Black chillis

I have been growing some cayenne chilli peppers this year from seed so as to avoid the hassle that comes with supermarket chilli-buying - that is, buying three, using two, binning one.

They were grown from a Sutton's Seeds pot thing - it was basically a bit of compost, some seeds and a container to propagate in. I got pretty good results and potted them out and they've been doing nicely outside. I ended up with six plants, though two were so stupidly planted that they never made it.

Anyway, I currently have four quite solid plants. They've needed staking to stop them flopping down but they're otherwise grand. Many fruit have now been produced but I've noticed some black patches appearing on them. The Internet seems a bit vague on the cause of these but I think I've come to a conclusion. This is what they look like:

There's a sort of burnt-looking region on this chilli. Now, at first this was the only chilli showing this so I imagined some sort of defect. However, several now show exactly the same thing so I researched online to see what the cause was. Internet reckoned:

1. Darkening before ripening to red.
2. Rotting.
3. Sun burning.

They seem good and firm and the one I cut up tonight (the one above in fact) was perfectly fine so no rotting. I'm not convinced they are going red. So that leaves us sun burning. I happened to notice that the black areas only appear on a single side of the affected fruits and that side matches the direction of the sun at around midday to 2pm - the strongest time for sun exposure, plus this is a heatwave year. In fact, if you look closely at the picture you can see quite a clear line showing what would match the strongest sun exposure.

I therefore conclude:

Black patches on cayenne chilli peppers are due to excessively bright sun.

On We Go

It's been a while since doing all that much with the garden. Firstly there was a heatwave which really limits what you can do other than watering every bloody minute you get. Then there was a load of rainy weather which is good and all but what can you do other than wait for it to stop raining? Combined with general business it's been mostly just waiting about and letting the garden do its thing.

So today we finally got a decent combination of bit of rain but drying up which is perfect. First thing in the morning it was quite reasonable too so I did a lot of inspecting and tidying up. From previous clearances I had a load of tubs and containers full of stray soil which had filled up with water and weeds and general crap. An hour of so of back-breaking labour cleared these via the medium of tipping them all out into a pile so they can drain and I'll deal with the bloody stuff later.

Other than that it looked like the two pieris in the rockery were slowing dying. This came as no surprise as they'd been hammered by the heatwave and also planted in the wrong type of soil - they want acid and I didn't realise so they've been sat in crappy multipurpose stuff. They have now been dug out and the rockery rearranged to give them more space and replanted into proper ericaceous compost. The rockery also had some attention regarding a hidden sedum being moved to a more prominent location and a euphorbia having it's long dying flower stems cut off. This left a nice little foliage thing:

I did discover after cutting it back that sap is toxic and that it tends to gum up secateurs. Fortunately I didn't get any on me, phew.

I did a load of rearranging of plants.

Those are both eucalyptus that have been moved. One is in an old disused lampshade. I remembered this time to soak them first so they don't wilt really sadly when repotted. They have had the crap eaten out of them and have fungus. C'est la vie.

I potted out some olive trees that I've been growing from seed. Only two of germinated and here's one:

I have chillis!

And olives!

And proto-raspberries!

Our garage door has also been colonised by caterpillars. I saw one stuck on it yesterday and it looked like it was dying but today it has turned into this:

It's a chrysalis! It swings about a bit when opening and closing the garage but it seems to be staying on. Fran saw another caterpillar climbing up the wall earlier and now I have found this:

It's chrysalising! We will have two butterflies of our very own to have and to hold.

Oh, and we got a couple of plants. Firstly a little patio rose. I thought about trying to bonsai it but from the sounds of it people who try to bonsai roses are on a hiding to nothing.

Secondly a little juniper. I wanted one of these ages ago for the rockery but couldn't find one. Now I don't want to plant it in the rockery due to the ongoing bamboo problem so it's going in a pot for the time being. I want to get some cuttings from it for bonsai and it may make it onto the rockery for next year:

And they also had this mad bastard:

It's another juniper and was heavily reduced so I got it too. It is now sat in another disused lampshade. They are good as they have drainage holes and everything. But aye, not really sure what to do with this, it was just spiky chaos so I got it.

And that's the state of the garden.