Chilies as well as bell peppers love mediterranean climates and, if given good nutritious soil and enough water, will fruit well into November or even until the first frost.
Sowing chilies has been fraught with difficulty in my experience. The plants don’t really grow strong and suffer tremendously with each transplanting. In the future I will therefore either sow them directly into the garden or buy plants from the garden center.
This year I had sown Jalapeno and Serrano chilies and ended up with only two tiny Jalapeno plants because none of the Serranos survived transplantion into the garden. I had planted a Cayenne and a Tabasco chili from the garden center which both did very well and grew to enormous sizes in the raised beds.
The Tabascos will definitely not make a comeback – they are way too hot for my taste. But the big and juicy Cayenne peppers were perfect to add to dishes and to make a lovely fermented hotsauce. I cut them both back in late November and am curious to see if they will survive the winter and maybe grow back next year.
Along with the other vegetables in the raised beds the chilies were shaded and watered deeply up to twice weekly throughout the hottest months.
The Bell peppers also grew very well in the raised beds without any shade and delivered up to ten luscious fruits per plant.
Both cayenne chilies and bell peppers showed a tendency for “cul noir” (blossom end rot) in the summer. I don’t know whether it was a reaction to the watering (not regular enough?) or to a lack of certain nutrients. To be on the safe side I gave them some special plant food and they recovered fully in late summer.
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