I posted a few days ago about how one of my over wintering plants has suddenly sprung back into life, just as I was about to give up hope that any of the plants had made it through the winter. This has inspired me to finally get round to planting some chilli seeds.
This year I plan not to fall into the trap of buying loads of seeds and only planting a few of each, leaving me with lots of spare/unused seeds. Instead i’m going to try ad use up as many of the old seeds I have kicking about from previous years. While I expect the germination rates to be lower than new seeds i’ve been storing all the seeds in a cool, dark dry place (in an old biscuit tin in the shed!) so expect some germination success.
At the weekend I planted a selection of habanero’s: Orange Habanero, Chocolate Habanero & an unknown variety that someone sent me the seeds for last year simply labeled ‘Habs’. Over the next few weeks i will raid my seed box and plant a selection of other varieties. I started off with the habaneros as they tend to take longer to germinate, grow and fruit compared to varieties such as Jalapeno.
I’ve tried various methods of germination over the years however my favourite is to put the seeds in a tray with some regular potting compost (sieved) the place the tray in a regular seed propagator. I then place the propagator on top of a vivarium heat mat as described in my article on speeding up seed germination.
Alternatively you could buy a dedicated electric propagator. I chose the heat mat option as i already had several regular propagators and like the flexibility of being able to use the mat separately.
