Hot 'nuff fer ya?

[dvg]

Growing a few of these Rio Huallaga rocoto peppers this season, all growing in their own five gallon pots.



This strain of rocoto pepper comes from Northern Peru and is very tolerant of harsh growing conditions and quite enjoys Canada's cooler summer nights.

The plant itself, sports slightly hairy leaves and purple colored flowers, with yellowish-orange thick walled pods that contain black seeds.



It produces a nice quantity of pods on a compact plant and also does very well in pots.



Rocotos can handle our cool autumn weather quite well and i figure that there is still another six weeks of outside ripening that can be milked, before the cold and lack of effective sunlight ends the season for good.


dvg

[dvg]

Here's a pic from today of some ripening...







dvg

[dvg]

Have to say that we didn't get too much help with pepper ripening from our local weather here in Alberta.

Haven't had this much snow in September since 1972.

Most of the ripening was done in our garage.

Thankfully, the peppers have responded fairly well to less than favorable ripening conditions.

Here are my three Rio Huallaga rocoto pepper plants, outside on an above freezing afternoon, earlier today.

The middle pot was left mostly unharvested, with pods being eaten and shared from the pots on the left and right.



And this is the plant shown previously in the above posts, less some cuttings that were taken from it last night.





Going to harvest some ripe pods, and that should encourage the green ones to ripen...the growing season here is done for this year.



dvg