Trust your instincts

It is very easy to get excited about a new plantation. After all you made the effort of obtaining the chilli varieties that get your blood going and spent time and money providing the seeds with the perfect environment for them to grow into sturdy plants. After all that careful planning though you know that the time is near when you need to let the resulting seedlings “fly the nest” and make it in this world on their own with a little bit of help still from your green thumb from time to time, obviously

Gauging when to put your plants outside can sometimes be a bit tricky though. Do it too soon and you risk damaging the plants with a sudden frost or heat burst, do it too late and they end up taking way too much space and become root bound and impossible to repot.

Using your common sense goes without saying of course but if like us you have a lot riding on your plantation or just wants to know you have done everything for your chilli plant to come to maturity then monitoring the outside temperature every day from April onwards is a good start. Weather forecasts can notoriously be very wrong but most of the time they can be reliable enough to make the right decision when the time comes.

If you are still hesitant though then you could always go to plan B i.e providing just enough heat for the chilli plant to be comfortable in while adapting to warmer days. You could do that by heating your home or greenhouse with an electric or gas implement but we find that putting a fleece or horticultural bubble wrap (the normal kind will get destroyed by the sun and humidity in no time) on a frame over the plants is a cheap and easy way to protect a plantation. In our case our plants are still in propagators and although we have started turning them down and even off on certain days, it is still too cold at night for the plants not to be snuggly tucked in with said bubble wrap over them. If you live in a place with really unfortunate weather, plan C would be to place a heat mat under the pots for the soil to keep at an even temperature for as long as possible.

Most plants from the Annuum family are rather sturdy but if like us you can’t get enough of superhot treats such as Trinidad Scorpion, Habaneros, Fatalii or a Naga then a little bit of extra TLC is always welcome as plants from the Chinense family from which most superhot chilli plants derive are a bit more fragile than their Annuum, Baccatum, Frutescens and Pubescens cousins.

For any advice, feel free to contact us from our site www.bountifulseeds.com and we shall do our best to help you produce chilli plants crawling under the weight of gorgeous spicy fruits!