The Chileman challenge

[Alice]

Mmm ! Love the look of those Hungarian blacks Tiger. Could go for that. Want to swap seeds for anything.

[sdgtiger]

Mmm ! Love the look of those Hungarian blacks Tiger. Could go for that. Want to swap seeds for anything.

no worries let me see if i can dig out the rest of the seed for these or failing that i can send u a pod once they've matured if thats ok

[smallblueplanet]

These are a similar looking chilli - but the leaves are purple tinged. They are purple jals (seed from unconcerned). They turn a lovely shade of red/purple and have a fruity taste - very nice indeed.

[smallblueplanet]

Here's the only nearly ripe one left (we've eaten the other two!), showing the colour they turn.

[sdgtiger]

they look lovely

[unconcerned]

Manda, looks like you have a nitrogen and/or phosphorous problem with that plant. Something that size should have more like 30 pods on it, not 3. The leaves shouldn't be that purple. It just looks like a plant on it's last legs. What do you feed it?

[smallblueplanet]

Hi julian, the picture of the whole plant is an old one. I'm not sure what happened...everything was growing really well up to 4"-5" pot size, then on repotting up things started looking a bit poorly. The purple jal was really early and those 3 fruit were growing before most others got buds.

But then they sort of stopped, started looking a bit yellow - I'm not sure why. I did put some bat guano in with the plants and perhaps I should have waited until they were fruiting? But I'm not sure about the compost we were using - New Horizon peat free. Anyway we repotted them into Focus peat free and added the last of the perlite/vermiculite we had and after a while the plants in bigger pots seem to have recovered and most now have new green leaves and buds...

So I don't know if I fed them wrong or the compost was naff and the drainage was poor??? Anyway for next year I'm gonna get a 100l bag of perlite and make sure the drainage is better. Would value your opion.



Here's the plant now, a fair few buds forming.

[unconcerned]

The NPK of the guano will be something like 9-3-2 which is probably why you're looking lush and green again. Much better. Compost only has enough food for a couple of months at best so you need to feed or repot in fresh compost. I resisted that chillifocus feed as I thought it was probably a bit gimmiky but people started saying it was good so I tried some recently and it really is impressive. The guano is good to start them off, but then you want something more balanced else the nitrogen will be too high and you'll get green growth rather than flowers and fruits. Can't go far wrong with tomato food either.

[Alice]

Here's the Hotwax I've sent you seeds for Tiger. It's the second crop this year and they're just goung red now.


The Jalapenos are going red so won't get any bigger - 6.5 cms.
The competition ends 31st Aug so everybody remember to update their entries.

[sdgtiger]

wow they look spot on hope i can grow something similar!!

[Alice]

The Chileman Jalapeno Challenge ends today Grapes so I hope everybody remembers to update. Mine stuck at 6.6 cms.

[smallblueplanet]

I'm too late to update my entry...but it wouldn't have won anyway, nowhere near 14.4cm!

The rhs jal of these '3 amigos' is 7.8cm.