None of my chilies are hot !!

[sidewinder]

If you have the room for a greenhouse yes.


Seriously people... the weather in this country has been the worst I've ever seen. It's just plain shitty!

Most the UK is now flooded. I might as well have bought a canoe, floated around in with a chilli plant and a rain coat. It is.... that bad !!!

 

[j.t.delaney]

If you have the room for a greenhouse yes.


Seriously people... the weather in this country has been the worst I've ever seen. It's just plain shitty!

Most the UK is now flooded. I might as well have bought a canoe, floated around in with a chilli plant and a rain coat. It is.... that bad !!!

My sincere condolences -- rainy, cold, soggy weather is great for growing a lot of vegetables, but peppers aren't one of them.

I've read quite a bit about capsaicin production being promoted by underwatering during the ripening process (a.k.a. "hydric stress") -- that little phenomenon has been well studied and reproduced independently. Could relative capsacin production be some inverse function of watering? It sounds almost too cute and perfect to be true, but then again, it may explain what you're seeing.

As a kid, I earned some practical experience with overwatered pepper plants -- it's a great way of promoting root rot and stunting them, and generally making them suffer. I don't remember them being insufficiently spicy, but my spice threshhold was a lot, lot lower back then.

 

[georgej]

i only started having plants again this year because in Japan it's so hard to get hot peppers. if you wanna get heat into food you need to use death sauce or something similar.

in the UK however, it's not too hard to get hot peppers. i used to always buy scotch bonnets for dirt cheap from an asian supermarket. they had thais and sometimes habs too, so it wasn't too difficult.
I'm sure london has the same kinda shops. plenty of people from the carribean in certain areas, so i guess scotch bonnets aren't hard to find if you know where to look.
Hopefully you guys get better weather next year!

 

[Skinty]

You guys just aren't trying hard enough! First time I grew chillies was in the highlands of Scotland and I had a bumper crop of cayenne peppers in August 2010. I also used to grow cherry tomatoes in hanging baskets outside in Scotland.

OK admittedly the chillies were grown in a 6x6 greenhouse but under a shady tree (also had some tomatoes in there and normal peppers). I got more adventurous in 2011 but then emigrated at the end of July so didn't get a chance to eat any of my crop. But yeah, the summers have been particular bad since 2000. In 2008 I planted massive Italian tomatoes outdoors (in Sussex) without the use of a greenhouse and the fruit grew really large but then rotted before they had a chance to ripen. They would have been OK if I had used a grow house.

Below is a picture from my greenhouse in 2010 and all the fruit I picked off in November when it was starting to get too cold. I experimented with drying them on a radiator but then I didn't fancy eating them afterwards. I still have them in a sealed plastic box in my kitchen drawer!