When can my chilli plants go outside?

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Let’s be honest, unless you live in a Mediterranean or tropical climate, you will, like me and millions of other chilli growers, be looking to put plants outdoors as soon as you can because your window, conservatory, polytunnel, or whatever, is never big enough to house all of your chili plants. It is never big enough because we always grow too much, it’s a bad habit.

I grow too much, I don’t need as many as I grow, I give them away, which brings me joy, but still I end up with an overflowing greenhouse and want to move them out into the elements as soon as I can.

So… When is it safe to do it and what special care should you take?

Remember, especially it the UK, it is always a compromise, they will never do as well as they would in the shelter of a greenhouse, but follow these guidelines to give your plants the best chance possible.

1/ My book has loads about temperatures, but just to summarise – If they go below about 18°c they won’t grow (some need even higher temperatures). You needn’t worry about them getting too hot. Even UK record high temperatures will make them jump for joy. Look at the forecast and judge accordingly, they can go cooler at night, but keep an eye on both daytime and night-time temperatures. For me this is, and it is the same most years, about the beginning of May through to early September.

2/ Think about bringing them indoors at night or in cold weather. They will benefit from this protection. It doesn’t matter if you put them in a dark corner, or even a garage, it is night time anyway.

3/ Try and only move established plants outside. Pot on your seedlings into their big pots but let them get established before they go outside. Tender small plants are more likely to get bashed by the wind and rain.

4/ Use big pots, these will keep moisture levels more balanced in drying winds and when the plants get bigger they won’t blow over. They also store heat during the daytime which keeps the roots warm at night.

4/ Protect them from the elements – Put them in sheltered warm spots, try and shelter them from wind as much as possible with trellis or other plants, anything to stop them being bashed.

5/ Stake the plants – Wind causes so many problems, in particular the constant swaying movement which loosens the stem at the base and tears at the roots. Also, use small sticks to support branches when the plants get bigger. Wind is your enemy.

6/ Don’t assume that rain is enough to keep them watered. I can’t emphasise this enough. Think about when you water a plant, you probably give it about 1/2 an inch at least. Very rarely do we have that amount of rain in the summer, especially on a daily basis. A light shower will get the surface wet, but it won’t reach the roots. Also, when they are kept against a wall they may be in a ‘rain shadow’; everything else nearby gets wet, but they get nothing.

7/ Too much rain can be a problem too. During we periods remove any trays from beneath pots so they aren’t sitting in water. If there is a storm forecast, then try and bring them into somewhere sheltered.

8/ Keep feeding them! Outside plants need all the help they can get, and regular feeding will keep the roots healthy and help them withstand the drying effects of wind. Use chilli plant feed or standard tomato feed.

A Miserable Chilli Plant

A fairly miserable, poorly fed and bashed chilli plant. (A deliberate experiment!)

8/ Move pots around regularly to search for slugs and snails hidden beneath. Look in the holes in the bottom of pots too. For small plants particularly this will be the biggest and most immediate threat the their existence.

9/ Holidays – If you entrust their care to a neighbour and you only have a few plants, they might get better care if you carry them round to their garden rather than making the neighbour come to you. Reward your neighbour with plenty of chillies, they might get hooked too. Alternatively consider planting them in a self watering system, more expensive, but at least it guarantees they are watered and fed for up to 2 weeks while you are away.

10/ Choose the right varieties – Be realistic, habaneros, scotch bonnets, and most of the super hot chillies need higher temperatures than our climate will give, and a longer growing season too, they really won’t do well outside unless you wait till they are fully grown, and you might not have the space for that. Stick to varieties that grow quickly or withstand harsher weather, Hungarian Wax are picked early, Bulgarian Carrot are very tough, and reasonably hot, Aji (Capsicum baccatum) varieties are also very resilient, with woody stems and small leaves. Apache F1 is nearly always foolproof as it is so quick and also compact, or for something hot and brightly coloured try Twilight.

Slug

Slugs & Snails the 2016 Battle

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My battle with slugs and snails is something that is close to my heart. Whilst I hate them with a passion there would be a gap in my life if they disappeared forever. This is an unlikely scenario, they are more likely to take over the world, and when they do I will be sent to the Hague to be tried for crimes against slugmanity, and there is no way I could argue my innocence.

Despite warnings in the media that our mild winter would mean the worst ever summer for slugs and snails, this doesn’t seem to have happened, yet. We had a cold snap recently, which was mostly charaterised by dry freezing northerly winds, so this maybe killed off a lot of the population at just the time they would be poking their noses out.

So last night, rather late in the year, was my first big slug hunt. Temperature 14.5°c at 9pm following a day of rain showers, this definitely demanded action. They breed like rabbits, and every one that wasn’t killed last night will produce 10 million by August, or something like that. So I left no corner of the garden unexplored. I have seen much worse, in fact I was pleasantly surprised, but I still had a job to do. The veg patch was pretty clear, mainly due to ‘good garden hygiene’, i.e. no old pots and rubbish lying around for them to hide under. Not so the rest of the garden, under the lilies by the cat’s graveyard there were plenty. I’m not sure what type of lillies, you can’t eat them so they are of limited interest to me, I only go there to kill slugs.

These days I mostly use what I call the ‘double tap’, named after the special forces method of shooting someone. One smash or slice with a trowel, then a quick flick to toss the remains into the shrubbery, a bit like the sport of hurling. I don’t want their rotting remains on the lawn, nor do I want to see their carcasses being eaten by their hungry brothers and sisters the following evening. There is more of this in a slightly more serious piece on slugs, what they eat and how to control them here.

Snail

Snail on Chilli Plant

The final tally was about 40 slugs and 55 snails and there weren’t many big fat Spanish slugs, which is good news. I have done much much worse in my evening rampages and I will continue this fight over the next few nights before I can sleep easily, but this isn’t victory, I will never win.

 

 

Slug Eating Chilli

How to REALLY Control Slugs – Drink the Beer yourself, and take the Battle to them

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Firstly lets deal with the notion that slugs are just slimy things that whilst annoying to the gardener and not very pleasant, they are otherwise quite innocent.

1/ They will eat the rotting flesh of their dead brothers and sisters, then crawl all over your vegetables

2/ Many of them will eat dog and cat faeces and then they crawl all over your vegetables

Is this what you want?

Now I’m not squeamish about creepy crawlies, but for these reasons alone I don’t touch slugs, well not the big fat ones anyway. There area number of different species and pretty much all of the ones you find in the garden will have a go at your plants and vegetables, but some more than others. Actually the ones that do the most damage on the tender shoots of your peas and beans are more likely to be Common Keeled slugs, or Yellow slugs. The Common Keeled slug is a difficult one to control as it spends most of its life in the soil, and can attack seedlings before they have even emerged into the daylight, you also find them under plant pots where the squeeze into the drain holes during the daytime.

The nasty one is the big fat orangey brown Spanish slug, these are a relatively new invader from overseas, they are drought tolerant, lay twice the number of eggs as native slugs and are voracious eaters of anything and everything, including dog poo and dead animals. They are taking over from our native slugs and are quite a disgusting and unwanted addition to your garden.

You will read about all sorts of ways of controlling and trapping slugs, and you can spend an awful lot of time and money on it too, nasty pellets, eco-friendly pellets, copper bands, plastic traps; the list goes on. All of these take time to set up and inspect, and according to my experience none of them really work. The reason they proliferate is twofold, firstly the people that manufacture things like beer traps and copper bands want to sell you something, and secondly people that offer advice want to do so without causing offence, so they offer tame alternatives to the real way of controlling slugs and snails, which is to hunt them down and kill them, mercilessly, by whatever means you have at hand.

So my slug and snail regime is as follows; I use Nemaslug in the spring, as soon as the soil warms up, (slugs don’t come out until the temperature reaches 6°C). You buy this from online retailers or garden centres and water it all over the garden on a warm moist night. This definitely swings the battle in my favour, and hopefully staves off the population explosion until after the spring rains and into periods of dry soil when slugs lie low anyway. Nemaslug is of particular benefit in the exposed soil of vegetable patches where the damage is done by the soil dwelling Common Keeled slug. The slug that leaving you wondering where they came from and where they go to when the sun comes up. They are the ones that will get your early seedlings and also attack root vegetables and newly germinating seeds underground.

Slug Eating Chilli

Slug Eating Chilli

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After Nemaslug there is no substitute for the nightly massacre. This goes for snails as well as slugs, (Nemaslug doesn’t work on snails). I go out an hour after dusk and slash or smash every slug or snail in sight. This is free, and actually takes less time than spreading pellets, or filling beer traps. If you drink the beer you would otherwise waste in their traps then this can help with any guilt that may build up during the slaughter. The death toll can run into the hundreds if you don’t keep on top of it.

If you keep this up you will soon get on top of them, and then from time to time on dry evenings you won’t find any, and you can ease off slightly on your nightly binges.

For some further info on slugs, and a handy identification guide, have a look at www.slugwatch.co.uk