In our continuing series about growing Chillies that you’ll find in our Chilli Cube Hamper, we’re passing on advice from The Chilli King about the very best tried and tested methods for growing fiery chillis! Today’s post is about what you should feed to your chilli plants.

How often should you feed them and what with? In the early stages and while the weather is quite mild you can give them a bit of tap water every 2-3 days or whenever the soil is looking dry on top. As the summer temperatures increase, you can increase this to once a day.

Once the flowers start to flower you can introduce a few drops of liquid tomato food into their water during every other watering, using half the dilution strength recommended for tomato plants. Doing so gives the plants the extra energy required to keep producing fruit over the summer months.

Thanks again to the team at ‘The Chilli King’ who are kindly offering their advice and experience with regard to growing chilli plants. You’ll find a packet of seeds in our Chilli Cube Hamper, which means that once all the Chilli flavour goodies have gone, you’ll have your own stash of homegrown Chillis!

Once your seeds have begun to germinate they suddenly have a new requirement to fulfill, light. Depending on where you are and which way your windows face, the windowsill or conservatory may well be adequate and provide your seedlings with enough light to flourish. The Chilli King warns that one problem with growing plants this way is that as they reach up to towards their light source (the sun) they can grow tall and spindly.

Growers can avoid leggy plants is by introducing artificial lighting. The simplest, and by far the cheapest option, is simple fluorescent tube lights bought from any DIY store.

The one downside with fluorescent lighting is that it tends to give off lots of heat which can scald or even kill the seedlings, but this problem can be eradicated by using bulbs that are called ‘cool white’. From experience most light fixings will come with normal bulbs so be sure to spend an extra couple of pounds on cool white bulbs.

Next all you need to do is to rig the lights up above your chilli seedlings. This can be done many different ways and much will depend on the resources and space available. One thing to bear in mind is that ideally whatever you mount your lights to should be adjustable as you will need to move them higher as you little seedlings grow into big strong chilli plants!

Ideally the lights should be positioned between 5-25cm from the top of your plants and you can use a simple timer switch so that the plants receive 18 hours per day under the lights. Alternatively you can put them by a window during the day then move them under the lights during the night.