Chilli & Pepper Seeds

Organic chilli pepper seeds - a quick guide

Sowing your own organic chilli seeds at home is a fun and rewarding way to achieve abundant harvests of deliciously warming chillies. To help you get started, here’s our quick guide to growing our ever-popular chilli varieties.

How to germinate organic pepper seeds

During the late winter, sow a few chilli seeds onto the surface of a pot containing seed compost and cover it with a sprinkle of vermiculite. Chilli seeds germinate best in warm, humid conditions and will sprout quickly in a heated propagator at 21C or on the windowsill with a clear plastic bag over the pot and secured with an elastic band.

How to care for organic chilli seeds

Once your seeds have germinated, take them out of the propagator or remove the plastic bag from the pot and continue to grow them on the windowsill. Your chillies are ready for transplanting into individual small pots when they’re approximately 1 inch high, into bigger pots when the roots start poking out of the bottom, and into their final pots in late spring. Use a cane to support your plants and continue to grow them either under cover or in a sunny corner of the patio and treat them as you would tomatoes.

Seed vs plug plants

Growing chillies from seed gives you access to the full range of stunning varieties of chilli available here at the Organic Gardening Catalogue. Growing from seed is a rewarding task, but it’s not for everyone. If you lack the space for a propagator or don’t have the time to care for delicate young seedlings, chilli plug plants are a great option. Although the range of plug plants is narrower than for seeds, we grow our plug plants in ideal conditions, guaranteeing strong healthy specimens for you to grow on. You get all the fun of growing your own delicious chillies with none of the hassle involved in seed propagation.