Chillies and Peppers 辣椒 / 柿子椒

This is my first time growing chillies! Not because I planned to, I was given some seedlings early in the spring by my neighbour’s dad. Having thought that chillies were grown in greenhouses in our region,
I had never thought of growing them by my own in the open. “I will give it a go”, I thought. After preparing the soil with manure and compost in late May, I planted the seedlings in the full ground and forgot about them all over until one day in July when I walked by, I noticed long, thin green chillies all over the then bushy plants. What a delight to see! I started picking the tender ones for stir-fry from early July onwards, they tasted super. By beginning of August, from the 5 plants I had, I'd picked 5 times, each time at least 15-20 fruits. The riper ones became hotter so I left them on the plant to grow on. Some of them are already ripe, they look now like this:

One-way my mother always does with red chillies: tie them up and hang them dry, which was exactly what I did with my harvest yesterday. They would serve me well the whole winter through in dishes. Other things my mother would do with red chillies include preserving them in jars with salt and spices or making chillies paste.

Despite the mild and rainy summer this year, they turned out to be such easy and fruitful veggie to grow! I would definitely grow them from next year on.


The same goes with sweet peppers. The seedlings came also from my neighbour's dad. It seems that all chillies and peppers are doing very well this year. The sweet pepper plants bear at least 4 fruits each;

each plant produces at least 2 very big fruits and 2-3 smaller ones.
The big ones are bigger in size than the average ones from the supermarkets, but thinner in flesh. The sweet peppers are in 3 colours: red, yellow and green. The yellow ones are sweeter in taste, the other 2 produce healthy and shinny fruits as well, definitely worth saving seeds for next year.