In late 2007 I stumbled upon a thread on a certain gaming group forum about home growing capsicums – chillies*. Living in Finland, as I mentioned in my introduction a few days ago, I found the idea itself to be quite odd. Why would anyone even try that this far north from the plant’s natural habitat? I suppose the rabbit hole opened under me when I started to read the Finnish chilli forum (chilifoorumi.fi), since quite soon I was purchasing seeds online and setting up a small plant lamp in a corner of my room. Since the humble beginnings I’ve expanded my hobby a bit, but only within the bounds of my apartment. I’ve had at most some 30-40 small plants at a time, and fewer once they’ve grown. All of my plants have been pretty small compared to ones grown in a greenhouse (the usual way here, simply to combat the less than optimal climate), and my crops have been tiny, but I’ve enjoyed my time and plan to keep going and expanding, especially when I have the space for a greenhouse.
What’s in it for me?
I wasn’t really a fan of spicy foods when I first started growing chillies. I’d used Tabasco sauce at some point years before for a while, but that’s about it. Now I do enjoy my food with a bit of a burn, I dare say hotter than most people would like to eat. I feel like I get more out of even the simple foods when I add some chilli powder or sauce, possibly due to the capsaicinoids’ aroma enhancing properties. Other people might like chillies just for the fun it is to grow them, seeing the seedlings germinate, take root, open their first leaves and eventually flower and produce fruit, or “pods” as they are often called. Others, like me, are more or less collectors. I like to grow many different kinds of chillies, from the most common and tasty to the rare and difficult ones. Some of my dearest chilli plants are only known by their scientific name, since they’re not grown commercially – Capsicum galapagoense, native only to the Galápagos Islands. The sheer number of different colours, flavours and shapes can be stunning. It’s not just about the red and green “pepper” people so often think of – there are yellow, orange, purple and nearly black chillies, plus striped ones and other multi-coloured varieties! The spectrum of flavours and heat levels ensures you’ll be likely to find a fitting chilli for almost any dish you can think of. A large part of a chilli farmer’s yearly schedule is reserved for processing the crops, whether it is by freezing or drying fresh fruits or by cooking up all kinds of jams, pickling the pods whole, fermenting them or even adding mashed chilli to red wine before fermenting it (yes, that’s been done as well).
The above reasons one might enjoy chilli farming are all somewhat tied to chillies themselves, but there are other reasons chillies are great for gardeners who want to try something new. The plants are extremely flexible in terms of suitable growing methods. Apart from the basic fertilized soil in a pot or ground, you can use all kinds of hydroponic systems, such as passive systems, bubblers, ebb-flood systems and NFT-systems, aeroponic systems or so called bioponic systems, where e.g. a fish tank takes the role of the water reservoir. If you like to tinker with technology or build your own equipment, there’s a world of options, each of which seems to result in healthy chilli plants and tasty pods. In Finland, home growing chillies is particularly popular among men of all ages, possibly due to the possibilities to play with all kinds of tools. The plants can also be groomed to fit your idea of the best chilli plant – whether that is a 4m tall giant with branches heavy with pods, or a miniature tree that can take less than year to create from seed, so called “bonchi” or “bonsai chilli”. There are many cultivars made to be decorative, ignoring the taste, others to be as hot as possible, and still others to have the best flavours for your foods. The last thing I’d like to mention is the awesome community gathered around these plants. The Finnish Chili Association has around one thousand members, and the annual Chilifest (taking place in Tampere, August 12-14 this year) is a massive event with more than 30,000 visitors from around the country.
Bringing everything together, the one great thing about chillies is the variety in cultivars, uses, growing methods, etc. If you’re interested at all, I recommend checking out this site by a fellow Finnish chilli enthusiast (in English for your convenience!). Mr. Fatalii has done a great deal to benefit the chilli growers worldwide, and you can find loads of information, beautiful pictures and seeds for sale, should you like to try it yourself. Note that I am not associated with the site or its management in any way. There are many more sites dedicated to chillies, most with a specific purpose. Fatalii.net has a bit of everything about chillies, and I believe it’s the easiest place to start. Fatalii’s Jukka and a couple other Finnish chilli experts put together a book about chillies last year, and rumour has it Jukka is working on another book in English…
As always, feel free to hit me with your questions and comments!
(*Note on the spelling: I decided to go with the British spelling, being a European and in general liking the British English pronunciation better than others.)
Upvoted you
Nice pepper garden, I try to grow peppers every year too.
That website has a great selection, I will have to read more about the bonsia ones.
I recently found an interesting Openbazaar store you might like called Tyggs Seedery in the Netherlands. They sell a few types of pepper seeds very cheap for bitcoin. I ordered Siberian Paprika and Spanish Pepper, and they showed up in about a week and 90% sprouted. This Siberian one is supposed to produce peppers all year long after it gets going.
Good luck with all those peppers!
Hi, and thanks! I'll check out Tyggs Seedery as well, I'd love to be able to buy seeds with bitcoin. Sounds like the germination rate is good as well, which isn't the case for every online seed store I've heard of.
Hey ottulo, nice stuff going on in your corner there :) I, too, have tried to grow my own chillies, although I'm from CZ (not really chilli's natural place as well).
I've bought Cayenne Peppers and Brazillian Chilli Fish – the results suprised me and really overcome my expectations. Not that I have ripe chillis yet, but my Brazillian Chilli quicky outgrows my window and Cayenne Pepper already has ~3 peppers/plant.
(full size here excuse the poor quality)
Might not be much in your numbers, but I feel really satisfied as a grower-newcomer :) Can't wait for the results & expansion next year, for sure!
Cheers to all fellow chilli lovers!
Hi!
Looks good in my opinion, and much better than my first years' attempts. The rightmost plants are somewhat small to be producing, since their crop will be very much limited by their size, but I'm letting mine produce already as well, and they aren't really any bigger. I don't have the space (or patience, this year) to let mine grow very big, I'll be just happy to have my own crop after a few failed years due to stupid mistakes (you ought to pay attention you're using the right amount of fertilizer). The season's not that long here either, so I'm not taking my chances and risk having no mature crops before it's too cold.
I have more photos from this year here: http://ottulo.kuvat.fi/kuvat/Kasvit/2016/ and from previous years in the other folders there (top left to switch to parent folders).
The last (top) six I took a moment ago, so they're pretty grainy due to the low light here now at 10 pm. There are some tomato and other plants mixed in as well, so don't be fooled. :P
Hi ottulo!! Welcome to the gardening corner! Lots of enthusiasts here. LOVE your enthusiasm for chillies!
Thanks! I'll be happy to share more, and will try to write some more detailed posts about some of the topics I mentioned here.
Great read. Happy to see someone from Finland joining Steemit, I used to live in Helsinki and loved every minute of it. Do you have a sauna? I would love to see a post on that. Also, so few people are aware of Santa's village over there and I am sure a post on that will get you more upvotes =)
I don't actually have a sauna in my apartment, although it's very common to have one even if the apartment is quite small. I live in a rowhouse with 8 apartments, and there's a communal sauna (another very common setup). Since there's only a couple other people using the sauna, we don't have a reservation system in place nor do we pay for using it, but other places have either a paper on the notice board or an online system for reserving shifts, and in those cases it's usually charged per use once a month. My parents live on a small farm and have a smoke sauna, which is very traditional. I've been to saunas heated with wood and electricity, small private saunas and large communal ones, plus a tent and a trailer, both made sauna. I could write up something about the sauna culture and/or different types of sauna you can find.
I haven't been to Santa's village, although I drove past it on a trip to Lapland a couple years ago. It's pretty much a full day's drive from where I live, but you could take the train or a plane to get there faster. My wife wants to visit the village, so we might very well go once our kid is a bit older and can enjoy it as well. I could also write a post on the origins of Christmas (or, to be precise, Yule), since that might be more informative and I could do that without making the trip up north.
Our sauna while I lived there had an electric faux-stone design that we used. It was quite a refreshing thing and we got into the habit of using it frequently while we were there.
We visited the Santa Claus village on our way up to see the Nordic Circle which was cool. They had a knife shop there (not sure if it is still around) that was ridiculously sharp. Both my grandpa and my brother cut themselves after the store keeper got through warning us all haha!
I love a fellow chilli grower. I live in Scotland, which probably had the same issues you have with regards to light/climate etc. It's an obvious question so forgive me but when you mentioned small yields I wondered if you fertilised regularly? I had experienced small yields with my chillis. My favourites to grow are jalapeños and scotch bonnets. I read online about fertilising weekly and upgrading the strength of the fertiliser when the plants were flowering/fruiting. This made a colossal difference to my yields.
Anyway loved your post!
Cool! Do they taste better than store bought?
Short answer: yes.
Long answer:
That would depend on the selection your store carries. Here, we used to have only the cheapest and most prolific Annuums grown commercially in Spain or Holland. The main focus was on cheap price and large crops, so the taste wasn't really good at all and the burn was very stingy and nasty. Growing your own, you can pick from the entire selection from traditional tasty Mexican chillies to the spiciest (but still very tasty!) Indian and Caribbean cultivars. Thanks to the great work by the Finnish Chili Association and the good press about the hobby and related events, you can now find several kinds of fresh Finnish-grown chillies in many stores or mail-order them. Finland just might be the only country apart from Central American countries where you can find e.g. fresh C. pubescens chillies at a store (correct me if I'm wrong).