All About Growing Chillies In The Southern Hemisphere - Pt 1These pages are dedicated to everything you should need to know about growing chillies in the southern hemisphere. While chillies-down-under.com.is based in Perth, Western Australia, the information will be relevent whether you're in Australia, New Zealand, SE Asia, southern Africa or South America. chillies-down-under.com do maintain a small chilli patch for personal use and the odd bout of research when the mood strikes. However, I also have good connections with keen hobbyists and commercial growers, and access to a large horticultural library.
Getting Your Chilli Seeds or Seedlings In The GroundIt is worth highlighting at this point that chillies are perennials that have evolved in the tropics of the central Americas.As many of us grow them in a temperate climate we need to appreciate that the plants will become dormant, even die, during the winter as the average ambient temperatures are simply too low for them. As a result of tjhis, many people believe that chillies are an annual. However, if you can keep them alive during the cold season you will see that they flourish agin in the spring and fruit through the summer and autumn.
There are, of course, two options for you should you decide to grow your own chillies; start from seed, or obtain seedlings and take it from there. In this series of four articles we will begin at the very start selecting the seeds to grow your chillies from. If it is your intention to purchase seedlings and plant those out then simply skip ahead to , Toughening & Transplanting Your Seedlings.
Obtaining Your Chilli Seeds There are two sources for you to obtain your seeds unless you’re lucky enough to live in a location where chillies grow wild. I’ll discuss both of these below and give you my recommendations. Home Grown Why is this? The reason for this is that chillies are rampant cross-pollinators. This means that even if you brought commercial seeds or seedlings and keep the plants near each other, they will fruit true to variety for the first year but after that what will be produced will be a cocktail of the nearby varieties. The home gardener who fully isolates his or her chilli varieties to prevent cross-pollination is a rare person indeed. Having said that however, do not suddenly form the opinion that home grown seeds are not for you. If you obtain some seeds from your own plants or those of a friend, plant a few of them anyway – you may end up with a hybrid variety that you really like! Commercially Produced Seed produced by the large seed companies is much more likely to grow true to variety as they have a vested interest in maintaining the genetic purity of the cultivar. For the non-botanists a cultivar is cultivated plant that has been selected and given a unique name because it has desirable characteristics that distinguish it from otherwise similar plants of the same species. When propagated it retains those characteristics. The common term for a cultivar is variety.
There are no federal regulations governing seed quality and certification within Australia and there is a significant variation of these concepts between the states. These range from a strict certification process within Western Australia to recommended ‘best practice’ guidelines in South Australia based on international practices. As a result of this lack of consistency you may experience some variation in seed quality and reliability when purchasing seeds from small producers as it is possible that they are unable or unwilling to introduce strict processes to guarantee cultivar purity. If you do wish to purchase from the smaller producers that is fine, just approach the purchase with the knowledge and perspective that you now have. Make a small purchase and test the quality before spending too much of your hard earned cash. Inspecting and Testing Seed Now, any seeds that are still floating are highly unlikely to germinate, due to a variety of factors including malformation and a lack of embryo or kernel. Discard the floaters and then pour the remainders into a sieve to get rid of the water. Now inspect the seeds, with a magnifying glass if you’re really keen, and discard any that look undersized, deformed or damaged.
Getting Your Seeds to Germinate Even with ideal conditions, getting chilli seeds to germinate can be a slow, irregular business. Talking to both small and large growers in Western Australia you can expect germination to take from one to six weeks, even in the tropical areas. The warning here is; don’t give up too early on your seeds. Just the same as the majority of other plants, chilli seeds need warmth, oxygen, and moisture before germination will occur. Below, I discuss some other factors that may help you increase your success rate planting from seeds. Temperature The ideal temperature for germinating chilli seeds is 22oC to 28oC .
While trying to induce seed germination, the medium that the seeds are in needs to be kept moist. Ideally this would occur with water that is not too different in temperature to the seed medium, but don’t get too hung up on this point. Fruit Maturity In the fascinating, but heavily scientific, Capsicum and Eggplant Newsletter that used to be published by the University of Turin (Italy) I found reference to a study carried out in 1986 in Texas on seed from tabasco chillies harvested 150, 195, and 240 days after transplanting. What the scientists R.L. Edwards and F.J. Sundstrom, observed, as expected, was that the seeds from the ripe fruit had a better germination percentage than the seeds from the immature fruit. What surprised a little more was that the germination percentage decreased as the fruit got older; after achieving 81% germination from the 150 day old plants, the percentage dropped to 63% for the 240 day old plants. To summarise these results, the study suggests that seeds from newly ripened chillies will have the highest percentage of successful seed germinations. If harvested too far either side of becoming ripe, you risk decreased seed germination performance.
Dormancy Another factor that affects chilli seed germination is a mechanism called dormancy which is common in many plant types. This is an obvious self defense mechanism that prevents the seed germinating in Autumn only to be exposed to the risks of winter and possible seedling death. All chillies are perennials however, unless you live in the tropics, they will behave as annuals and the inherent dormancy in both the seeds and the plants will vary between the varieties.
OK, this section ends here. It continues on the next page and covers everything you need to know about germinating your seeds and transplanting the seedlings.
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The mini greenhouse I use to germinate chilli seeds. The plants in the pots nearby are curry trees, which I thoroughly recommend to all of you as an ingredient for many asian style dishes.
