Basket of Fire

A trailing F1 bred for hanging baskets, and a fixture of British garden centres every spring. The plant is smothered in small pods that ripen through deep purple, yellow and orange to scarlet, so a single plant carries four colours at once — which is the point of it. It reaches around 30cm tall with a 50cm spread, and tolerates cool weather better than most, fruiting outdoors well into autumn and longer under glass. At 80,000 to 100,000 SHU it is considerably hotter than its ornamental looks suggest.

Culinary uses

Fresh in salsas and stir-fries; pickled whole; dried for flakes. Often grown as much for display as for cooking.

Growing it in the UK

Annuum is the forgiving group, and the right place to start. Seed germinates readily in warmth, the season is short enough to finish outdoors in a good summer, and February to early March is soon enough to sow. Germination is given as 7–10 days.

At 25–30 cm it is a windowsill or small-pot plant — a 3-litre pot is plenty, and it will not need staking. The record puts the yield at heavy, so start feeding weekly with something high in potassium as soon as the first fruit sets — a plant carrying that much will run out of steam otherwise.

This is superhot territory, and the handling advice is not decorative: wear gloves when cutting it, keep your hands away from your eyes for the rest of the day, and open a window before frying it — capsaicin in hot oil will clear a kitchen. Thin walls dry quickly, which makes a glut easy to deal with.

Read from this variety's own record — the figures are in the panel opposite.