Red hot crops! He’s had a few false starts, but Monty Don has mastered the art of growing chillies

With gardening, as in life, pride usually precedes a whopping great fall, so I’m tempting fate in saying I’ve learned how to grow chillies well. But it has taken a while and was preceded, if not by failure, by very average results.

Nowadays I have a great supply and that, in itself, is a cause for celebration. I’ve grown to love them and, along with a quarter of the world’s population, eat them daily – usually for breakfast, with eggs – and there are few dishes that cannot be improved by the judicious addition of chilli.

Yes some are blisteringly hot in the mouth (not heat at all, but a reaction to the capsaicin which is mainly found in the seeds and the pith). If you do eat a chilli that’s uncomfortably hot then milk is the best way to negate the effect, which is why it is better to accompany a hot curry with lassi rather than lager.

Choose your chillies wisely and build up tolerance until you work out how hot you like them. I certainly balk at the hottest peppers and the whole point is to grow and eat them for pleasure. The real secret is in the fruitiness of a fresh chilli.

The heat should never obscure this. Eaten ripe – in most varieties, when they turn a uniform red, although you can get chillies in yellow, orange, purple and even brown – they have a distinctive fruity flavour.

Now is the time to order your seeds, to be sown in January – they need a long growing period before they’ll produce flowers and are slow to get growing well. 

Leave seed sowing until spring and you can run out of time for the plants to become big enough to bear more than a few fruit.

They need heat to germinate and for the seedlings to grow. I use a heated propagating bench but a windowsill above a radiator is fine. Pot on the seedlings into plugs or small pots once ‘true’ leaves appear and then, as they grow, keep potting them on into bigger pots until they are a foot tall and can go into their final container.

Terracotta is ideal but I grow in plastic too. I’ve tried raising chillies outside in the garden but a greenhouse or polytunnel suits them much better.

Water them daily and in spring they should be fed weekly with a high-nitrogen fertiliser to encourage new growth. As soon as the first flowers appear, switch to a high potash feed like tomato fertiliser or liquid seaweed.

Ripe fruit left on the bush looks attractive but inhibits the production of new flowers, so pick them as soon as the chillies ripen. You can keep chillies growing for years, but I always ditch mine at the end of the year – as they get older they produce fewer chillies.

Finally, the best way to store them is to freeze them whole. I put them by variety in freezer bags and take out a few as and when I need them. This preserves most of their texture and their fruitiness as well as the heat.

This year I am growing:

‘Early Jalapeño’ – relatively mild fruits with lots of flesh. They can be eaten green.

‘Slim Jim’ – an Anaheim type of pepper with a mild, fruity flavour.

‘Long Red Slim’ – is a cayenne pepper with long slim fruits. It’s highly productive.

‘Curry’ – a new F1 variety with slim fruit that can be used green or red. I have yet to taste them.

‘Aji Hot’ – stout fruit originating from Peru. Hot!

‘Anaheim’ – a mild chilli from California with fleshy wrinkled fruit that can replace sweet peppers.

‘Padron’ – the classic tapas pepper, it gets hotter as it becomes bigger and redder. 

ASK MONTY  

Q. How many years can agapanthus stay in the same pot and can you split them? 

Josie Heayns, Berkshire 

A. Traditionally, you only repot agapanthus when they break the container – meaning they do well with very constricted roots.

If you do repot, do not give them more than an inch or two of extra soil around the edge of the pot. They do best on poor or stony soil. Split them in spring.

Q. Can I plant a crab apple tree in the exact same spot a sambucus [elder] has been growing for years?

Graham Barks, Staffordshire

A. I don’t see why not. As long as the elder was healthy and you dig out most of the roots then there should be no problem at all.

Q. My bumper crop of tomatoes is not getting ripe. What can I do to help them redden?

Eric Hughes, Greater Manchester

A. The warmer a tomato is, the quicker it will ripen. Sunlight tends just to harden the skin, so put them in a warm drawer and many will ripen in the dark.

Add a ripe banana and that will speed the process up.

Also, hanging the entire plant upside down from a beam in a shed or garage will help with ripening and improve taste. Finally, you can always make green chutney and green tomato soup.