Growing hot peppers in Kyoto, Japan

This is my third year growing peppers since moving here; my first year was pretty good (completely accidentally), last year was a bit of a disaster due to unusual weather and my general gardening ignorance, so I can only hope for 2024 I can apply some of the lessons I have learnt on the way, and I am so happy to find such a treasure trove of knowledge and experienced growers here in this forum!

There are some specific challenges to growing here: in addition to the annual monsoon/rainy season, Kyoto City sits at the bottom of a valley system surrounded on three sides by mountains, which causes cold, dry winters and hot, humid summers. Summers are particularly hot since we are a long way from the sea, so we get no nice sea breezes or cooling effects (unlike our neighbours Osaka and Kobe). It is also hard to obtain the hot pepper seeds I want as the Japanese government has now decided you need a phytosanitary certificate to ship any chili seeds from suppliers abroad.

As you might guess from my username I make hot sauces, currently purely as a hobby, and I am trying to settle on a couple of recipes using chillies that I grow myself. @internationalfish tested one of my older sauces, lived, and very kindly gave me a lots of great feedback and advice. If there are any other members based in Japan I am happy to send you a bottle of my hot sauce from my next batch to test.

Anyway, I have big house move in summer so I am limiting my growing this year to:

Hot Thai (overwintered from last year)
Buena Mulata
Fatalii
Chocolate bhutlah
Chocolate jolokia

I may attempt to grow habaneros again (last year my plants were destroyed in a typhoon) and maybe a Jalapeno for a green hot sauce, I can purchase these as seedlings locally, but I am undecided - I don't want to have to lug too many mature plants across the city in the middle of summer.

Anyway, thank you for reading and any advice, help or recommendations are most welcome! Happy growing to you all in 2024!

 

[bansho hot sauce]

Been a while since my last post - big house move, a few business trips abroad, etc, - so here goes!
This summer was the hottest I have experienced yet in Japan. Those plants that survived the monsoon, then all dropped their flowers in August and are only starting to flower again now. Early Jalapeño died at the end of July. My fatalii made a grand total of five fruits, then never fruited again (the peppers I did get were delicious and mind-blowingly hot, they are frozen and going into my next hot sauce) entering some kind of moribund stasis. Then, at the height of summer I got the mother of all aphid infestations, only my chocolate jolokia was unaffected. Pyrethrin did the job, but I think the affected plants were weakened long-term by the onslaught, at a time they were already badly affected by the heat.

That said, it's not all doom and gloom, I've been lucky to discover the star of this year: chocolate bhutlah, consistently giving me fruits right up to August. Honourable mention to my Buena Mulata, which is fruiting again now and these post-summer chiles are shorter but hotter and possibly more flavoursome than its earlier ones. All in all I am getting close to my target of 1kg chillies in my freezer for this year for my hot sauce, but it has been hard work and I may end up falling a little short.

Given the extremes of weather we get here, I'm seriously thinking about specialising in indoor growing for the future! In May I started a DWC hydroponics setup (an all-in-one kit from Amazon, it was on sale) just for fun more than anything, and am growing a NuMex orange spice jalapeño in it (hydroponics or not, this variety is amazing!). The yield isn't as high as I expected, but the chiles are spicy and tasty in spite of the plant never receiving sunlight for its entire life. After this grow, I look forward to trying some other varieties in DWC hydroponics.

Anyway, my quest goes on for productive hardy plants that can survive the conditions we have here. I am going to try a Thai variety next season that is supposed to have a mild flavour; I've always had success with Thai chiles in the past here, just a lot of people don't like their unique taste and I am trying to make a marketable hot sauce. Also am going to experiment with some Caribbean superhots, which may be more tolerant of the humidity and heat. And I'm going to invest in shade cloth (although it is expensive to buy here)!