Overwintering Chillies #allotment #chilli #overwintering

Hello my lovelies and welcome back to Allotment of the Dead and the chillies that we've got outside now um they're lacking leaves i think all the leaves have gone off here practically uh we've still got some fruit on there um what i need to do though is take all the fruit off basically because it's getting cold if these And we're not far off a freeze. freeze then they're going to go soft and mushy It was four degrees this morning, maybe even dropped to two degrees. I don't know. I'll check the inside the polytunnels. But yeah, the idea today will be to try and, I guess, harvest what we've got here. Green ones as well. We've got plenty of green ones. These are the Warthog chillies. These are those whoppingly hot, massively hot chillies. that are kind of two and a half million Scovilles but we've got green ones not sure whether they should ripen off the plant. It's getting a little bit cold for them in here so it's probably not going to be something that is they're unlikely to ripen now on the plant so what I'm going to do is take off all the fruit and then we're going to think about overwintering. Now overwintering This doctrine isn't something I normally attempt. But I've cleaned out the shed at the other end, I've got some shelving in there, I've got the propane heater potentially I could put in there, maybe I'll give it a go. I know it's going to be really really cold, but I don't have anywhere else I could potentially overwinter anything. So it's worth a go, I'm not going to lose anything because next year I'll probably replant the seeds and everything anyway. Um... But yeah it's worth it's worth a go. Right let's just harvest all of the chilies off there first though. I think some of the tiny little ones I'm probably not going to harvest. I'll leave them on. I'll just chop those out later. Okay these are really cold actually on the plant here so it's unlikely they will be doing anything else. Oh crikey. Right lots of green ones. Are these green ones going to be as hot as the the red ones? Probably not. Amazing looking things, they're all spiky. Now if we'd have had a bit of a longer growing season, they would have probably looked quite impressive. Kind of bright red and gnarly. Okay, I don't even know whether these are still working. It's a shame. Okay, that one's a dead one. Letters on the sky. Burning in your eyes. You look at me, babe, I wanna catch on fire. It's buried in my soul. Like California gold. Okay I think other than over here that is the entire plant. Okay so I've got a bag of warthogs albeit most of them green. Okay not too bad. Right so the next step to this overwintering will be to chop this plant back. Used a lot of cable ties here just to try and keep the plant from falling over. I'll take that one as well. It's got a nice little pointy end on it. Right, so what we're going to do is we're going to take out everything to single Vs. So we've got the main stem here, which I've kind of fixed. And we've got these branches coming off all over and we've got a dead branch here. So that's going to be the first one to take out. Okay, it's not coming out because I've got it tied in with the cable ties. We've got this one here, so we've got a branch here. Now I could cut it back to that original branch there. In fact, I might do that actually. But what I'll do in the first instance is take it off there and there and we'll chop out the cable ties. Okay, right. What we're going to do is we're going to break this branch down into bits into the bin. You can put these into the compost, I'm going to end up with basically lots of chilies growing everywhere if I put this in the compost, so I don't think I'm going to bother. There's a few tip runs I need to do this week, so they'll be going down to the tip I think, unfortunately. Okay, so we'll take that out as well. Okay, we'll chop that out. Okay, so this is the other branch here, so we'll take that out there. Okay. This is actually sat in standing water at the moment, which is probably not great for it. So what you'd normally do is take it out of the pot, wash the roots out and repot it up into some fresh compost. Maybe I'll do that. I'm gonna chop that back down to there. Still plenty of cable ties to cut out. Okay, so this one here, I'm gonna take it out quite close to the base and here again. Okay, that one I've already chopped out, the dead one. Now, that dead one there, I'm going to chop out. Oh, it's actually partly because the actual branch itself had split off. OK, I'm going to take these down gradually. OK, OK, OK. So you can see here that looks pretty drastic. Thank you, Nick. In fact, we'll take that off as well, he said. So what used to be a massive plant, kind of this sort of high is now reduced to this. But it should be okay. It should hopefully come back with new growth in the spring as long as I can keep it warm enough in somewhere. So the shed at the other end is probably my best hope. But that's the warthog. I've got to try and do the same with this one here. And this is the Carolina Reaper. So they look absolutely gnarly. They don't look particularly big, but they look absolutely gnarly. So I'm going to need to probably do the same with this Carolina Reaper. I've tried the Chocolate Reaper the other day. It was really quite a flavoursome chilli. But yeah, that heat was really quite strong still. Um... So yeah, I'm going to probably harvest whatever Reapers are on here and do the same with this one. it's a shame they as i said we needed that massively long growing season i think the carolina reaper is one of those one of those chilis that needs that really long growing season but everything at the minute it started to drop uh pods and also leaves so yeah we got a lot of uh windfalls so yeah we got what we're going to do is we'll chop this one back as well We've got this Ajucura plant here as well that is still flowering. Again, we're probably going to need to chop that back as well. So it's that time of year now where everything starts slowing down. Now I was expecting frost 5th of November. It's now the 9th and so far we haven't had it. So all of the chillies I've got in the polytunnel, I've got to try and do something with as many of those as possible this week. And then I'm probably going to clear that space. There's going to be... It's unlikely to get much in the way of anything out of there in terms of overwintering anything. I've got the Dragon's Breath in there, which is in a pot, so I'm going to try and overwinter that one as well. I've got the Kev's Fried Chicken, not massively bothered about that one, and I've got the Remert. So we're going to try, we'll chop all those back, so much the same way as I've done with this one. And, yeah, we'll get them in the shed at the end. Right, have a go at overwintering. I've tried every year, and I've never found somewhere warm enough, really. I've got no space at home. I could do with the daughter moving out. No, I don't want her to move out. Yeah, I could do with a lottery win, actually. The new allotment of the dead chilli farm. That would be good. But anyway, so that is the warthog chop back. So over a winter in chillies, let's see what we can do this year. I'll keep you guys updated as time goes on as to how they're proceeding up there. We'll see what happens. Yeah, but these, absolutely gnarly. All the best, guys. Take care. Bye-bye.