Hot peppers light up your cooking and also decorate homes with their beautiful colors. Instead of buying them in the market, grow them yourself at home so that you never miss them.
AgroWeb.org will teach you how to grow your own chili peppers starting from seed.
Most seed sellers will provide you with a variety of chili pepper seeds of varying intensity. If you don’t like seeds, you can buy seedlings, but unlike seeds, the variety of seedlings is more limited.
You should plant the seeds in small pots filled with soil compost with organic manure and well-drained manure. Place the pots in a well-lit area, such as a window sill. High temperatures accelerate sprouting.
The ideal soil temperature should be 21 degrees Celsius or more. To ensure this, you can put the pot under an electrically heated layer, but if you plant them in the spring you will not have such problems.
Seedlings should be grown until they have developed three to four sets of leaves. Then you can transfer them to a bigger pot.
After the danger of frost has passed, take the pots out to the balcony once a day for a week to strengthen the sprouts. They will be ready to move to another space and will not experience the shock of changing environment.
Growth conditions
It’s no wonder that chili peppers grow well in hot temperatures. You can plant them in a well-lit place, but if it’s cold, make sure to wrap them with plastic layers. The ideal air temperature should be 20 to 32 degrees.
Chillies prefer a soil rich in compost and vegetable nutrients. The area around the plant should be moist, but neither too wet nor too dry.
If you add too much water, the peppers will lose their hotness. The plant bears more fruit if you grow it in a pot.
So having a small house is no excuse for not growing them. One pot is all it takes and you’ll get a lot of chili peppers. The flowers of the plant must be pollinated by hand or with a small brush.
Picking peppers
You should wait until the peppers turn a deep red, orange, yellow, purple or whatever color of the variety you bought.
If you like your peppers a little hot then pick them when they are green, but the longer they sit on the plant the hotter they will be.
Peppers are much better when eaten fresh off the plant, but don’t eat them right away unless you’re sure of the level of heat you can handle. Some peppers are so hot that they can burn you for hours.
If you want to measure the level of heat of the pepper, include it in the food you have cooked. Some other peppers can be dried or frozen for longer storage.
Dried peppers can be stored whole or ground as a powder./AgroWeb.org
