Not chillies but some sweet peppers I harvested today. Orange one is Etiuda and brown one is Sweet Chocolate. Both grown outside in a straw bale! The plants don't seem to be putting on any new growth, don't blame them after the battering they've got from the wind and rain, but at least I've got something out of them!
They look great. I’m not very experimental with sweet peppers. Not since just after I started growing extra veg plants to sell. I grow a load of sweet peppers. 3 varieties I think. Didn’t sell many. I ended up with 43 plants! Very few of them produced any fruit. So I sort of gave up with them. Mind you most of them we’re Californian wonder ! Never done well with them. Now I just grow Palermo, which is fantastic in production & flavour.
Think maybe I should start trying a few different ones. I’d love to know what you think of the taste of both of those. Especially the chocolate, I’m very drawn to that one
I’d like to see them growing in the straw bales to .
A lot of bell peppers take forever to ripen. New Ace F1 is probably the earliest ripening, I tend to get smallish fruit as I've only ever grown it in 10 L pots, but someone I follow on YouTube has them in the ground under cover and their fruit is a lovely size. King of the North is productive but slow to ripen.
Non-bell peppers I find more productive and earlier to fruit and ripen: this year we're trying Amy (squat, pointy yellow wax type) and Semaroh (ram's horn). I also quite like Mohawk F1, it's a dwarf plant which pumps out yellow mini-bells with a really nice sweet, fruity flavour. It's a hybrid but I've found somewhere selling a dehybridised version and and its red brother Redskin. Tangerine Dream has also been quite early and tasty (and slightly hot!). Sheep Nose is setting lots and lots of fruit. Next year I will try a variety from Belarus called Troyka.
Both were tasty, juicy and slightly sweet. I feel that, as can happen to tomatoes, the amount of rain and poor weather we've had may have diluted the flavour. We've got one of each plant in the greenhouse too so I should get a better idea of the flavour from them.
The plants look absolutely knackered, it's like they've giving up growing and just put all the energy into ripening the fruit. The nearest is Amy, then Etiuda, then two Sweet Chocolate. The Maskotka tomatoes in the left hand bale are doing very well.
I grew sheep nose last year. Only got 1 fruit off it. And that was pampered as much as my usual Palermo.
I’m trying tangerine dream this year. It is behaving a lot more chilli like than sweet pepper. It’s doing well and producing nicely. Looking forward to trying it. Especially now you’ve said there’s some heat there.
I do like the idea of growing in straw bales. Never going to happen. Straw is more rear than unicorn poo up here .
Straw bale gardening works but on hot days the bales lose a lot of water through evaporation. It's quite popular in America, even in very hot areas, but they use drip irrigation or soaker hoses. We're only doing it because the straw bales were free from a local stables and I wanted to plant less in pots to try to conserve our homemade compost because commerical compost was sold out everywhere. You also need to apply a lot of fertiliser to the bales in order to prepare them for planting and organic fertiliser doesn't work as well as synthetic.
Think I will buy some Lemon Dream seeds for next year too.
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