Chilli Pepper Growing Guide – Part 5: Hardening Off & Potting Up

Welcome to Part 5 of the Chilli Pepper growing guide! Two parts to todays video, part 1 is all about bringing your plants outdoors and hardening them up, and part 2 is all about potting up, pot sizes, and growing positions/planning. Any questions please let me know!

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Chapters:
00:00 – Intro
00;35 – When can chillis go outside or under cover?
04;02– Sun Scorch & Hardening Off
06;05 – Chilli Pepper Pot Size Explained!
14;56 – Planting peppers in the ground
16:15 – Potting Mix Recipe
16:34 – Supporting Chilli Peppers

hi folks and welcome back to part five of my UK Chili Pepper growing Guide Series this today is probably the most important day in the growing calendar for me because I’m going to be getting a lot of my Peppers into their final pots today we’ve got a kind of two-part video the first is going to be getting your chili peppers outside when is the right time what temperatures do you need to look out for what other things do you need to watch out for because there’s a few things that I’ve done wrong that I can show you and part two is going to be the actual potting up process for me this always feels like a major event in the garden calendar and I absolutely love it so when should you be thinking about bringing your chili plants outside I guess the first question and the first thing that you need to think about is what your final growing position is are they just going out into your back Garden do you have something undercover a greenhouse a poly tunnel that changes things quite dramatically you can take these outside and just grow them somewhere if you’ve got like a nice south facing Sun trap these can grow really well just Outdoors you don’t have to have a greenhouse or a poly tunnel for them but generally speaking if you’re going to be putting them out undercover into a greenhouse or a poly tunnel you can bring them out a little bit earlier but you do need to be aware of something that a lot of beginners fall into a lot of beginners think that over night your poly tunnel and your Greenhouse are going to be really warm when in fact they’re going to cool down extremely quickly there’s not going to be that much difference between what’s outside and the temperature inside in your Greenhouse SO waiting until it’s properly warmed up is absolutely key the temperature that you want to be looking for is a nighttime temperature of 10° or above generally in the daytime if you’re starting to move towards shorts and everyone around is wearing shorts then it’s probably going to be okay but you do need to look at those nighttime temperatures and looking at the forecast is one thing but Gathering your own data is absolutely invaluable there can be a really big difference between your own localized outdoor grin conditions and what is forecast on kind of weather modeling and your weather station which might be a good few miles away and so investing in a little thermometer where you can keep track of the trends see what the knights are dipping to compare that to the forecast really really invaluable I’ve had this little thermometer out in the poly tunnel and I’ve got one in the greenhouse as well and I know that generally the lowest we’ve seen recently since I bought these Peppers out has been 9° ideally you want 10 to kind of 15 for a nighttime temperature for them to be really comfortable but above 10 you’re generally going to be okay another trap that beginners can fall into is thinking that this 10° guide is just a guide and that it doesn’t really matter that much you know everyone knows Chili Peppers like heat but they need it and it’s really really good advice to hold off and keep them indoors for as long as you can and I’ve got a perfect example for you this is a sugar rush long Peach that was brought out to the greenhouse a little bit too early I did this deliberately to show you the difference both of these are in one lit pots and and can you guess which one was left indoors both of these are pot bound they’re not the healthiest of plants but you can see the difference and what happens if you bring a plant outside too soon before the temperatures have warmed up basically your plants will be okay so if it’s kind of do or die if you don’t have any other choice but to get them out they will survive under 10° but they won’t grow they will kind of stall like this one has there’s a little bit of growth coming out the bottom and that’s probably just since it started to warm up but for the longest time this has just sat doing virtually nothing just kind of hanging on Surviving but not thriving meanwhile this one which has been kept at home far from ideal you can see it’s far too kind of tall it’s getting a bit long it’s not got much growth it has started coming out now it’s got the sunshine but it’s going to be so much further ahead than the one that we brought out into the greenhouse too early so definitely do not underestimate the power of those cold nights to completely stall your plants the other thing which I have personally underestimated is the power of the sun and the ability for it to completely destroy your plants I have never had sunscorch as bad as this year and I did not harden off enough I was a bit Cavalier a bit kind of like ah I’m sure it will be fine I think for about 3 days I was putting these outside just in the back Garden to get a little taste of the proper full Sunshine which is is very very different from a grow light this is especially harmful to the plants which have just been under the tiny little blurple kind of much less powerful grow lights the one that have been under a super super duper light they have also had quite a lot of sunburn actually and a bit of sunscorch but nowhere near as bad as this so ideally you want to set aside at least a week to be bringing these out you know half an hour at first for the first day just give them their first little taste of sun then back in an hour the next if it’s full sun then be really careful if you’ve got a full cloudy overcast day then you can put them out for a little bit longer but it is a really good idea to give them a week or two of an adjustment period if possible best case scenario you could bring them out to their final growing position I can’t really do that and a lot of my viewers who have allotments won’t be able to do that because it’s a whole Trek you’ve got to get the car out and load your boot up with your chilies maybe if you’ve only got one or two you could put them into the greenhouse but it’s good to acclimatize them into that final gr position position and then at night time bring them back into your warm and cozy house where it’s definitely going to be above 10° if you do get a bit of sunscorch don’t worry you should still have a really nice healthy root system if you’ve had a good strong growth and a good strong start to your year so a lot of these leaves will start to die back if it’s really bad like this one I should probably take this off so the plant can continue to grow left it on for for demonstration purposes but so long as you’ve got a nice healthy plant and nice healthy Roots the plant will shoot forth with loads more fresh Healthy Growth which will be much better adapted for the the power of the sun now let’s talk about the next stage potting out but first I do want to say just because it’s time for me to do a lot of my final pot sizes that doesn’t mean it’s right for you it does depend on a lot of different situations I’ve did did a whole episode and a whole segment on the correct pot sizes so that is linked below but a quick recap I have a massive range of pot sizes I’ve been doing a lot of planning today as you can see a lot of these plants they’re just in little pots for now but I’ve put them inside the pot that they will be going into today and I’ve got a whole range like I say between 2.5 L uh we’ve got the 10 lit here I’ve got 6.5s I’ve got fives I’ve got 12 L and I’ve got 10 L as well so it all depends on a lot of different factors I mentioned that it might not be right for you to pot up just yet generally when you pot up your plant is going to be comfortable for another four to 6 weeks this one was last potted on the February February the 27th so it’s been in this tiny little pot for 9 weeks now these are absolutely crying to be potted on but I didn’t have the space indoors this is a very common problem that you’ll run into if you’re growing Chili Peppers so this for me I want it to be a really good plant a really large Plant this is a sugar rush long Peach I want as much fruit off this as possible so it’s going to be going into a 10 L Pot today in the pot siiz video I said ideally you want to be going to no more than around five times the size size of your current pot so if you’re in a 1 lit pot you would normally go up to around 5 L but I’m really confident about the temperatures now and I know a lot of these healthy plants I’m putting the biggest healthiest plants into the 10 lit pots and I know they’re going to romp away if I had something like this slightly sickly sunburnt plant that I was showing you earlier I would not be putting this straight into a 10 lit pot because it’s going to be growing much slower and those roots aren’t going to fill the pot you’re probably going to end up with a water logged compost at the bottom of your soil and it’s a situation you want to avoid so for something like this I would go up to the intermediate stage this is a 2.5 L Pot I’m going to be doing a lot of these slower growing ones that were brought up into the greenhouse a little bit too early I’m going to be doing those into 2.5 lers so the ideal pot size for your plant will completely depend on the purpose of that chili if you want maximum growth go for the biggest pot size possible if you’ve had good strong growth and they’ve been potted up for around six four to kind of seven weeks you can kind of get away with a little bit of that gray area let me pick up the camera and walk you around and show you a few of the decisions I’ve been making because I think it be really helpful for you to see one other really key consideration when thinking about pot size is the variety of plant that you’re growing as well so generally speaking the pot size will dictate the size of the pepper pod so if you’re growing for example something like a jalapeno or let’s say a bell pepper because I couldn’t find my jalapeno what you will really want to do is make sure that they’re in the biggest pot possible because if you’re in something like a 5 L Pot for a bell pepper or a jalapeno they’re going to have small pods and obviously that’s fine you can still use the pods but for something like a jalapeno normally you want to have it raw you might want to have it um sliced on a pizza or make a jalapeno popper or something like that the same is true with this California Wonder bell pepper it’s a bit like a small onion you don’t really want a small onion just because you lose the economies of scale in the kitchen it’s a lot more faff to chop up and to prepare so for some varieties of pepper and chili you do want to keep that in mind and try and aim for the bigger pot size if you’ve got something that you’re growing maybe for the first time that you’ve not tried before like I’ve got over here with my kstar sweet Queenie I mean this is a double whammy this is a pepper I’ve never grown before so I’m interested just to try a few of the pods and it’s also grown very very poorly you can see it’s very very small this was just under the blue light it’s had a bit of sunscorch it’s not looking great although fantastically compact so this one I’m just putting in a 2.5 L and if I left it in this I’d probably still get some decent sized Peppers that would allow me to get a sense of the flavor profile and how it grows and if I want to grow it next year and if I want to do it a bit bigger the chinen varieties are really one to watch out for so these are your hotter Peppers something like a scotch bonnet a red habanero I’ve got one of those in here somewhere you can see the difference in the growth structure I love these plants they’re so so beautiful big broad leaves you’ve got one up here as well compared to the slightly more slender leaves of a of a different chili variety and generally speaking you want to be a bit more careful with these because they’re are slow growing plants and most of these are in 5 L pots at the moment and I think because they’ve grown quite well but they are slightly on the slow side I’m going to put them into five and if they really romp away if they start getting really good growth then there’s still time to plant them up to maybe a 7.5 or a 10 lit pot lat in the year and the other thing to think about this really applies if you’re doing it at scale like me if you’re growing more than 10 plants have a proper plan you don’t need to have a written plan ahead of time but today I have spent many hours like looking around the green houses looking around my poly tunnel looking around my grow space so I’ve got the two green houses back here and over here as well I’ve got a nice 10t X 20ft poly tunnel with a fair bit of room for growing Chili Peppers so I’ve done an awful lot of thinking about which which varieties you’re going to go where before I’ve decided the pot size because the bigger the pot size the bigger the plant and the more room they need obviously the last thing you want to do is plant everything up do all the work of potting these on into gigantic 10 lit pots and then going oh wait a second I’ve only got room for five or six of those in my Greenhouse where am I going to put them all it’s much better to C off the plants at this stage save yourself the time the effort give them away to neighbors while they can still be it up and put into their Greenhouse there’s a very good chance if you’re like me you’ve got slightly more plants than than you should have and you’re struggling to fit them in I’ve got some good room in here just a little space up here on the greenhouse and here is another good example of the pot sizes so this is another new variety for me this year at puess looks fascinating very very cool plant but one I just want to try so I’ve got two of those in little 2.5 L these are the slightly bigger ones these are 7.5 which is kind of the smallest I would recommend for a sweet or a mild pepper you want those to get nice and big so this is a beaver dam and we’ve got a Peppa G back there and then elsewhere in this greenhouse I’ve got a little self-watering system a quad grow back here and space for just a few what you don’t want to do and trust me I’m speaking from experience you don’t want to cram too many plants into too small a space for a few reasons first is light the plants will be competing with each other for light the second is maintenance when the plant start growing into one another it becomes an absolute pain to try and like Harvest them or do anything like that with them and the third is watering if you’re doing manual watering once again it’s just it becomes a jungle I’m speaking from experience and you end up neglecting your plant a little bit or you’re more likely to miss things that have been unwatered or something like that you might miss a problem or a p problem you might miss ripe chilies it’s just honestly it’s so much better to just plant for the space that you have and a really good way to do that actually is using sources here are all my pot sizes the 2.5S the fives the 7.5 and the 10 the main ones I like to use but for all of them I like to use these sources and at this stage in the growing season these are perfect for going around and setting out the spacing too so let’s pop into the poly tunnel where I’m just starting to get things ready and in here we’ve got this autopop watering system ah this was absolutely phenomenal last year I just need to make a little bit more space for the plants here we’ve got this mini self-watering system uses a wicking mat called a chili grow and I’ve set out they’ve been knocked about a bit but basically two lots of six plants and the idea is that I will be able to get into here to water it’s all going to be pushed over a little bit and I need to have a little clear up in the poly tunnel and that kind of thing but earlier in the day I had all of the plants in there imagining them getting to full size kind of trying work around them and I think to be honest I’m still going to have a few too many plants but I do every year and it’s sort of part of the fun but do as I say not as I do don’t grow too many plants or you can grow as many as you want but don’t try and cram them into too smaller space where they’re going to be fighting with each other it becomes a headache I do have another pot siize example as well these 2.5 L I’ve got three plants which I’m putting into the ground directly in the poly tunnel this year which is something I’ve not done before but I think it’s probably a good idea to just wait a little bit longer and instead of planting them straight into the ground right now in their one liter pots just give them a little bit more of a boost give them a little 2.5 L Pot which will just give the soil in the poly tunnel that little bit longer to warm up it’s probably a good idea if you’re doing anything that is going to be going into a raised bed or going into the ground just give it a little bit longer don’t plan it out when the nights are 10° wait until you’ve had that for a good few weeks as well as warm days so that the soil can really warm up and so the roots of these chili plants aren’t going to get a nasty shock the sources are of course as well brilliant for bottom watering you can just pour the water straight in here and let the plants absorb it I’ve talked all throughout the series about the importance of bottom watering and how it can really help the root development of your chili pepper plants in terms of the actual process of potting these up it’s exactly the same as earlier in the season it’s just scaled up so for me I use a very interesting tool which is actually this old bathtub which I found on an alotment it is perfect for mixing up the amount of compost that you need when you’re going into full kind of 10 L chili pepper plant pots but yes in terms of the potting mix I still use the one from chili chump Linked In the description his potting mix it’s absolutely phenomenal I just do it at much bigger scale empty out whole bags of compost 40 L at a time into that big bathtub mix it all up and then get these potted on and put into their final growing position and if you can putting in a plant support while you’re potting this up it’s probably the best timing I have a history of forgetting to do this obviously this is this is an old one that I used last year and there’s a few ways you can do it if you’re in a really big pot you can just do one kind of bamboo cane that you then tie the main stem into but because I use a lot of the smaller pots one cane will just end up getting really loose cuz there’s not that much compost to hold it in place so I like to get three and basically set them in a triangle around your plant with twine that goes through and then that twine can support the branching stems that come out and keep everything nice and supported if you don’t do this and you have a really good growing year you run the risk of a plant getting a really heavy branch which falls and actually snaps under its own weight so getting the support in nice and early now is a really good idea because you’re less likely to damage the plants and if you’re putting canes into the compost you’re not going to be damaging their Roots because they won’t have filled out the pot just yet I really hope your growing season is going very well and you found this super useful thank you ever so much for watching an extra special thank you to all of my chili pepper tier patrons Tony Bill Pam Louise Mel Michael Denise socks in the garden Andrew Sarah dcasa Angela and Louise hopefully I’ll see you again in the next one when all of these will be romping away