Growing South... Notes from Plot 14
JANE
Wilbraham
Jane Wilbraham is a multi-disciplinary artist, proud plotholder of Plot 14 and committee member for the Longton Nursery Allotments Association.
The self-managed Longton Nursery Allotments, a 2-minute walk over the road from us here in Sydenham is one of the joys of our neighbourhood.
Much-deserved winners of the Lewisham Best Allotment Site 2019!
We love being able to use Jane's produce from Plot 14 in our menus, and as she's taught us all such a great deal we thought it was time to start sharing Jane's green-thumbed notes from the allotment with you all.
This week Jane has been picking outdoor-ripening chilli's much to her surprise.
The amazing (UK) outdoor ripening chilli…
I like chillies. Not ‘so hot they make your face numb’ hot – I’ll leave those to Ben! - but more that mellow, slow-build chilli-heat that is so addictive and seems to make every other ingredient it comes into contact with pop, fizz and pulsate with hyper-real flavour. That’s down to a compound called capsaicin, which mammals experience via their pain receptors, but birds do not. (If you want to deter squirrels, add some dried chilli flakes to bird food and you’ll see evidence of the veracity of this).*
This is important, as birds are instrumental in the evolutionary development of chillies. They can ingest the seeds without experiencing the burn and then broadcast them via their droppings.
If you grow chillies, you’ll know that you get a lot of hot bang for your gardening buck from a relatively small plant, and they look beautiful at all stages of growth. I freeze chillies immediately after they're picked for use through the rest of the year. Pop them in a cup of hot water and they quickly bounce back to as they were when you picked them.
Until this year, I had always grown chillies in a greenhouse, as everyone knows chillies won’t ripen outside in the UK, right? Wrong. Thanks to seed suppliers The Real Seed Company and a dedicated grower called Nigel Green, it seems you can ripen chillies outside in Britain. Hello, ‘Nigel’s Outdoor Chilli’!
I admit to feeling oddly conflicted about the fact that it’s now possible to get a chilli to fruit and ripen outdoors, even in balmy SE London. It still seems a bit of a stretch from the chilli plants origins in Mexico (or to be more archaeologically accurate, Mesoamerica), and traded via the colonies of the Portuguese empire to hot climates around the globe, but the seasons of our temperate climate are distorting and changing, there’s no denying it.
Nigel’s chilli performed magnificently outside in the ground on my plot at Longton Nursery during this hottest of hot years, doing exactly what it said on the paper seed packet and obligingly producing an abundance of green (hot, not quite fully ripe) and red (more mellow, fully ripe) fruits; so if I can embrace the dissonance, this one is a keeper. Thank you, Nigel.
*No squirrels were harmed during my experiments, but I doubt they’ll be ordering take-away madras any time soon.
Jane Wilbraham, 17th Sept 2020
@lnallotmentsse26
Longton Nursery Allotments
Hello ‘Nigel’s Outdoor Chilli’ !