Last year I had a great crop of chillies. I was so pleased with them that I couldn't bear to throw the plants on the compost heap when they'd finished fruiting.
Last year I had a great crop of chillies. I was so pleased with them that I couldn't bear to throw the plants on the compost heap when they'd finished fruiting. So I saved my favourite two to overwinter indoors as an experiment in chilli endurance.
Although grown in the UK as annuals, chillies are perennial plants, so technically they can last for several years. The climate of their native South and Central America helps though. I once stayed in a hostel in Fiji that had lush, green chilli bushes growing in the grounds. The bushes were huge and bright red chillies hung from them like exotic earrings.
By December my overwintered chillies looked quite dead. I put this down to the fact that it was December, it was dark and miserable and they should have been on the compost heap.
In January I just had two pots of twigs, so in a last-ditch effort to save them, I top-dressed them with some fresh compost and fed them with a seaweed solution. Come March, I had moved house and no longer had a sunny windowsill to keep them on, so I hardened them off quite abruptly by putting them outside.
Against all odds, my chillies burst into new life and vigour. I repotted them in fresh compost and sowed seeds of red clover around the base of their stems, to act as a green manure. I hoped the clover would fix nitrogen in the soil, which would directly feed the chillies and encourage new leaves to grow. This seemed to work, and before long the plants were in full leaf and flower and attracting lots of hoverflies.
I did get some chillies, but not as many as I'd hoped for, and they weren't as hot or flavoursome as the first year's crop. Perhaps this is because I overwintered them, or maybe they rebelled at such harsh treatment. I'll definitely wait until I have a greenhouse before attempting to overwinter chillies again. But I think I'll be taking these two inside again this autumn. I feel I owe it to them.
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