Chilli Plant Update
Back in July I mentioned that our chilli plants had gone a bit dormant after I repotted them and moved them outside. Clearly our cold British climate is just not making them happy! Since moving them all back indoors (we now have a conservatory which is almost as good as a greenhouse!) they’ve woken up, the small plants have grown with very large leaves, and they’ve all been producing flowers.
For a while I wondered if bringing them indoors was the right thing to do as the flowers were coming but just dying and falling off. Then I remembered what a friend of mine had told me last year about how he had manually pollenated his plants and cross pollenated them as well, and that suddenly hit me. Of course, being indoors, there are no bees/wasps/flies to help with the pollenation process, so with a little brush I’ve been keeping an eye for any newly opened flowers and get them pollenated, and most of them so far have started to product the chillis.
At present they’re still growing and still green, but judging by the packet they came out of they should turn red so I’ll just keep tending to them and hopefully they’ll start to turn to red at some point 
So note to self, next year keep them in the conservatory and remember to manually pollenate them!
- September 25th '09
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