A guide to Growing Scotch Bonnets in the Bitter Cold North
I love chillis, cooking with them, grinding them, fermenting them. Everything just about bar sleeping with them. But here in the frozen north (Scotland) they ain't always available in the shop's. When they are, bizarrely they often are just not hot enough. So I grow my own!
Just now is a perfect time to get sowing as this means you can enjoy chilli fruit joy from spring onwards throughout the year.
First up, getting your seeds
Well this is easy. The best way to get seeds is to use the seeds from one you are going to eat! For ages I assumed you had to buy seeds from eBay and the like and don't get me wrong you can but heck why waste the money!
So get your scotch bonnet and chop the top off like so
Now scrape the seeds out
Next up, planting those blighters
You will need some pots and some compost. Little pots about five inches high like below will do (my good lady says these pots are only three and a half inches high but that can't be right?
You can use any old compost but a handy hint whatever you use is to microwave the compost for a couple of minutes. I used to get compost from a well known DIY store. My house was plagued by little black flies. Eventually I traced them back to the pots that my plants were growing in. A bit of online research later found that often compost from such places has little black fly larvae or eggs in it and a quick microwaving kills em off!
After the microwaving, fill your pots almost to the top and add your seeds, four or five to a pot. We will thin them when they sprout.
Cover with a thin layer of soil, water them till moist but not soaking and then pop in some "sealy" bags. Sandwich ones are ideal. This keeps the moisture in like a little greenhouse
Finally find a nice windowsill that gets as much light as you can get and keep there. Because the bag is sealed you shouldn't have to water it.
I will report back in a week or two when the first seedlings appear. And appear they will as this method has worked every time before. It might be that they are easy to grow!
Of course if you don't have some kind of warmth or heating in your house this might not work!