Hot chilli pepper on balcony, or how I became a victim of my success
It just happens that whenever I go abroad, I like to collect "in the wilderness" seeds of local plants and grow it at home, like living souvenir from the trip. With the first part of these plans I usually have no problem, but the second often gives me trouble. And thus, for example, seend of exotic palm trees are already waiting for several years; the same with plants collected on mediterranean meadow (frigana) or olive seeds.
Instead, this year I sow seeds of hot chilli pepper, without too much hope, because while it is true that recently every year is warmer from the previous one, there is still much difference between mexican and north-european climate, to say the least. From the other hand, global warming seems to be real and during last four years we could observe something more like dry and wet seasons instead of usual four. So I decided to drop some seeds, without counting them, to the small box filled with soil. I sow whatever I grabbed - some mexican Serrano, some ecuadorian ones and some Cayenne (these on photo below). After good watering I let them stand in the warm near radiator, thinking that surely only a few would germinate...
And within few weeks virtually all emerged.
Initially I was really glad that everything went so smooth, although the peppers took the whole large windowsill, because I had to transplant them to individual plastic cups. I left them near the window and every day, as soon as the sun came up, I opened the blinds thinking that at our altitude every bit of light counts.
And all pepper seedlings turned to beautifull dark green plants.
I had to move them to larger containers. I used standard half-liter beer cups, they are ideal for this purpose. But this time I was somewhat worried, because peppers took not only all windowsills in the house, but also part of the floor and I had to rearrange the furniture. Fortunately spring soon arrived and I was able to move all this to balcony. But for the night I had to move them back into the house - several tens of large pepper bushes. For the night, or when it rained. Or sun shines too much. Or is windy. Hot chilli pepper is quite delicate and fragile and stronger blow of wind could break it. So every morning there was action "Move Out", every evening action "Move In"...
At this point I realized that I have problem...
Problem, because with such care, hot peppers grew like there was no future. Soon it becomes neccessary to put them in real large pots. Such pepper is quite large bush and needs sufficiently large pot - five liters at least, preferably twice as much or more. At this point I was seriously wondering what I've just done and how to get rid of all this. Fortunately I was able to give half of that pepper garden to my friends. The remaining rest started to flower and then developed fruits (or pods, technically speaking).
Although I very like hot chilli, it is not something that could be munched in such quantity...
All remaining pepper bushes grew beautifully until first frosts, and gave such amount of extremally hot chillies, so it would be sufficient for filling the rams for three Wawel's dragons (in case you don't know, there is a Polish legend about dragon living in southern Poland, which ultimately died after eating a ram filled with spicy and deadly things). In short: a big bowl fully filled and several ristras hanging and drying at the windows. It seems that in Polish climate chilli peppers not only grows fantastic, but I even had to keep them from the abundance of the sun light. Is it the direct effect of global warming? Who knows?
