All of our summer crops are coming to an end, so today it was time to harvest the chillis. We had grown six plants from seed, and planted them back in April. They spent late spring in the kitchen, and once we’d pricked them out into full-size pots we transferred them to the greenhouse where they stayed all summer.

Rich’s mum took one home with her, leaving us with five plants, from which we gathered the harvest above.

I was going to make chilli oil with them, but that’s actually quite a lot of work and it doesn’t last all that long. Plus, if you don’t do it right you risk salmonella as the spores in the chillis can actually thrive in the oil if you don’t manage to kill them off by boiling it all up in a frying pan first. And the idea of carrying around a pan full of scalding oil is frankly terrifying.

So instead we’ve laid them out on a plate with a piece of greaseproof lining beneath them and slipped them into the freezer. As we use them through the winter we’ll defrost them individually under the warm tap and drop them into whatever we’re cooking.

Related posts:

1. Harvesting the beans
2. Harvesting the beetroot
3. Chilli in the greenhouse