Places Features

When you think of chilli growers, you probably imagine acres of fields in the hot climates of countries such as Mexico and India. What wouldn’t spring to mind is a large greenhouse in Bedfordshire but prepare to change your views - because the county actually grows more chillis than anywhere else in the UK!

Many of these are grown at Cherwood Nursery in Chawston, whose products go under the name of Edible Ornamentals.

Under the guidance of owners Shawn and Joanna Plumb, they grow about 40 different types of chilli plants in their greenhouses, from the nice smooth Anaheim chile to the Russian Roulette Padron (You pick them green, and they are generally mild but one in ten will blow your socks off!) up to the hottest in the world - the Dorset Naga. They are even breeding a unique Bedfordshire chilli that nobody else has – the Golden Clanger!

They also produce and sell a range of chilli pepper-related products including pickled chillies, dried chilli strings (‘ristras’), and their own range of gourmet chilli sauces, which can be purchased at Cherwood Nursery and local farmers markets. They also supply their local Waitrose store and Morrisons Eastern region stores as well as leading London restaurants.

A greenhouse at Cherwood Nursery

Their expertise is widely recognised and they are especially popular locally. This was particularly highlighted recently when they were voted as regional finalists in the Local Food Heroes competition staged by the cookery show Market Kitchen.

They were selected by a panel of expert judges as one of the top three food providers in the Anglian region, after food lovers across the nation, were asked to nominate their favourite business. The most popular 10 businesses in each region were assessed by a panel of experts, with the best three selected to appear in the TV series.  Joanna and Shawn will be featured in the next series of the show, due to be broadcast in November. The overall winner will then be revealed in December.

Demand

So how do you get into such a hot business in cool and leafy Beds? Joanna revealed all:

“I used to hate chillis when I got into this business” she said, “but my brother also grows chillis, he’s the largest chilli grower in the UK.

“I was studying horticulture at the time and he got me to grow several thousand chillis seeds for this order which then got cancelled. My dad wanted to throw all those chilli plants away because he was getting fed up of watering them but I said ‘no, let me have a go’.

Chilli plants propagating at Cherwood

“So we started selling them at farmers markets and garden shows and I realised there was a demand for chillis, everybody wanted chilli plants!”

At Cherwood, they start propagating in January and February and continue with this in succession until at least May. The first plants start to produce chillis around mid-April and the picking starts at the end of May / early June.

The plants are started off in the seed greenhouse where water jets in the ceiling come on twice a day creating something like tropical rainforest conditions. Which just goes to show that you can grow a lot of chillis in a cooler climate even if it’s not all year round, as Joanna explained:

“When I do Bedford farmers’ markets I get lots of people from the Caribbean coming up to me and saying they have picnics underneath their Scotch Bonnet trees and am I envious” she said.

“So they are perennials in their natural countries, but here in the UK it’s best to treat them as an annual. But you can get a ‘super’ chilli plant which produces about 300 chillis a year so you do get plenty of chillis, even growing them in the UK climate.”

Advice

Of course, chilli growing is not always an easy process and presents its own particular problems, as Joanna revealed!

Edible Ornamentals products

“We always have to wear gloves” she said, “but when we’re making the strings of dried chillis we have to wear gloves, a face mask and goggles as well so they are quite lethal and very dangerous.

“My health advice [for anyone handling chillis] especially to gentlemen, wash your hands before and after going to the toilet!”

And as a chilli expert, Joanna also has good advice for those of us who may have risked a curry that is far too hot for us!

“Don’t have water, have milk or any dairy product - milk, cheese or even some bread will do it.

“It’s the Capsaicin [in the chilli] which carries the heat, which is an oil, so you need something to absorb that. Water and beer will just disperse it round your mouth and make it hotter still!”

But despite having to take handling precautions and occasionally burning your mouth, Joanna revealed that chillis are actually very good for you!

“They’re a super food so they’ve got lots of Vitamin C and they’re good for anti-cancer and pain relief as well” she said.

"Hotness"

All chillis at the nursery are marked with their level of “hotness” and as Joanna explained, this is done scientifically.

“The heat is measured on the Scoville Heat Unit which is a scientific test” she said.

“In the olden days they used to use glasses of water with sugar in, so a person would eat a chilli and then have all these glasses of water, and depending on how many glasses of sugared water they had, that was the level [of hotness].

“But after a while you get used to the heat of the chilli so it wasn’t a very good unit of measure. Now they do it scientifically in a lab.”

A chilli String

One of the inhabitants of the Cherwood Nursery is the hottest chilli in the world, the infamous Dorset Naga, which, as its name suggests, was actually developed in this country!

“It was bred by a man called Michael who lives in Dorset” explained Joanna.

“He went to an Indian shop and bought some nagas and started to breed them, and all his customers were saying these chillis are really, really hot.

“So he sent them to a lab in New York to be tested and this lab had never tested anything so hot. It actually went off the Scoville Heat Unit scale. But Michael didn’t believe them so sent them off to another lab and again the chillis were off the scale.”

“So us Brits have bred the hottest chilli in the world!”

BBC Three Counties Tim Wheeler visited the Cherwood Nursery. Listen to his reports here: