, it is decent heat. The peppers are like 3 centimeters big and just 1 pepper is enough to heat a whole meal very decent.
I am flirting with the idea that this is the 'Chinese 5 colour pepper' where you can see examples of the peppers here and here. Only this plant is giving just the purple peppers and no other colours. It has heat from somewhere between the 30.000 and 50.000 point on the scoville scale making it three times as hot as a jalapeno.
It is time to harvest at least some of them and throw them in the pan with regular food. But I guess also the drying process will start again to dry them on low temperature and mayeb even grind them into pepper powder which is super easy to use in other dishes.
So 3 months after the first buy the first plants is giving their peppers. The two other plants are starting to give flowers now so I am very curious what will come out of them and how hot it will be.
To be continued over the next couple of months!