In the final part of this series, we’ll be looking at the flowers and fruit that will have appeared on your Chilli plant by now. A final big thank you to the team at The Chilli King who have offered their expertise on how to grow chilli plants.

As your pepper plants begin to mature you will start to notice flowers appearing on your plants. This is the sign you have been waiting for as it means that your first chillies are not that far off. All that stands between you and fresh chilli pods is pollination.

Pollination will be taken care of naturally by bees and other insects if your plants are kept outside. If grown inside your plants may suffer from flower drop, in which case you may want to consider hand pollination. Don’t worry, this is not as sordid as it may sound. All you need to do is wait until you have a few flowers on your plants then lightly rub your little finger inside the flower heads on your plants. Alternatively use a small artists paint brush or a cotton bud. This will do the bees job of moving pollen around from flower to flower.

Eventually you will see that some of the flowers will go brown and drop off. This is usually no need for alarm as the cause will be a chilli pushing its way through the flower. All you need to do now is to keep up the water/food and wait for your chillies to ripen.

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.

The team at The Chilli King are giving us lots of tips on the best way to go about growing Chillies that we include in our fiery but delicious Chilli Hamper.

Once the seedlings have developed their second set of leaves it is time to re-pot them. The Chilli King recommends pots about 10cm in diameter. Be careful not to damage the seedlings during this process. One good tip is to avoid touching them altogether by re-potting the area of compost around the seedlings roots. By doing this hopefully you will avoid damaging the roots of the plant.

Depending on the time of year, your location and amount of light available you can keep the plants on you windowsill, in the greenhouse or under artificial lighting. Pepper plants love light, so the more they get the faster and stronger they will grow.

Depending on the variety you may need to re-pot the chillies on again in a few weeks time. It is a good idea to avoid potting on to early as there are many theories that potting on too early into too big a pot focuses the plants growth on growing the roots rather than stems, leaves, flowers and ultimately chillies. A general rule of thumb is to only do this when roots are appearing through the drainage holes at the bottom of the pots.

Once the risk of frost passes you can put the plants outside. Initially you might want to harden them off by placing outside for just a few hours a day. This will get the plants used to the direct sunlight and wind that they may not have experienced so far during their indoor life.

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.