Chilli love song
With the end of the year in sight, it is a time for a gardener to sit back in a comfortable armchair and reflect on the great successes he has enjoyed in the garden over the past season while looking forward to the year ahead. This won’t take long then.
The lavender was amazing in 2018 with blooms all the way through to November and the garden awash with honey bees and bumble bees taking advantage. The verbenas and salvias kept on flowering, but there was one plant that looked closest to its seed catalogue best.
The request from the vegetable management committee was for, “a lot of chilli peppers” and so I set about germinating pepper seeds with the zeal of a Chelsea Flower Show debutant . They were placed carefully in the propogator and in no time at all pushed healthy shoots up through the precautionary layer of vermiculite. However in a mysterious set of circumstances not even Hercule Poirot could sort out, I ended up with one pepper and many tomatillo plants.*
(* If you are having trouble sleeping, there is a similar post below)
I didn’t realise they were tomatillos till very late in the day. And even later in the day I didn’t realise I hated the taste of tomatillos. Despite my honeyed words such as, “they look great for colour in a salad” my wife treated them with the disdain of someone who’d been promised “a lot of chilli peppers” and had been supplied with squelchy acorns.
Analysis of both our seed orders from Thompson and Morgan revealed no purchase of tomatillo seeds and so our only guess is that somehow the tomatillo seeds got mixed in with the chilli pepper seeds and I have nurtured them like cuckoos in the nest. Tomatillos are terribly indulgent and wilt like a Victorian lady caught without her parasol the moment they detect a photon and are demanding of water on the scale of a small hydroponics installation.
Our sole surviving chilli plant was also spoiled rotten. When Frances Tophill nominated the chilli peppers as her Plant of the Century on Gardener’s World, I had scoffed mightily. While the other experts had nominated more predictable, sensible things like acers and roses, this seemed like the choice of the teenager who wanted to do their homework in five minutes.
As the summer wore on, the fruits appeared and seemed to stay forever green. Always the one with the greater patience, my wife - who had bonded with the plant so thoroughly now that she would take it shopping with her to Waitrose - insisted that they would turn red. And turn red they did. She loved that plant.
Then there was the agonising part. Saying goodbye... ...saying goodbye in stews and casseroles and chilli con carne, or occasionally as a gift to friends. (If you are a friend of my wife's and were given a chilli, that is her ultimate badge of friendship, the Golden Ticket)
When the very last one was picked in late November it was as though the last child had left home. Emotional. So yes, Frances, the chilli pepper is a significant plant. And this year the seed order has been thoroughly checked over by us both.
If we get tomatillos again, I shall be taking them back up the A14 to Ipswich myself.
