Storing Chillies

After months of nurturing your chilli plants, watering, feeding, and proudly showing off those first bright pods, harvest time finally arrives. The plants are loaded, the colours are stunning, and you’ve got more chillies than you could possibly eat fresh. It’s a wonderful problem to have… until you realise that even the most enthusiastic spice-lover can’t get through a kilo of fresh chillies in a week.

That’s where drying comes in. Drying chillies is the simplest, most satisfying way to preserve your harvest and make sure none of that glorious homegrown heat goes to waste. Whether you grow mild jalapeños or eye-watering habaneros, drying intensifies the flavour and locks in their fiery punch for use all year round.

Prepping for Drying

Give your chillies a quick rinse and pat them completely dry. This step’s crucial, moisture is the enemy of preservation. If you’re drying thick-skinned chillies, slice them in half lengthways and remove the seeds if you prefer a milder result (though let’s be honest, that’s half the fun gone!).

Methods for Drying Chillies

There are a few ways to dry your homegrown beauties, and which you choose depends on your patience level and available tools.

Air Drying

If you like to keep things simple, this method is as low-tech as it gets. Thread your chillies onto a needle and strong cotton or fishing line, leaving space between each one for air circulation. Hang the string somewhere warm, dry, and well-ventilated, like a sunny window or an airing cupboard.
This can take anywhere from one to three weeks depending on humidity, but it’s deeply satisfying watching your chillies slowly transform into wrinkled, ruby-red jewels.

Oven Drying

If you live somewhere damp (hello, British autumn), the oven method is your best bet. Lay your chillies on a baking tray lined with parchment paper and pop them in the oven on the lowest setting, around 80°C, with the door slightly ajar to let the moisture escape.
Check them every 30 minutes and turn occasionally. Depending on size, they’ll take 4 – 8 hours. They’re done when they’re brittle and snap cleanly.

Dehydrator

If you have a food dehydrator, it’s the perfect tool for the job. Spread your chillies in a single layer and set to around 60–65°C. Leave them for 6–10 hours, or until completely dry. It’s fuss-free and reliable, ideal if you grow a lot of chillies each year.

Storing Your Dried Chillies

Once dry, allow them to cool fully before storing. Keep them whole in airtight jars or tins, somewhere cool and dark. Stored properly, they’ll keep their kick for up to a year (though I promise they won’t last that long once you start using them).

You can crumble them into flakes, blitz into powder, or soak in warm water to rehydrate for cooking. Dried chillies are perfect for soups, stews, marinades, and homemade chilli oil.

Drying your chillies is one of those deeply satisfying garden rituals, simple, thrifty, and a little bit magical. You start with vibrant fruits plucked fresh from the plant and end with jars of ruby-red spice that’ll brighten up your winter cooking.

It’s the perfect way to celebrate your harvest, waste nothing, and bring a little summer heat into the colder months.

First-rate additions to the 'out of season' garden, hellebores will reliably produce a mouth watering assortment of flowers at a time when little else is in bloom. As a result, they've become firm favourites with savvy gardeners, who crave colourful, easy-care displays from December to April.

Not only a joy to look at, the flowers are packed with sugar-rich nectar and high protein pollen, so they're a treat for early-rising pollinators, like the solitary bumble bees, looking for a quick and nourishing fix of essential nutrients. Choose some of the single forms to give them easy access.

Also, as the showy parts of the flowers are made up of waxy sepals rather than soft petals, each bloom can last as long as 3 months, while shrugging off torrential rain, hard frost and heavy snow.

Sought after for their beauty as well as their brawn, the flowers of these tough, evergreen perennials range from pure white to near black, with all the shades of pink and purple in between. There's also apple greens and even yellows, and many of them come with striped, speckled or picotee colouring to their 'petals', while flower forms vary from simple singles to extravagantly ruffled rosettes. The selection really is enormous, so choosing your favourites is no mean feat - and you can never have enough.

Can I grow hellebores in pots and containers?

Most hellebores will put on a terrific seasonal show in a pot or container, provided their big, fleshy roots are given plenty of room to spread and grow. For this reason, choose deep pots and fill them with a 50/50 mix of soil-based John Innes No.3 and good quality general purpose potting mix..

Can I cut hellebores for the vase?

Hellebores make lovely cut flowers, but for the longest lasting displays, simply snip off the flowerheads and float them in a bowl of water. Alternatively, stems can be cut for a vase, but to prolong their lifespan, use a sharp knife to make an incision along the side of the stems before plunging them into water. They'll look terrific with daffodils, or sprays cut from early flowering trees and shrubs.

A naturalised look in a woodland, cottage or urban garden

Plant your preferred hellebores in oddly numbered groups, or set them out to form irregular drifts. Then, add extra colour by scattering (and planting where they fall) spring flowering bulbs such as snowdrops, crocus, grape hyacinths, daffodils and convallaria.

To build displays that will last year-round, team them up with a selection of perennials that flower in procession, allowing each to take their turn in the spotlight as the seasons progress. Things like shade-tolerant spurges, herbaceous cranesbill, meadow rue, toad lily, and Japanese anemones would all work really well together.

Focus on foliage for form and structure

Even when not in flower, the foliage of a hellebore can put on a lush and lovely display that will add interest and definition to a planting scheme. Maximise this by combining them up with other strongly defined leaf shapes, such as those found on hostas, evergreen ferns, or bergenias. By playing with form and texture you can build a display that's visually interesting throughout the year, while also having some stand-out seasonal interest to look forward to.

Which hellebores should I choose?

For long lasting displays, opt for a mix that will flower in succession, kickstarting the pageant with early-flowering Christmas roses (Helleborus niger). As their common name suggests, their exquisite blooms resemble species roses, despite belonging to the buttercup family. Wonderful in the winter garden, these hellebores could also be potted up and brought into a cool, bright room for a short period if you're looking to brighten up the decor.

Lenten roses or Oriental hybrids (Helleborus × hybridus) are a little later into flower, but are perhaps the most popular (and diverse) members of the group. Full of vim and vigour, they come in a veritable smorgasbord of colours and forms - all of them lovely. Also, as they've been bred for their flowers to face outwards rather than downwards, they tend to be a bit showier than some of the others. Both Christmas and Lenten roses will do well if potted up for a seasonal display.

If you've a patch of dry or heavy shade, H. foetidus will add colour and presence with its slender, fingerlike foliage, and generous trusses of plush-green, bell-shaped flowers. This British native and AGM holder is a striking plant, and you shouldn't be put off by its common name of 'stinking hellebore'. It does produce a slightly meaty smell when the foliage is crushed, but it's barely noticeable to most. If you do have a sensitive nose, tuck it well away from a path or border edge where you won't be brushing past it.

The Corsican hellebore (Helleborus argutifolius) is another noteworthy species, best suited to larger borders or more naturalised planting schemes where its splaying stems can be given room to stretch out. Forming a low mound of sharply toothed foliage, topped with generous clusters of zesty, lime-green flowers, it illuminates partial shade, while also providing a pleasing backdrop for early-flowering bulbs. Another AGM winner, Helleborus argutifolius is a handsome and architecturally interesting plant that adds year-round allure. "

Can I Sow Sweet Peas in November?

You can — and quite a few old hands will tell you it’s the best time. November sowings give you sturdy little plants that sit quietly through winter, then explode into growth the moment spring remembers what it’s doing.

1. Five seeds into a litre pot.
Nothing fancy — just a decent peat-free compost. I push five seeds in around the edge of a one-litre pot. They seem to enjoy each other’s company, like a little sweet pea committee deciding how they’ll take over the world next summer.

2. Give them warmth to germinate.
Pop the pot somewhere cosy — under the bed, the corner of the kitchen, anywhere that stays a touch warmer than outside might be...they need about 15 degrees to get themselves in order. 

3. Move them to the cool the moment they’re up.
Once they’ve germinated and are showing an inch or so of growth, shift the pot to an unheated greenhouse or a sheltered spot outside. This cool, bright environment stops them turning into leggy spaghetti and makes them tough as old boots by spring. It's important not to leave them in the warm too long...ignore this at your peril.

They’ll sit there quite happily through winter looking like you’ve paused them mid-sentence. Come March, they’ll surge away and reward you with flowers earlier and in greater abundance than spring-sown cousins.

If you’ve never done a November sowing, give it a whirl. It’s one of gardening’s great confidence-builders.