Your favourite chilli!

[Sara]

Hello everyone,

If you're anything like the GYO team, you love your chillies. The topic came up in our office and now we're all hotly debating (pun intended!) the best varieties to grow.

Could you help us out? We'd like you to name your favourite chilli variety and tell us why it's on your list of must-sow crops. Perhaps, it's a real tongue-tingler or incredibly easy to grow? Whatever the reason, we'd love to know!


Your comments may be edited and published in the March issue of GYO.

[Samurailord]

For me it has to be Jalapeno - mainly because it is the only chilli I was able to successfully grow this year as it was my first season with an allotment.

Having said that I already have seeds of another seven varieties of chilli ready for next season, so wish me luck!

Andy

[VirginVegGrower]

Despite not eating much in the chilli realm I do enjoy growing the odd plant. They are one of the prettiest vegetable plants that you can grow. Last year it was Black Hungarian Wax and it added some much needed glossy purple to my greenhouse shelving. Fast forward to 2013 and I'm intending to grow Lemon Drop - all cheery yellow and citrusy. Just in case we have little in the way of sun again

[rustylady]

Joe's Long for me. Easy to grow and a prolific cropper.

[Aberdeenplotter]

I don't do chillies even a Scotch Bonnet

[MartinRSharpe]

For me its got to be the Jalapeno. Easy to grow and usually a good cropper with a wide variety of uses.

The super hot varieties are fun but I can rarely use all the chillies as I am the only one that will eat them!

[Newton]

I grew rocoto for the first time this year. A large plant with round thick skinned juicy chillies that resemble tomatoes. The platns grow large and fruit well. Even this summer my two plants yielded lots of fruit and took over one end of the greenhouse. Hot too!

[chilli_grower]

Habanero orange for me! THey have a nice shape, nice colour and they taste incredibly fruity and they are hot!

[T8Ter]

Yellow Fatalli for me - great flavour, quite a bit of heat and can be challenging to grow so a nice sense of achievment when you get a great crop, plus it makes fantastic chilli jam when used with yellow sweet peppers.

[Moopmoop]

The best chillies I ever grew came from a random stranger who gave me 2 chillies. I have no idea what they were, I planted the seeds and had about 7 plants that I overwintered, they were amazing. Still no idea what they were, probably a cross pollinated variety that I'll never grow again, I think I lost the seeds that I saved that year. There's always next year.

[Vince G]

My best chilli this year was the Gorria, a mild to medium chilli from the Basque country. They grew to nearly 3 feet in height in my polytunnel and as I write (18th December) still have some fruit on them. The fruit are about 4 inches long and 1 inch in diameter, with decent thick flesh and few seeds, and prolific enough to have provided a decent sized bagful for the freezer. They're just about mild enough to add to salads raw finely chopped, and are excellent in all sorts of cooking. Next year I want to grow a Padrón, which are the ones the Spanish fry briefly in olive oil and sea salt to make a tasty and slightly spicy tapas snack, excellent with a cold beer on hot summer evenings.

[BarleySugar]

My favourite for taste are the habaneros, fruity and hot. I find my peach habanero on my bedroom windowsill (south west facing) fruits all year, although not always growing out 'full size'. However, as I'm the only one who likes them, they are an ideal size added to mayonnaise for my salads.
Lemon Drop are very prolific and do grow to full size and ripen all year round, again on the bedroom windowsill. My plants are now 2.5 years old, and get pruned and re-potted in spring. The plants grow quite large and flower prolifically.

[darcyvuqua]

i bought a packet of hot patio sizzle last year from wilkinsons i had always grown cayenne so bought a few different types to try this one was cheap so was expecting that much out of them well it was a great germinator 100% in fact i found hundreds of small chillies that packed a huge punch im trying to overwinter some now but i have since bought another pack of seeds i liked them that much

[The Large One]

my favorite is the Bengal Naga
one of the real hot Chinense varietys so needs looking after to get a good crop but wow, what a flavour, a fruity bubblegum aroma which then stands up on its back legs and smacks you in the mouth with the heat

[northepaul]

I find the most reliable one is cayenne, which has a good level of heat for us. I LOVE growing the rainbow ones, as they make pretty little house plants too!