So I like plants and gardening. My appartment is full of plants and I have a small herb nursery in my window sill. I’m currently growing three basil plants and a pepper plant.
I go to social media for tips and tricks and as usual it’s full of people with grade A set ups producing lots of herbs and veggies and stuff. I started growing my pepper plant and after weeks I managed to produce a whopping number of 1 pepper. The weird thought that occurred to me was: I failed. I failed because my pepper plant isn’t as productive as the plants I see online.
Meanwhile: did I have fun doing this? Yes, I loved watching the progress of this plant. I did feel cool when I added my home grown pepper to my dinner. Isn’t that what hobbies are about?
How many people are out there quitting things because they aren’t immediately good at it because social media primed us to crave instant satisfaction through constant dopamine hits? Pick up hobbies, be bad at them, learn, have fun.
I’ve been nursing a chili pepper plant (several actually) from seeds I brought back home. It’s going on its third year and produced lots of fruit in the second year, though they tend to be smallish (I think they could become bigger). I think I got some fruit from the hardiest stems in the first year, some of them grew really big and others are slowly dying. I didn’t know how many seeds I needed to plant so I just chucked a bunch in a pot and months later I have 11 stems growing lol.
The great thing about chili plants is they’re hardy af and don’t really have predators, since capsicaine is their defense mechanism. Really easy to take care of, it’s like there’s no such thing as too much or too little water for these plants.
Your plant is probably going to give more fruit next year. You can also add more stems to the pot like I did with mine, but I really only have two plants giving fruit. Harvest the peppers while they’re still green once they’ve reached an ideal size or size they don’t seem to grow out of, and let them ripen in a sunlit area. You need to harvest the fruit for the plant to make more. Don’t touch the flowers.
I want to try NPK fertilizer but I’m otherwise a terrible gardener lol and it feels daunting to use the thing. I just give it water and while it likes having a lot of it, I find that I don’t have to give it all this water, it can also go several days without water (apparently it makes the fruit more spicy as well). Right now it’s inside for winter and so it’s not producing any fruit, but once I put it back outside when it becomes warmer at night it’ll start producing tons of flowers. It comes from a country where there is no such thing as winter so it could totally grow fruit year-round.
Dry the peppers in the oven btw if you don’t use them instantly. They’re not like store-bought peppers and will rot very quickly. Just chuck them in the oven at 50-60C for 2-3 hours (yes, ovens go that low). They should still retain a little bit of humidity and not turn to dust when you pick them up. I cut them up beforehand so that I can harvest the seeds (even though they’re the spiciest part), so that I can hopefully plant those later. No idea if they’re fertile. You need to dry the seeds too, but it’s much easier, just leave them spaced out on a plate for half a day.
Instead of fertilizer you can also use left over pasta water (without salt), or put some banana peels in a bucket of water for a few days and use that water or use coffee grounds. Lots of nutrition in it.
I’ve also heard you can use rice water if you let it ferment for a few days, but I tried that and the coffee grounds and it didn’t seem to do much, I was worried it was actually having an adverse effect.