Transcription
Welcome to the first episode of "From Seed to Sauce," a beginner's guide to growing chilli peppers. My name is Shaun, also known as ChilliChump.
In this episode, we're going to be planting seeds. The first thing you need to do is get yourself a cup of tea. Now, not only is it tasty and delicious, but it's also going to come in handy when we're planting our seeds. My philosophy when growing chillies, or any other plants for that matter, is to try and replicate what happens in nature as closely as possible. Now, I live in the UK, which is not typical chilli growing country, but there are a few things we can do to try and optimize that process and still result in a massive harvest at the end of the season, and I'll share all those tips with you throughout the series.
Today, however, we are talking about planting seeds. Let's think about what happens in nature when it comes to chillies getting their seeds spread far and wide. Chillies, as we know, most chillies are spicy. They have capsaicin inside them, which results in a burn, and it's not just you and me that feel it, but other mammals do as well. So, a bear goes and eats some Carolina Reapers, they will not be a very happy bear. Your dogs and cats will also not be very happy if you feed them Carolina Reaper, so please don't.
However, if you have birds, feel free to give them as many chillies as you want. Birds cannot actually sense the heat from capsaicin. The capsaicin, the part that makes a chilli hot, does not affect birds whatsoever. Now, it's thought that that's a defense mechanism to help the chilli seeds be spread far and wide. Birds can get those seeds out further than mammals can, for example.
Now, we've got to think about what happens when a bird goes and eats a chilli and those seeds go inside their stomach. Obviously, the bird flies off and it'll go and poop somewhere, and you'll end up with seeds propagating in the soil and becoming lovely chilli plants. So, there are two things that are going on there. The one thing is the poop is going to help that seed to have a bit of nutrients to get started, but we'll come on to that in a future episode, what nutrients to use. But in this one, we're interested in the second part of this, which is the scarification of the seeds.
Now, in this instance, it's chemical scarification, and scarification just means the softening of the seed shell, and it allows oxygen to get inside the seed and it also helps the seed to germinate. This is very important for older seeds, not so important for very fresh seeds, but still, it does help. And regardless of my seeds are a month old or five years old, I will still do the process I'm going to show you today.
The good news is we don't need the digestive fluids of a bird to be able to do our chemical scarification, but we will replicate that in a way. What we're going to use are tannins. Now, this being English Breakfast tea, which is just black English Breakfast tea, that has quite a lot of tannins in. The other tea that has a lot of tannins in is chamomile tea, so if you can only get hold of chamomile tea, this will be perfectly fine as well. If you make a cup of tea like I've got here, take that tea bag out and put it in another cup. You can use a Pyrex jug or something like that and put some hot water in that and let that steep for about half an hour or so. Once the temperature comes down on that liquid, where it's at room temperature, then we're ready to start our scarification of our seeds.
Something else you can use for chemical scarification is hydrogen peroxide. This is three percent strength, which you can get over the counter at a chemist or from Amazon, and this has one other added benefit. If your seeds have a risk of mold on them, if you haven't dried them properly, or you've got some seeds that you're not too sure of the quality of them, hydrogen peroxide will actually help to disinfect those seeds too. We're going to need a 30 to 1 mix, so that means 30 parts water (this is just filtered water) and one part hydrogen peroxide.
These are the four varieties that we'll be growing during the series. So, in the last beginner's guide series, I didn't grow a super hot because a big mistake that beginners make is they'll rush out to get a whole bunch of seeds for super hots like the Carolina Reaper, Seven Pot Primo, and that sort of thing. And the problem is, they need a very long season, and that can be some of the most challenging to actually produce fruit. But I'll show you how I get decent harvest from my super hots, and we'll do that with the Moruga Scorpion. I would grow cayenne every single year because you'll be able to use this far more than you will super hot, and they just taste fantastic. We'll be making a sauce with each one of these chilli varieties, and the cayenne will be definitely one that I use to make a buffalo-style wings hot sauce.
The Moz Piri Piri, this is the seed variety that I've sent out to my volunteers. So, this is what they will be comparing progress with when it comes to this series. And if you want to do the same thing, then you can go check out chillichumpseeds.com and get yourself a packet.
To soak my seeds, I'm going to use these small shot glasses, which will do a perfect job. You don't need a lot of liquid in here, just enough to cover over the seeds, and these are really cheap and reusable as well, so I'll use them each year. You can label them, you could write on the shot glass itself if you want, you can write a label and stick it on, or you know, use a tag and put it next to it. I use this little container, it just helps out with dispensing the liquid when you are using such small cups. So, all that we do is give it a bit of a squeeze, and there we go.
We're going to be using a good quality compost for our germination. This is just plain compost, it's beautiful stuff, lovely and dark, and it's actually quite fluffy as it is. However, there are bits and pieces in there that aren't ideal for germination, so we need to take a riddle, something like this, where we can sieve out any of the big particles, and that gives us this beautiful, fine, fluffy compost. Now, you can buy seed starting compost as well, but it's far more cost-effective to buy this because this will be used for when I pot on as well. I won't need to actually sieve it as much, this will be perfectly fine.
Where chillies typically grow, it's fairly warm, and you've got to make sure that your chillies have a good start to life by trying to replicate that warmth. You want to reach around 28 degrees Celsius. That is not something I can get here in my potting shed. It actually gets below freezing in here most of the time, so I need a heated propagator. Some other ways you can use to heat your trays if you are doing this indoors, it's a little bit easier because you probably already have heating on indoors. These trays, as long as you make sure there are no holes underneath, or you put them inside another tray, you can put that on top of the fridge. Sometimes fridges will be quite warm on the top, and that should be enough to get the temperatures up for you. You can also put this on top of satellite boxes, sometimes those can be quite warm, but again, make sure that you're not spilling water near electrics. But for me, I'll be doing it inside a heated propagation tray.
I'll be using SeedsIO to track my plants, so if you do want to follow along, you can go into SeedsIO and check out what's going on there. I know this is tray number 12, and I've got it laid out how I want it to be, so I'm just going to mark this tray. You can see I've already put some masking tape over there, but this is tray 12, and then we're going to mark our rows. This just helps me to keep track. It's easy to keep track when you only have one tray, but I'm going to have about 15 trays.
This compost has been sitting outside for a while, so it's fairly cold. We're going to let this come up to temperature while our seeds are soaking. If you want another little trick to help you get better germination rates, stick your seeds inside the fridge for a couple of days before you go and soak them in the tea. What this does is it kind of tricks the seeds into thinking it's gone through a winter cycle and it's now ready for spring when it starts warming up like this. And spring is typically when nature says, "Hey, we've got to start germinating." So, just another little tip that could help you out.
It's time for us to plant our seeds. So, we're going to start off with our cayenne, which we'll be taking up this column over here, column E. So, here, column E, and all that we do is we stick it on top of the soil. We don't need to embed it very low down, so we just take one seed and get that in there. Now, you can put more than one seed in there if you want, and then you just thin out the strongest. That is completely up to you, and it's a good strategy as well if you want to ensure the success of that seed cell. We got there. Actually, I'll do column F as well. So, we'll add that to SeedsIO. I do love my cayenne plants and chillies. Before I forget, I just added in here, and there we go. So, we've got the cayenne in there.
So, something to point out while we're doing this, you can see in here that some of these are floating. That does not mean that they are not good seeds, so just bear that in mind. Don't throw away the floaters. It's not always an indication that they're bad seeds. If you have extra seeds, then yeah, feel free to double them up. You'll just be pruning them a little bit later, you'll be pinching off the less vigorous growing one, the one that's not growing as quickly.
The next step is to lightly cover the seeds with some of your compost. You can use things like vermiculite or perlite if you want, but I like to just use a little bit more of the compost that I've already used. So, make sure you don't budge these seeds into a different seed cell because you'd be very upset when you get the wrong type of chilli. I'm going to pat down lightly. You don't have to do this necessarily, but that'll be fine. Okay, make sure that all your seeds are actually covered. You don't want them exposed to the air, and when we water, we'll be able to have another look and see whether any have been exposed.
For this initial watering, we're just going to use a spray bottle and we'll see how that goes. Try and get the water to room temperature. You don't want to use freezing cold water. Don't use water from the tap if you can help it because of the chlorine. If you do have to use water from the tap, then let it sit in an open container for about an hour or so, and hopefully the chlorine will evaporate. But unfortunately, sometimes it's not just chlorine that's in the water, there's something else called chloramine, which does not evaporate. The water I like to use is water straight from the heavens, so I use rainwater quite a lot. I collect most of it off my greenhouses and I use that for watering.
So, I can already see some of my seeds are poking out a little bit, so we'll just add a little bit more soil and make sure that they're covered over. Until my plants are outdoors, I will be bottom watering. And the reason for that is typically you'll have lights overhead, and if you don't have lights, then of course you're going to have some sunshine, and if you're watering from the top, it can cause a green film of algae. Okay, so I've wet that down. All right, for now, I'm going to still do some bottom watering here because I can feel it's still quite light. All I've done is settled the top by using the sprayer, and that makes sure that at least from the top, the seeds are nice and wet and they are covered over.
We just need to saturate the soil, and to do that, we need about a liter of water. If both these trays were full, then I would use two liters of water, but one liter of water will do just fine for this. Make sure the water is above the base level, as you can see here, just a little bit, not too much. You don't want this to be sodden wet. This needs to dry out over the next two or three days, but that is just fine. That means that the water will actually pull up into the soil.
Once we've watered from the bottom, we need to get the humidity dome back on to make sure that we keep the moisture inside here. It's a bit of a balancing act, but it is hugely important to make sure that your seeds do not dry out at this early stage. Until they've germinated, you've got to make sure that there's always moisture in your hair without being too much moisture. So, make sure that the humidity dome is on. These flaps, make sure they're closed, so no air can get in and out. It just keeps the humidity in here. You should start seeing some condensation on the inside of the dome if it's doing its job, if it's heating up correctly, and if you've got enough water in there. And at this stage, you do not need any light.
The light that I have above the plants at the moment, they'll go off in just a bit, is one of my favorite things to experience when growing chillies. Now, when that happens, you'll see a little shoot come up, and there'll be what are called cotyledons appearing above the soil. They, the cotyledons, that's when I start putting light over my chillies. What you need to do to look after your seeds until they all start germinating and until I take you on to the next episode where we talk about seedlings, just make sure that this is damp, not soaking wet. Water from the bottom. So, every other day, if you've got the humidity dome on, every other day, look underneath, make sure that it's dry underneath the seed tray, there's no standing water. And if there is any standing water, do not water. If it's dry underneath there, then you can add some more water, another liter or two, if both your seed trays are full up.
That's it for this episode. I hope that has helped you out, and I hope that you have brilliant success with your germination. And until the next episode, stay spicy.